RE: the prospect of immortality being taken seriously

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Aug 20 2001 - 21:45:01 MDT


Damien writes

>> I don't know anything about Lord W. but I'd assume he and
>> most of the other "peers" he is talking about are 1-2 std.
>> deviations above average intelligence. People like Michael
>> and Eric are 3-4 std. deviations above average intelligence
>
> you Yanks would have a reciprocal clue as well. Sorry about that.
> Professor Lord Robert Winston is a major *in vitro* pioneer, with
> patents in transgenic technology, and the author and/or host of
> SUPERHUMAN (hasn't that reached PBS yet?), so he's not necessarily
> an Olde Fogey Farte of marginal intelligence.

:-) I'm sure that Robert was not implying by any means that Lord W.
is of "marginal intelligence". I have talked to Eric Drexler and
I have the same impression that Robert does. Eric is close to 4
standard deviations, I'd guess. (That's about 1 in 30,000 statistically,
although I don't know about "actually"; perhaps your encyclopedia would
say again.)

Have you had an opportunity to talk to Lord W. for more than just a
few minutes? I would be very interested in your personal impressions.
While I'm sure that there are some very interesting exceptions, I
find that I can get a pretty good idea of someone's intelligence
after a ten or twenty minute discussion with them. At least for
sure I've met some pretty dumb customers with Ph.D.'s (I even
went to high school with some).

Lee



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