Rationality: From AI to Zombies

By Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Category: Philosophy

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Description

What does it actually mean to be rational? 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; where you recognize and make full use of your fuzzy intuitions and emotions, rather than trying to discard them. In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes. These eye-opening accounts of how the mind works (and how, all too often, it doesn't) are then put to the test through some genuinely difficult puzzles: questions in computer science about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), questions in physics about the relationship between the quantum and classical worlds, questions in philosophy about the metaphysics of zombies and the nature of morality, and many more.

Episode Date
Go Forth and Create the Art!
Mar 16, 2015
The Sin of Underconfidence
Mar 16, 2015
Practical Advice Backed by Deep Theories
Mar 16, 2015
Beware of Other-Optimizing
Mar 15, 2015
Bayesians vs. Barbarians
Mar 15, 2015
Incremental Progress and the Valley
Mar 15, 2015
Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
Mar 15, 2015
Money: The Unit of Caring
Mar 15, 2015
Helpless Individuals
Mar 15, 2015
Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
Mar 15, 2015
Church vs. Taskforce
Mar 15, 2015
Can Humanism Match Religions Output?
Mar 15, 2015
Your Price for Joining
Mar 15, 2015
Tolerate Tolerance
Mar 15, 2015
Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate
Mar 15, 2015
Three Levels of Rationality Verification
Mar 15, 2015
Schools Proliferating Without Evidence
Mar 15, 2015
Epistemic Visciousness
Mar 15, 2015
A Sense That More Is Possible
Mar 15, 2015
Pt Z Raising the Sanity Waterline
Mar 15, 2015
Final Words
Mar 15, 2015
Shut Up and Do the Impossible!
Mar 15, 2015
Make an Extraordinary Effort
Mar 15, 2015
On Doing the Impossible
Mar 15, 2015
Use the Try Harder, Luke
Mar 14, 2015
Trying to Try
Mar 14, 2015
Tsuyoku vs. the Egalitarian Instinct
Mar 14, 2015
Tsuyoki Naritai! (I Want to Become Stronger)
Mar 14, 2015
My Bayesian Enlightenment
Mar 14, 2015
Beyond the Reach of God
Mar 14, 2015
The Magnitude of His Own Folly
Mar 14, 2015
The Level Above Mine
Mar 14, 2015
My Naturalistic Awakening
Mar 14, 2015
Fighting a Rearguard Action Against the Truth
Mar 14, 2015
That Tiny Note of Discord
Mar 14, 2015
The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth
Mar 14, 2015
A Prodigy of Refutation
Mar 14, 2015
Raised in Technophilia
Mar 14, 2015
My Best and Worst Mistake
Mar 14, 2015
My Childhood Death Spiral
Mar 14, 2015
Beginnings: An Introduction
Mar 14, 2015
The Twelve Virtues of Rationality
Mar 14, 2015
Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
Mar 14, 2015
When (Not) to Use Probabilities
Mar 14, 2015
Something To Protect
Mar 14, 2015
Ethical Injunctions
Mar 14, 2015
Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)
Mar 14, 2015
The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"
Mar 13, 2015
Feeling Moral
Mar 13, 2015
Zut Allais!
Mar 13, 2015
The Allais Paradox
Mar 13, 2015
One Life Against the World
Mar 13, 2015
Scope Insensitivty
Mar 13, 2015
The Gift We Give to Tomorrow
Mar 13, 2015
Value is Fragile
Mar 13, 2015
Serious Stories
Mar 13, 2015
High Challenge
Mar 13, 2015
Sympathetic Minds
Mar 13, 2015
The True Prisoner's Dilemma
Mar 13, 2015
Magical Categories
Mar 13, 2015
Morality as Fixed Computation
Mar 13, 2015
Could Anything Be Right
Mar 13, 2015
Changing Your Metaethics
Mar 13, 2015
What Would You Do Without Morality
Mar 13, 2015
2 Place and 1 Place Words
Mar 13, 2015
Sorting Pebbles into Correct Heaps
Mar 13, 2015
Created Already In Motion
Mar 13, 2015
No Universally Compelling Arguments
Mar 13, 2015
My Kind of Reflection
Mar 13, 2015
Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom
Mar 13, 2015
The Design Space of Minds-in-General
Mar 12, 2015
Dreams of AI Design
Mar 12, 2015
Detached Lever Fallacy
Mar 12, 2015
Fake Utility Functions
Mar 12, 2015
Fake Morality
Mar 12, 2015
Fake Selfishness
Mar 12, 2015
Not for the Sake of Happiness (Alone)
Mar 12, 2015
Ends: An Introduction
Mar 12, 2015
Interlude - A Technical Explanation of Technical
Mar 12, 2015
Class Project
Mar 12, 2015
Einstein's Superpowers
Mar 12, 2015
My Childhood Role Model
Mar 12, 2015
That Alien Message
Mar 12, 2015
Einstein's Speed
Mar 12, 2015
Faster Than Science
Mar 12, 2015
Changing the Definition of Science
Mar 12, 2015
No Safe Defense, Not Even Science
Mar 12, 2015
Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?
