On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Ziana Astralos wrote:
> --- Neal Marin <shikarivivasi@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I'll second that... my mom walked into the room as I
> > was cruising my inbox...fortunately I managed to
> > switch to another folder before she saw the subject
> > line 'hot sex'...but that was still a trifle...close.
>
> That's for sure :)
Hmmmm... this raises a whole host of confusing issues.
As Ken pointed out, we now have cases where our email
agents are "hiding" things from our attention because
they look like things we think are irrelevant (gosh
isn't that what the brain does much of the time???)
Then as Sasha pointed out, we should have some strength
vis-a-vis our convictions.
But as Eliezer/Neal/Ziana observe, it isn't our convictions
that are so much the problem but the convictions of the
non-extropian overlords of list subscribers who may not be
especially happy with the topics we so freely throw around.
One sees in the [distant?] horizon a lawsuit from parents
against members of the Extropian list for contributing to
the suicide of a list subscriber who became excessively
depressed upon encountering discussions of Damien's "Spike" and
Hanson's "There Shall Be Only One" uploading economics and
Bradbury's proposed deactivation of obsolete sub-SIs (e.g. humans).
As recent discussions regading DeCSS (see Slashdot.org and
pointers from it to Linux World) indicate, though their
may be no merit to these legal actions, the net effect
would be stifle free speech (and force conformance)
among the list subscribers. We only have to consider
the can-of-worms that Keith Henson is in for evidence
of this situation.
Should we start an Extropian Legal Defense Fund now?
Related to this, most humans are easily fooled by
relatively primitive encryption... Should we develop
simple programs that would allow the list-server to
transmit "temperature adjective of physical act between
two individuals" for subsequent translation on the
reader's machine only when the magic key sequence
is entered?
The problem with being "rationally conscious" is that sometimes
we must use that capacity to avoid the consequences that might
be generated by the "irrational" or "unconscious".
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:39 MDT