"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> Charlie Stross wrote:
> >
> > And here's another thought: we need critics.
>
> Samantha Atkins is a useful critic. These people are not. It takes a
> certain amount of native intelligence and future-shock-adaption to ask
> tough *creative* questions instead of just panicking over the basics.
I agree with Eliezer about that these are not the best kind of
critics, but I disagree about that this is due to any lack of
intelligence or adaptability.
The critics we would like to see are the ones that engage in a
thoughtful, intelligent debate with us about problems and
possibilities, forcing us to come up with good arguments and
solutions. The critics we don't need are the ones that we simply don't
have any common philosophical ground with, that disagree on basic
values, that have a very different (I would say wrong) conception of
how economy and technology works and instead of planning to engage in
debate will be deliberately working to *pre-empt* the debate. If you
meet the groups Bailey wrote about in a fair debate about facts and
practical possibilities, you have a good chance of winning against
them. So they will not go for that kind of debate, they will win much
more by creating a polarized situation or by scaring politicians into
thinking that nanotechnology is some kind of child abuse. They did it
quite well with genetic engineering in Europe.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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