Miyamoto Musashi
- The Book of Five Rings
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike, or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking, or touching the enemy, you will not be able to actually cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test. Do not walk to the truth, but dance. On each and every step of that dance your foot comes down in exactly the right spot. Each piece of evidence shifts your beliefs by exactly the right amount, neither more nor less.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The ninth virtue is perfectionism. The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice. As your mind becomes more silent, you hear more noise. When you notice an error in yourself, this signals your readiness to seek advancement to the next level. If you tolerate the error rather than correcting it, you will not advance to the next level and you will not gain the skill to notice new errors.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The eighth virtue is humility. To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The seventh virtue is simplicity. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said: "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Simplicity is virtuous in belief, design, planning, and justification. When you profess a huge belief with many details, each additional detail is another chance for the belief to be wrong. Each specification adds to your burden; if you can lighten your burden you must do so.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction. What tree grows without roots? What tree nourishes us without fruit? If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, "Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air." Another says, "No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain." Though they argue, the two do not anticipate any different experience of the forest.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The fifth virtue is argument. Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them. Those who smile wisely and say: "I will not argue" remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the communal effort. In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts. Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favor is to you.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The fourth virtue is evenness. One who wishes to believe says, "Does the evidence permit me to believe?" One who wishes to disbelieve asks, "Does the evidence force me to believe?" Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: "But it is good to be skeptical." If you attend only to favorable evidence, picking and choosing from your gathered data, then the more data you gather, the less you know.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The second virtue is relinquishment. P.C. Hodgell said: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer.
