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Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky

“There's history books you haven't read," Harry said quietly. "There's books you haven't read yet, Hermione, and they might give you a sense of perspective. A few centuries earlier - I think it was definitely still around in the seventeenth century - it was a popular village entertainment to take a wicker basket, or a bundle, with a dozen live cats in it, and -" "Stop," she said. "- roast it over a bonfire. Just a regular celebration. Good clean fun. And I'll give them this, it was cleaner fun than burning women they thought were witches. Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -" Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, "- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise. So, no, it does not indicate that Draco Malfoy was inhuman or even unusually evil, if he grew up believing that it was fun to hurt his enemies -”

Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Work

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Author

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a writer known for his contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, particularly in the areas of reinforcement learning and rationalist philosophy. more

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“The Christian response to evil—to aggression—is resistance, of course, but nonviolent resistance, the resistance of love, prayer, and accepted suffering. When Christians do anything else, they have parted company with Jesus. Nonviolence is the expression of a faith that the greatest power in human history is the forward movement of love. Nonviolence is as realistic as Jesus himself, and it is one with the cross of Christ's victory over evil. The question of whether or not nonviolent resistance 'works' should be referred not so much to the gain of an immediate victory as to the transformation of history from within by the converging forces of love.”