Mar 12, 2015
Science Isn't Strict Enough
Mar 12, 2015
When Science Can't Help
Mar 12, 2015
Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality
Mar 12, 2015
The Dilemma: Science or Bayes?
Mar 12, 2015
The Failures of Eld Science
Mar 12, 2015
Many Worlds, One Best Guess
Mar 11, 2015
Thou Art Physics
Mar 11, 2015
Where Philosophy Meets Science
Mar 11, 2015
If Many Worlds Had Come First
Mar 11, 2015
Quantum Non-Realism
Mar 11, 2015
Living In Many Worlds
Mar 11, 2015
Privileging the Hypothesis
Mar 11, 2015
Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable
Mar 11, 2015
Decoherence is Simple
Mar 11, 2015
Collapse Postulates
Mar 11, 2015
Distinct Configurations
Mar 11, 2015
Joint Configurations
Mar 11, 2015
Configurations and Amplitude
Mar 11, 2015
Quantum Explanations
Mar 11, 2015
Psychic Powers
Mar 11, 2015
Excluding the Supernatural
Mar 11, 2015
Zombies: The Movie
Mar 11, 2015
Belief in the Implied Invisible
Mar 11, 2015
GAZP vs. GLUT
Mar 11, 2015
The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle
Mar 11, 2015
Zombie Responses
Mar 11, 2015
Zombies! Zombies?
Mar 11, 2015
Reductive References
Mar 11, 2015
A Priori
Mar 10, 2015
When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid
Mar 10, 2015
Brain Breakthrough! It's Made of Neurons!
Mar 10, 2015
Heat vs. Motion
Mar 10, 2015
Angry Atoms
Mar 10, 2015
Hand vs. Fingers
Mar 10, 2015
Initiation Ceremony
Mar 10, 2015
To Spread Science, Keep it Secret
Mar 10, 2015
The Sacred Mundane
Mar 10, 2015
Scarcity
Mar 10, 2015
Is Humanism A Religion-Substitute
Mar 10, 2015
Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
Mar 10, 2015
The Beauty of Settled Science
Mar 10, 2015
Mundane Magic
Mar 10, 2015
If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
Mar 10, 2015
Bind Yourself to Reality
Mar 10, 2015
Joy in Discovery
Mar 10, 2015
Joy in the Merely Real
Mar 10, 2015
Savannah Poets
Mar 10, 2015
Fake Reductionism
Mar 10, 2015
Explaining vs. Explaining Away
Mar 10, 2015
Reductionism
Mar 10, 2015
Chaotic Inversion
Mar 10, 2015
Think Like Reality
Mar 09, 2015
Qualitatively Confused
Mar 09, 2015
The Quotation is Not the Referent
Mar 09, 2015
Probability is in the Mind
Mar 09, 2015
Mind Projection Fallacy
Mar 09, 2015
Righting a Wrong Question
Mar 09, 2015
Wrong Questions
Mar 09, 2015
Dissolving the Question
Mar 09, 2015
Searching for Bayes-Structure
Mar 09, 2015
Perpetual Motion Beliefs
Mar 09, 2015
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Mar 09, 2015
Outside the Laboratory
Mar 09, 2015
Beautiful Probability
Mar 09, 2015
Is Reality Ugly?
Mar 09, 2015
Universal Law
Mar 09, 2015
Universal Fire
Mar 09, 2015
The World: An Introduction
Mar 09, 2015
Interlude: An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem
Mar 09, 2015
37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong
Mar 09, 2015
Variable Question Fallacies
Mar 09, 2015
Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
Mar 09, 2015
Conditional Independence and Naive Bayes
Mar 09, 2015
Superexponential Conceptspace and Simple Words
Mar 09, 2015
Mutual Information and Density in Thingspace
Mar 08, 2015
Entropy and Short Codes
Mar 08, 2015
Where to Draw the Boundary?
