Eliezer Yudkowsky

Yet the way that you acquire magical powers is not by being born with them, but by seeing, with a sudden shock, that they really are perfectly normal.

This is a general principle in life.

Explaining, verse explaining away.

John Keats' Lamia, 1819, surely deserves some kind of award for most famously annoying poetry.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven.

We know her woof, her texture, she is given.

In the dull catalogue of common things, philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air and gnomed mind.

Unweave a rainbow.

My usual reply ends with the phrase, if we cannot learn to take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed.

I shall expand on that tomorrow.

Today I have a different point in mind.

Let's just take the lines, empty the haunted air and gnomed mine, unweave a rainbow.

Apparently, the mere touch of cold philosophy, that is, the truth, has destroyed haunts in the air, gnomes in the mine, rainbows.

which calls to mind a rather different bit of verse.

One of these things is not like the others.

One of these things doesn't belong.

The air has been emptied of its haunts and the mind de-gnomed, but the rainbow is still there.

In writing a wrong question, I wrote, tracing back the chain of causality step by step, I discover that my belief that I'm wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I'm wearing socks.

On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in the desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert.