Re: Singularity-worship

Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Mon, 02 Dec 1996 21:30:25 -0600


> Perhaps you should have stayed on the prozac. As far as I can see,
> you are an arrogant bastard...and that's putting it nicely. Just one
> question, Eliezer: in your rose-tinted world, is there such a thing as
> 'consideration'? If not, I think your condition is drastically greater than
> you might expect (though that is bound to be naught).

Prozac would make me more arrogant, not less. It acts on some of the
self-esteem systems and increases your opinion of yourself, which is why
it is often prescribed for depressions.

> >There's no use in discussing anything, anything at all, that takes place
> >in a world where there are transhumans.
> >
> >You've never been faced with anything smarter than you were so you >cannot
> possibly appreciate what it is like.
> >
> >In conclusion, remember that I might not be right, but if I say you're
> >wrong, you're almost certainly wrong.

Interesting choice of quotes - almost certain to give a wildly
misleading picture of my post. The first quote and the scond belong
together, but the third implies that I mean that *I* was transhuman and
that *I* was smarter than *you*. Full humans are smarter than me in at
least two areas that I can think of, with Godel, Escher, Bach being the
concrete example that forced me into an appreciation of the
Singularity. You aren't an Algernon, all of your cognitive systems
remain intact, so you're smart enough to be on a par with the rest of
humanity. I'm not.

Anything I say may be distorted and remixed and used against me. Sigh.

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I know.