Eliezer Yudkowsky

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
/wiki/Eliezer Yudkowskycreator
Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2006.
Let me say that Eliezer may have already done more to save the world than most people in history.
—From a blog comment.
Rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph.

Author of Three Worlds Collide and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the shorter works Trust in God/The Riddle of Kyon and The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, and various other fiction. Helped found and is probably the most prolific poster to the blog/discussion site Less Wrong (the name of which he has used as a pseudonym on occasion), and is currently writing a book on rationality.

His day job is with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, specifically working on how to make an AI that won't just kill us all accidentally, and make AI less of a crapshoot.

Most of his fictional works are Author Tracts, albeit ones that many find good and entertaining.


Tropes describing Yudkowsky or his work:

Part of the real reason that I wanted to run the original AI-Box Experiment, is that I thought I had an ability that I could never test in real life. Was I really making a sacrifice for my ethics, or just overestimating my own ability? The AI-Box Experiment let me test that.

In one sense, it's clear that we do not want to live the sort of lives that are depicted in most stories that human authors have written so far. Think of the truly great stories, the ones that have become legendary for being the very best of the best of their genre: The Iliad, Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, Watchmen, Planescape: Torment, the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or that ending in Tsukihime. Is there a single story on the list that isn't tragic? Ordinarily, we prefer pleasure to pain, joy to sadness, and life to death. Yet it seems we prefer to empathize with hurting, sad, dead characters. Or stories about happier people aren't serious, aren't artistically great enough to be worthy of praise - but then why selectively praise stories containing unhappy people? Is there some hidden benefit to us in it? [...] You simply don't optimize a story the way you optimize a real life. The best story and the best life will be produced by different criteria.

Tropes related to Yudkowsky's writing:

...if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don't be too proud of that either! It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.