"Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Staring into the Singularity", 1996)
"There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards, and some problems will suddenly move from 'impossible' to 'obvious'. Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious. Move a huge distance upwards [...]" (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Staring into the Singularity", 1996)
"A model does not always predict all the features of the data. Nature has no privileged tendency to present me with solvable challenges." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation", 2005)
"In the laws of probability theory, likelihood distributions are fixed properties of a hypothesis. In the art of rationality, to explain is to anticipate. To anticipate is to explain." (Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation", 2005)
"Reality dishes out experiences using probability, not plausibility." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation", 2005)
"But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Mysterious Answers To Mysterious Questions" 2007)
"The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions", 2007)
"The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "An Alien God", 2007)
"If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet [...]" (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Joy in the Merely Real", 2008)
"[...] part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic - and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Mundane Magic", 2008)
"There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model." (Eliezer S Yudkowsky, "Quantum Explanations", 2008)
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