I’m rereading Eleizer Yudkowsky’s “Sequences” and spotted a contradiction that’s a useful example of his mysterious answers:

…I personally believe now that God is alive in many ways, but I do believe, you know, I do believe that God is somehow, mysteriously, involved with our universe, and that underlies a lot of what I do, and I also know I will never be able to prove it, but I’m thankful that I could never prove it, because if it was proved, I think then I would lose interest in the whole subject; there would be no mystery, and no interest in it.

and later, also describing his college years:

I’m trying, I believe it’s just because I was just, I couldn’t imagine how, they were so different from mathematics, in astronomy you would never be able to go to the sun and really know what it was like there. You always had secondary information. If I would be an astronomer, I would never, I would, I would have to die before I would know anything, which was really true, because it’s all based on speculation. It’s all based on our best guesses about the way the universe is, and nothing that you can really experience yourself, or prove correct. In physics, the same way, nature is beyond our grasp, and you don’t know.

But mathematics was different. Mathematics had this certainty about it that, where you could finish a problem, and you could say, you know, I know I’ve got the answer. And so I like that. It was easy. It’s much easier; you know, I have to admire the people who, the scientists who spend their life and never know whether they’ve solved the problem or not, they just get supporting evidence for or against it, but to me, anyway, mathematics got more and more appealing, for the reason that it gave me some certainty; just the opposite of the reason why religion was appealing, because it didn’t have certainty, I mean I would feel unhappy of the life where I had nothing certain, and life where I had everything certain. In either extreme, life, it’s hard for me.