Edwin Evans wrote:
>
> > After some discussion on this topic, I'm forced to confront the
> > fact that it doesn't seem we have any independent verification that
> > Eliezer is in fact 19.
>
> Easy. Go to http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~setmentr/members.html and notice that
> most of the people are young. SET wasn't created until 1991 (so if Eliezer
> took PSAT in 1991 then ve could be at most 22 now). I think this should be
> good enough for what you want.
I took the normal SAT in 1991, at age 11. Are they doing the PSAT now?
And of course, it doesn't prove I'm 19; but as Edwin Evans points out, if you know that I'm no older than 22, then you can probably assume I'm 19. Good one, Evans! That never occurred to me as a verification source, and it should have.
I wish I'd thought to show that to Damien Broderick before he sprang his "Brooklyn grandmother" line on me in _The Spike_ (of course, I had no idea he was going to do that until I read the book; otherwise I'd have figured out some way to verify things and destroyed a perfectly nice line, which is probably why Broderick kept it as a surprise).
FWIW, Brian Atkins has physically met someone who looked like a teenager/young adult, claimed to be me, and knew the contents of emails sent to "sentience@pobox.com". Someone who claims to be my father, Moshe Yudkowsky, is known by a number of SF fans and will be at Worldcon this year, and will verify that his son has an email address of "sentience@pobox.com" and was born on September 11, 1979. (Or he may claim I'm an android he bought from Macy's, or that he's never heard of me. We're a little silly down here.)
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way