Eliezer Yudkowsky

'm not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language

language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can't get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work

See, if you ask someone what they expect in the normal case, they visualize what looks like the line of maximum probability at each step along the way - namely, everything going according to plan, without any mistakes or surprises. But actually, since more than half the students didn't finish by the time they were 99% sure they'd be done, 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

"If I lied the first time, I'm not going to tell you the truth just because you ask twice."

Draco's eyes were wide again. "Did you really

One of my tutors once said that people form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves

The same could be said of Draco's clever use of reciprocation pressure for an unsolicited gift, a technique which Harry had read about in his social psychology books

A pause to reflect could go a long way in defusing the power of a lot of compliance techniques, once you learned to recognize them for what they were

My father takes all of his allies seriously," Draco said. "That's why he has a lot of allies. Maybe you should meet him