From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Aug 18 2003 - 03:59:58 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Any lessons learned? So far, only one: be temperate in your
> praise of others, else you will come to feel responsible for
> their actions. I hadn't known that.
But you're *not* responsible.
Why would you be a hypocrite if you stayed? You didn't throw Mike Lorrey out.
At the last Foresight Gathering, I met Gary Hudson, the rocket scientist.
Or at least, I met a person with "Gary Hudson" on his badge. So I
asked: "Are you _the_ Gary Hudson?" He gave me a strange look and said
yes. "Wow," I said, "you were one of my childhood heroes." He gave me
another strange look and said, "I'm not sure how to react to that."
I didn't think of the correct reply to this until later: "You don't need
to react to it at all. You are not responsible for what other people
think of you."
What I choose to think of Gary Hudson, or, say, Douglas Hofstadter, is my
business. Douglas Hofstadter could decide to go into business as a palace
torturer in the Third World and, while he might be responsible to himself
for that decision, he wouldn't be responsible to me.
I don't see why you can't just take back everything nice you said about
the Extropians list as relates to freedom of speech. You were
demonstrated to be wrong, that's all. It happens, especially for positive
forecasts. Is it really that terrible if we fail to live up to your
expectations?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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