Re: Professional intuitions

Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Sun, 27 Sep 1998 18:24:37 -0400

Damien R. Sullivan wrote:
>
> On Sep 25, 2:51pm, "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> > and he doesn't sound like a crank, he didn't say anything I know is false, so
> > I have no choice but to trust his conclusions - to default to Drexler on the
> > matter of nanotechnology.
>
> Tangent:
> I haven't read it yet, but most chemists I know laugh. So I default to a
> neutral state: he may have some nice equations; they have actual experience
> with reaction chemistry.
>

I'm not a chemist. After reading Nanosystems, I decided that it sounded plausible, but that I wanted to see some critical analyses. I could not find any refutations of anything in the book, so I posted to several newsgroups, asking for any references at all to a viable refutation. I got lots of references to various hand-waving web sites, but nothing at all quantitative and nothing that purported to identify a specific flaw in the book. I then aske a the foresight fellows meeting in Palo Alto in May (my first.) Apparently, nobody has seen any such paper. Do you have a reference for one? Thanks.