Re: Larry Ellison article mentions Extropy

From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Mon Apr 30 2001 - 04:47:08 MDT


On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Max More wrote:

> You'd be surprised. I don't know who you would count as a "mover and
> shaker", but we *have* had such (not counting those "in the circle" who are

Maybe I'm setting the standards a bit high, but I would say a "mover and
shaker" starts at -- arbitrarily set -- 100 megabucks of net worth (and
growing visibly as we speak) or people above people turn to advice. With
very few possible exceptions, I don't see such people on any lists I
frequent. No, I don't think they're lurking, and even through proxy. I
readily believe they do use email and web, but they don't do lists, unless
they're very elite, and informal, consisting of a few addresses in the
mail headers.

> moving and shaking), and I've seen interesting things on other lists. Very
> busy people may not themselves read the list, but they may have someone
> monitor it. For example, on the Motley Fool board devoted to discussing

Investor lists, yes. We're not an investor list, though. We're regarded as
fringe futurists, high volume, low signal-noise, at a time where busy
professionals and academics are avoiding online fora -- which they once
frequented -- like the plague, due to Net attracting mainstream (instead
of former elites) and lack of social feedback silencing mechanisms; we do
really need foolproof adaptive reputation based filtering infrastructure,
and badly so.

Can you imagine Minsky (not that I'm a personal fan of the man, quite the
opposite, but he'll do as an example) coming back, right now, even as
lurker? This is not a phenomenon specific to extropians@, I'm seeing this
trend across all lists for years. It's a wonder these things are still
around.

> Celera, it became very clear that Craig Venter had either read the
> messages, or some collection of them.

Venter would be a fool not to read the Fool. It's an investment barometer,
and even a veritable investment climate kitchen (lots of butterflies,
watching other butterflies). Would Venter read extropians@?

> I will leave addressing the function of this list and its improvement for
> another time. But one thing I *still* want to do is for ExI to offer a
> roster of specialized email forums (Web-based preferably). Those more
> focused forums might attract busy people more than this list, which is a
> catch-all.

I hope any of you Javien people listening are cooking up something nice.
If you do really have a painless reputation based filtering in the
works...



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