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By anybody’s standards, there is a huge amount of unnecessary and undeserved suffering that is just bad and that we should get rid of.

— Nick Bostrom The End of Suffering (2006)

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Pain

More quotes by Nick Bostrom

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.

Unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.

Perhaps it is a sign of civilizational progress that the very idea of threatening a nuclear first strike today seems borderline silly or morally obscene.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Knowledge about limitations of your data collection process affects what inferences you can draw from the data.

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

All Nick Bostrom quotes →

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A man who only becomes a husband brings pain to his parents, and a person who only becomes a son brings pain to his wife.

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A portion of life, every moment gets torn out of me hurting, and flees away.

Suman Pokhrel

Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems (1844)

If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower (1993)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Nick Bostrom (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.