From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 12:30:40 MDT
On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 12:40:17PM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> My biggest concern right now is that, in general, most Extropians lack the
> scientific expertise or understanding to support the evaluations and
> predictions we make. I fear that we are more like salespeople and
> advertisers who make unfounded claims for their product with no support. We
> are almost like a cult that selectively quotes scientific articles to
> support our pre-conceived ideas.
This is a good point. Of course this is not unique to us, it happens all
over the place, but at least we should hold ourselves to some level of
intellectual integrity (after all, it is in the principles - without it
we do not belong here).
As I see it, the best way of making extropianism useful is to have people
actually make academic careers or set up think tanks or other
organisations and try to live on the ideas. When you cannot afford to
just handwave about everything you like, but actually have to verify it
(if only to deal with the hypothetical well-researched critical
journalist at the press conference) you will start to pay attention and
filter information more thoroughly. A lot of the discussion on this list
is social and has the lack of rigor that on would expect; when I become
intrigued by a question and look around for an answer, I will still not
spend as much energy in writing a good post as I would if it was a
scientific paper or a report from my company. The trick is to try to
produce good quality stuff but recognize that the best is not made for
the list.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 02 2003 - 12:40:51 MDT