I don't think "incongruity" works here either. It's at best a
misperception, and at worst a malicious slander. I don't think
anyone who has ever personally been with a group of Extropians
and gotten to know them would call us anything but compassionate.
I do not wish to devalue my true compassion by hiding behind
emotional rhetoric instead of the plain language of reason; but
if doing so in some cases helps the cause, then I must consider
it, because I value results above motives.
If the worthless bleeding hearts whose policies of self-sacrifice
/cause/ hunger and homelessness accuse us of being unkind because
we can see beyond their teary-eyed dogma, then perhaps it is in our
interest to better tune our language to their limited minds. I do
not for a second forgive the cult of faith, hope, and charity for
its crimes against humanity; their good intentions are no excuse.
But I do not have to forgive them to work with them to achieve
the result we both claim to share--prosperity for everyone--and
to use the compassion they claim to have to help the very real
compassion that we cave.
Greg's essay is a good example. While the more mathematically-
minded of us might complain of a certain lack of rigor, or that
Axelrod's result is only a starting point to understanding the
more detailed ways that cooperative behaviors can emerge as
evolutionarily stable strategies, and the more complex ways in
which we can drive memetic evolution toward desirable ESSs, I
think it does set the right tone for the masses. The Bioarchive
project language is another good example.
Unfortunately, I'm not very good at such language, and neither
are many of us. I also don't see this particular private list
as the proper venue for it; this list is for those of us already
committed to the cause, and plain, provocative language gets
the point across much faster. But perhaps this episode will
help us work on our public image a bit.