From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
> ...the modern cultural era is almost as
> skewed towards approving of the mediocre as earlier eras were skewed
> towards the hero theory of history.
Chock it up to socialistic egalitarianism, the hobgoblin of political
correctitude.
> Einstein may not have made as large a
> contribution to physics as all the unsung Salieris who followed afterward
> and filled in the blanks, but he sure made a larger contribution than any
> individual Salieri. We would all have been the poorer for it if Einstein
> had decided to spend out his life filling in the blanks rather than
> achieving his full potential as a Mozart.
Unless, of course, Relativity turns out to be as wrong as theories of Marx and
Freud.
> In earlier eras it may have made emotional sense for people to try and be
> happy with their native ability levels, but not this close to a
> Singularity. Time to de-repress.
The more I learn about world politics the farther I feel from the advent of
AI, which reminds me, how's that FAI coming?
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:45 MDT