>From: Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
>
> > Why will you not concede the point: you may consider yourself an
>Extropian
> > if you agree with the principles (and in my opinion follow them). You
>are
> > not an Extropian if you cannot do that.
>
>That's a silly tautology: "I define X as people who believe Y, so
>people who don't believe Y are not X". So what? The opposition
>isn't arguing that, though they might think they are. What they're
>really arguing is one of (a) The use of words to identify things
>should be less rigorous than set theory in some contexts; (b) the
>set of people who believe Y really /ought/ to believe Y', so the word
>X should refer to Y'-believers as well; (c) while belief in Y is
>common among those calling themselves X, it's really a consequence
>of those people having condition Z (which may or may not include
>beliefs), so we ought to use X to refer to Z-people, most of whom
>also happen to believe in Y, but not necessarily; (d) Y itself is
>so imprecisely defined that some people we don't think are X might
>actually be X after all, because their vision of Y is clearer.
I agree. While we may all be able to agree on the meaning of the terms
"entropy" and its opposite, "extropy", I think the term "extropian" is
subject to more debate. One person might (reasonably) claim that you are
not extropian unless you live by the stated principles of ExI. Another
person might (just as reasonably) claim that you are extropian if you are
merely opposed to the increase of entropy.
I'm currently reading a history of the US Civil War and its political
preludes, and it is interesting to see how much those who considered
themselves as "Republicans" in the mid-19th Century would differ politically
from those who today call themselves "Republicans". Yet there would be *no*
disagreement between them on the definition of the word "republic".
-Zero
"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past"
--Thomas Jefferson
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