From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 07:21:23 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Olga Bourlin wrote,
>
>>Certainly, I can understand why a 13-year-old would think that (most
>>teenagers are prone to narcissism, anyway - it's probably even an
>>important developmental step).
>
> Also remember that this boy is still in the formative stages gathering
> input. He just finished his degree. He has been learning everything given
> to him. I have no doubt that he excelled in his learning of the Bible and
> church studies as well. He has not yet gotten to the stage where he is
> questioning what he has learned or started producing new ideas to replace
> the old ideas yet. That comes with experience.
As I recall, I started tossing out religious ideas as "obviously wrong" at
around the age of five, when they first claimed that praying in a language
I didn't know (Hebrew) could possibly accomplish anything. But I didn't
actually work up all the way to tossing out the idea of God until age 13
or so, and I kept my mouth shut about it until I had moved out of my
parents' home. I would never have voluntarily made a statement about God
to nonfamily, though, and certainly not to the press.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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