Mar 08, 2015
Arguing "By Definition"
Mar 08, 2015
Sneaking in Connotations
Mar 08, 2015
Categorizing has Consequences
Mar 08, 2015
Fallacies of Compression
Mar 08, 2015
Replace the Symbol with the Substance
Mar 08, 2015
Taboo Your Words
Mar 08, 2015
Empty Labels
Mar 08, 2015
The Argument from Common Usage
Mar 08, 2015
Feel The Meaning
Mar 08, 2015
Disputing Definitions
Mar 08, 2015
How an Algorithm Feels From Inside
Mar 08, 2015
Neural Categories
Mar 08, 2015
Disguised Queries
Mar 08, 2015
The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
Mar 08, 2015
Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
Mar 08, 2015
Similarity Clusters
Mar 08, 2015
Extensions and Intensions
Mar 08, 2015
Words as Hidden Inferences
Mar 08, 2015
The Parable of Hemlock
Mar 08, 2015
The Parable of the Dagger
Mar 08, 2015
Lost Purposes
Mar 07, 2015
Anthropomorphic Optimism
Mar 07, 2015
The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
Mar 07, 2015
Leaky Generalizations
Mar 07, 2015
Terminal Values and Instrumental Values
Mar 07, 2015
Artificial Addition
Mar 07, 2015
Ghosts in the Machine
Mar 07, 2015
Optimization and the Intelligence Explosion
Mar 07, 2015
Humans in Funny Suits
Mar 07, 2015
Belief in Intelligence
Mar 07, 2015
Thou Art Godshatter
Mar 07, 2015
Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
Mar 07, 2015
An Especially Elegant Evolutionary Psychology Experiment
Mar 07, 2015
Evolutionary Psychology
Mar 07, 2015
Adaptation-Executers, Not Fitness-Maximizers
Mar 07, 2015
Fake Optimization Criteria
Mar 07, 2015
The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
Mar 07, 2015
Evolving to Extinction
Mar 07, 2015
No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices
Mar 07, 2015
Evolutions are Stupid (But Work Anyway)
Mar 07, 2015
The Wonder of Evolution
Mar 07, 2015
An Alien God
Mar 07, 2015
Interlude: The Power of Intelligence
Mar 07, 2015
Minds: An Introduction
Mar 06, 2015
The Ritual
Mar 06, 2015
Crisis Of Faith
Mar 06, 2015
Leave a Line of Retreat
Mar 06, 2015
No One Can Exempt Your From Rationality's Laws
Mar 06, 2015
The Meditation On Curiosity
Mar 06, 2015
You Can Face Reality
Mar 06, 2015
The Proper Use Of Doubt
Mar 06, 2015
Just Lose Hope Already
Mar 06, 2015
The Crackpot Offer
Mar 06, 2015
The Importance Of Saying "Oops"
Mar 06, 2015
Cultish Countercultishness
Mar 06, 2015
Lonely Dissent
Mar 06, 2015
On Expressing Your Concerns
Mar 06, 2015
Asch's Conformity Experiment
Mar 06, 2015
Two Cult Koans
Mar 06, 2015
Guardians of Ayn Rand
Mar 06, 2015
Guardians of the Gene Pool
Mar 06, 2015
Guardians of the Truth
Mar 06, 2015
Every Cause Wants to be a Cult
Mar 06, 2015
The Robbers Cave Experiment
Mar 06, 2015
When None Dare Urge Restraint
Mar 06, 2015
Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs
Mar 06, 2015
Uncritical Supercriticality
Mar 05, 2015
Resist The Happy Death Spiral
Mar 05, 2015
Affective Death Spirals
Mar 05, 2015
Mere Messiahs
Mar 05, 2015
Superhero Bias
Mar 05, 2015
The Halo Effect
Mar 05, 2015
Unbounded Scales, Huge Jury Awards, and Futurism
Mar 05, 2015
Evaluability (and Cheap Holiday Shopping)
Mar 05, 2015
The Affect Heuristic
Mar 05, 2015
The Genetic Fallacy
Mar 05, 2015
Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
Mar 05, 2015
We Change Our Minds Less often Than We Think
Mar 05, 2015
How To Seem (And Be) Deep
Mar 05, 2015
The Virtue of Narrowness
Mar 05, 2015
The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
Mar 05, 2015
Stranger Than History
Mar 05, 2015
Original Seeing
Mar 05, 2015
The "Outside the Box" Box
Mar 05, 2015
Cached Thoughts
Mar 05, 2015
Do We Believe Everything We're Told?
