Quotes from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I only want power so I can get books.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?"

"Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“There is light in the world, and it is us!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here.
- With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world?
- No! I mean yes - well, NO!
- I think i should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“In what weird alternative universe would that girl NOT be Sorted into Ravenclaw? If Hermione Granger didn't go to Ravenclaw then there was no good reason for Ravenclaw House to exist.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“...if you're unhappy whenever other people don't picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that's already dooming yourself to always be unhappy. No one ever thinks of us just the same way we think of ourselves.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE YOU!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently...

PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford.

HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.

HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding.

DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.

PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time.

DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.

DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.

Presenting:

HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

You ain't guessin' where this one's going.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.
This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'
And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice.
Wish granted. Now what?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Someday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“...there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness...”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very creative.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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