Michael Vassar

“LessWrong profile”

“Eliezer Yudkowsky”

“Holden Karnofsky”

“Vassar, before I came to Berkeley, someone warned me "Vassar is kind of crazy and it's impossible to have a normal conversation with him". As a result, I spent several months avoiding you. Then I finally got to meet you and I realized I had made a huge mistake. I mean, you are crazy, and it is is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. But normal conversation is incredibly over-rated compared to whatever the heck you call the thing that interaction with you involves. I regret that we didn't get more of a chance to talk about stuff and I hope to solve that sometime in the future.”

“You listen to Michael Vassar. You don't remember traveling to this party or sitting on this beanbag. You don't remember when he began to speak. He is still speaking. He sounds like madness and glory given lisping poetry, and you want to obey.”

“I am personally convinced that the LW Sequences / AI to Zombies gave me something, and gave something similar to others I know, and that hanging out in person with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Michael Vassar, Carl Shulman, Nick Bostrom, and others gave me more of that same thing; a "same thing" that included e.g. actually trying to figure it out, making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience; using arithmetic to entangle different pieces of my beliefs; and so on.”

“[Michael Vassar] once gave me and Ofer Grossman quests. My quest was to write a Go AI capable of defeating world champions, and Ofer's was to purchase a metric ton of corn. One of these quests has been accomplished (though certainly not by us), but the other one still stands …”

“If greater-than-human artificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all but certain that the human species will be extinct in very short order.”

“It's easy to be cynical, but it's hard to be cynical enough.”

“First they came for the epistemology. We don't know what happened after that.”