From: Gordon Worley (redbird@rbisland.cx)
Date: Mon Apr 09 2001 - 00:00:40 MDT
At 2:53 PM -0400 4/7/01, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>PLEASE don't take this as saying that the list has to be G-rated or
>anything. Everyone here can be assumed to be a responsible adult - at
>least, anyone bright enough to be on this list at age eleven can be
>assumed to be a responsible adult. It's whether society and parents
>*know* that, which I question
Hey, give that 11 year old some credit. When I was that old, I
wasn't so stupid as to do things that might upset parents without
taking precautions. Likely, at 11 years old, the Singularity would
be such a thing, unless of course the 'kid's' parents were at least
Extropians.
Oh, one more thing. I don't think that being bright makes one
equivilant to a responsible adult; it's being wise. Of course, by
that definition about 99% of the population should still be kids.
Wisdom is the key factor in figuring out how to move into the future,
not how to make the technology to move into the future (this requires
brightness). At 11 years old, the amont of wisdom a human could have
compiled is very limited. Geez, I look at people many years older
than me who haven't obtained much wisdom yet and if they have still
need to figure out how to act on it. I know I have some wisdom, but
then I know one day I'll look back and laugh at how sophmoric I used
to be. I do that now in reference to what I may have thought just 6
or even 3 months ago!
In the recent bloom of discussion, I saw plenty of bright comments,
but many lacked much wisdom. I've gotten wiser by learning lots of
history, learning form past mistakes, and trying to set myself up to
be disillusioned as often as possible, since disillusionment forces
me to re think things until I've come up with an idea many times
better than my old ones. Don't wait for it to happen; go do it on
purpose! The list will be a better place for it.
Now, since I've only been around 18+ years, I have some excuse if I'm
sophmoric at times, but many of you have a decade or two on me (or at
least that's my guess, unless the list is highly polarized with the
late teens/early twenties group), so by all means you should be able
to run cricles around me. Well, start doing it!
Oh, and sorry for all of the exclimation marks, but I felt like some
of those points were really important. :-)
-- Gordon Worley http://www.rbisland.cx/ mailto:redbird@rbisland.cx PGP Fingerprint: C462 FA84 B811 3501 9010 20D2 6EF3 77F7 BBD3 B003
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