Mar 05, 2015
Priming and Contamination
Mar 05, 2015
Anchoring and Adjustment
Mar 05, 2015
Don't Believe You'll Self Deceive
Mar 05, 2015
Moore's Paradox
Mar 04, 2015
Belief in Self Deception
Mar 04, 2015
No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
Mar 04, 2015
Doublethink (Choosing To Be Biased)
Mar 04, 2015
Singlethink
Mar 04, 2015
Dark Side Epistemology
Mar 04, 2015
Of Lies And Black Swan Blow Ups
Mar 04, 2015
Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
Mar 04, 2015
Is That Your True Rejection?
Mar 04, 2015
Fake Justification
Mar 04, 2015
Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation
Mar 04, 2015
Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
Mar 04, 2015
A Rational Argument
Mar 04, 2015
Rationalization
Mar 04, 2015
What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
Mar 04, 2015
The Bottom Line
Mar 04, 2015
One Argument Against an Army
Mar 04, 2015
Update Yourself Incrementally
Mar 04, 2015
Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
Mar 04, 2015
Human Evil and Muddled Thinking
Mar 04, 2015
Rationality and The English Language
Mar 04, 2015
Hug The Query
Mar 04, 2015
Argument Screens Off Authority
Mar 04, 2015
Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence
Mar 03, 2015
Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
Mar 03, 2015
Correspondence Bias
Mar 03, 2015
The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality
Mar 03, 2015
Policy Debates Should not Appear One-Sided
Mar 03, 2015
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Mar 03, 2015
Your Rationality Is My Business
Mar 03, 2015
0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities
Mar 03, 2015
Infinite Certainty
Mar 03, 2015
How To Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
Mar 03, 2015
Absolute Authority
Mar 03, 2015
The Fallacy Of Gray
Mar 03, 2015
But There's Still A Chance Right?
Mar 03, 2015
New Improved Lottery
Mar 03, 2015
Lotteries A Waste of Hope
Mar 03, 2015
The Third Alternative
Mar 03, 2015
The Proper Use Of Humility
Mar 03, 2015
Rationality: An Introduction
Mar 03, 2015
Interlude - The Simple Truth
Mar 03, 2015
Truly Part of You
Mar 03, 2015
"Science" as a Curiosity-Stopper
Mar 03, 2015
Explain/Worship/Ignore?
Mar 03, 2015
Making History Available
Mar 03, 2015
Failing to Learn from History
Mar 02, 2015
My Wild and Reckless Youth
Mar 02, 2015
Lawful Uncertainty
Mar 02, 2015
Positive Bias-Look Into the Dark
Mar 02, 2015
Say Not "Complexity"
Mar 02, 2015
The Futility of Emergence
Mar 02, 2015
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Mar 02, 2015
Semantic Stopsigns
Mar 02, 2015
Fake Causality
Mar 02, 2015
Science as Attire
Mar 02, 2015
Guessing the Teacher's Password
Mar 02, 2015
Fake Explanations
Mar 02, 2015
Hindsight Devalues Science
Mar 02, 2015
Conservation of Expected Evidence
Mar 02, 2015
Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence
Mar 02, 2015
Your Strength as a Rationalist
Mar 02, 2015
Occam's Razor
Mar 02, 2015
Einstein's Arrogance
Mar 02, 2015
How Much Evidence Does It Take?
Mar 02, 2015
Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence
Mar 02, 2015
What Is Evidence?
Mar 02, 2015
Focus Your Uncertainty
Mar 02, 2015
Applause Lights
Mar 02, 2015
Belief as Attire
Mar 01, 2015
Professing and Cheering
Mar 01, 2015
Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Mar 01, 2015
Pretending to be Wise
Mar 01, 2015
Bayesian Judo
Mar 01, 2015
Belief in Belief
Mar 01, 2015
A Fable of Science and Politics
Mar 01, 2015
Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
Mar 01, 2015
The Lens That Sees Its Own Flaws
Mar 01, 2015
Expecting Short Inferential Distances
Mar 01, 2015
Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You
Mar 01, 2015
Planning Fallacy
Mar 01, 2015
Burdensome Details
Mar 01, 2015
Availability
Mar 01, 2015
...What's a Bias Again?
Mar 01, 2015
Why Truth? And...
Mar 01, 2015
Feeling Rational
Mar 01, 2015
What Do I Mean By Rationality?
Mar 01, 2015
Biases: An Introduction
Mar 01, 2015