Re: Slavery essay

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
06 Apr 1998 11:15:36 +0200


Michael Lee Bowling <mlbowli1@iupui.edu> writes:

> The core values of Extropian thinking, while radical compared to
> mainstream modes of thought, are hardly incomprehensible. With out
> explicit references to uploading or iniversal assembers, I think the
> Extropian principles are rooted in very accessible ideas. Even so your
> teacher or anyone else scoffs the first time encounter Extropian ideals.

A good strategy when presenting transhumanism is to be light on the
uploading, space colonization and nanotech from the beginning; that
just makes people think it is some kind of new age (many people seem
to have the heuristic that anything optimistic but non-mainstream, not
obviously political is new age). But if you instead present our core
ideas (the human condition can be improved through rational means in a
life-affirming way) combined with some convincing evidence for this
position and that it has positive results, then people will begin to
listen. And in time even accept the more far-out ideas when they are
ready (or even better, do as my office-mate and ignore them and
concentrate on the immediately useful aspects of transhumanism; he has
pointed out that discussions about uploading might even be memetically
unhealthy for us).

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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