"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> You don't have that kind of time, and furthermore you're treating this
> whole issue like a contest for the position of tribal chief. The
> objective here is not to take over the existing tribe or go split off your
> own. This is about technology. If you're still interested in seceeding,
> I suggest you go read "How To Start Your Own Country" so that you can
> become discouraged enough to give up.
>
Perhaps it makes me non-mainstream here, but I do not believe
that technology alone will allow us to transcend our current
conditons and its many dangers. I don't believe that a
technology-only (or mostly so) end-run is a viable or workable
alternative. I think a lot of personal/social transformation is
also required.
> Maybe I'm being too harsh here. I guess a lot of these ideas look a lot
> less silly if you're planning for a 50-year or, ha ha, 100-year outlook.
> But try pretending, as a mental exercise, that everything you do with your
> life has to be completely finished by 2008 to do any good, and see what
> that does to your perspective.
You can only dance as fast as you can. It is a worthwhile
exercise to think how you would act if the above is true and it
may even be that you will do the best you can possibly do even
if the above turns out to be false. It helps to have as clean a
vision of what is to be acheived as possible. Then you can
decide how much can be done in the timeframe and what the
tradeoff is between a stretched out timeframe and aspects of the
vision.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:13 MDT