There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is Don’t try to be clever. And, Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts. If you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know how much you don’t know, and you don’t know how much you needed to know.
…there’s something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness…
The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed
Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.
Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.