From: -randy (cryofan@mylinuxisp.com)
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 12:20:16 MDT
On Sun, 08 Jun 2003 13:17:39 -0400, you wrote:
>(Though, oddly enough, it is possible to have AI cranks, such as Mentifex,
>despite the lack of any experimentally established AI theories for them to
>disagree with. It would appear that a crank in a chaotic field is still a
>crank.)
Just for the sake of argument, how would one tell that *you* are, or
are not, an "AI crank"? You would seem to fill the bill: you write at
length on AI, but have no university degrees, and you are an advocate
of decidedly non-mainstream ideas, such as the singularity,
extropianism, cryonics, etc.
>It really is not hard to tell who has the ball. Where Flandern is
>concerned, the existing theory of general relativity has the ball, and
>Flandern is a crank. Where, say, nanotech is concerned, Drexler has the
>ball, and until Smalley figures out how to address the existing literature
>and argue quantitatively, Smalley is simply embarassing himself.
You stop just short of calling Smalley a crank, but leave that
implication out there for the reader. I think Drexler is great, but I
remind you that Smalley won the Nobel Prize for his nanotech
work.....kinda hard to imply that he is a crank. Wrong, maybe, but a
crank?
-Randy
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