ClaimsEliezer Yudkowsky

“Well, I have sometimes said that the keynote question is what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, interviewee September 2025 Interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality and Systematic Misunderstanding of AI Alignment (LessWrong)

Factual Field building and careers

Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes said that the keynote question of rationality is what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it.

Not researched Checkable, but outside the sample that was researched.

Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

Cite this claim

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes said that the keynote question of rationality is what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it.” (said September 2025). Verdict: not researched. Reliability API, claim c_908f78bc86da, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_908f78bc86da

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

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More factual claims by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  1. Mostly true Factual 28 February 2018
    “the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is no longer strapped for cash, so much as it is strapped for engineering talent.”

    Thanks mostly to the cryptocurrency boom, MIRI is no longer short of funds and is instead short of engineering talent.

  2. Mostly true Factual 30 January 2013
    “He’s doing lots of meta-strategy work, but he also does work on anthropic probabilities and the parliamentary model for normative uncertainty and other things that are object-level”

    Nick Bostrom does meta-strategy work as well as object-level work on anthropic probabilities and the parliamentary model for normative uncertainty.

  3. Mostly true Factual 30 January 2013
    “he hosts people who like Anders Sandberg who write papers about uploading timelines that are actually relevant to our policy decisions.”

    Nick Bostrom hosts researchers such as Anders Sandberg, who write papers about uploading timelines relevant to policy decisions.

  4. Resolved true Factual 30 January 2013
    “Paul Christiano isn’t making this mistake, since Paul is working on actual FAI problems while looking for other promising interventions.”

    Paul Christiano is working on actual Friendly AI problems while also looking for other promising interventions.

  5. Mixed Factual 20 April 2026
    “I was observing that obvious-seeming hypothesis myself, sometime around the time of GPT 3.5.”

    Yudkowsky himself observed the persona-selection-like hypothesis around the time of GPT 3.5.

All of them

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