Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

I never overthink or overanalyze anything.

How many situations can be resolved with less thinking?

Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough.

When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience.

Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.

Economists don't usually make good speculators, because they think too much.

We must rely less on spreadsheets and funding formulas and more on common sense.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

Critiquing relieves you of the responsibility of doing integrative thinking.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

I need something, Wax. A place to look. You always did the thinking.” “Yes, having a brain helps with that, surprisingly.

Sometimes my doubt seems intuitive, but most likely it derives from an implausibility or a logical problem I may at first find difficult to identify and articulate. It is interesting to me to work through questions that arise in this way.

Most of the problems in life are because of two reasons, we act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting.

That's all managing is: just coming up with the right questions and getting the right answers.

It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.

Intuition is the discriminative faculty that enables you to decide which of two lines of reasoning is right. Perfect intuition makes you a master of all.

Reasons come first. Answers come second

By using your intelligence, you can sometimes make your problems twice as complicated.

It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.

My personal feeling is that people need to be careful not to start over-analyzing and taking things apart and trying to be critical.

Often intuition will direct you. If it feels right, it's probably right.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I'm not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.

As intuition grows, the need to make problems and see complications starts to dwindle.