From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed May 01 2002 - 16:28:11 MDT
Interestingly, there is a substantially higher-than-average percentage of
transgender and homosexual individuals on the Extropians list. I suspect
(and Max More has said in a Changesurfer interview that he suspects
likewise) that this is because nobody on Extropians notices or cares - if
you want to add an extra set of arms or move to a robot body, then switching
genders or sexual preferences isn't even noticable. This makes the
Extropians list a nice place to hang out if you're transgender, homosexual,
etc. and looking for somewhere where people *really* don't care - not just
in the sense of scrupulously ignoring it to be polite, but in the sense of
just not caring because it's not a significant change on the scale they're
used to discussing. And I, like Max More, think that's a good thing.
There are a *lot* of people with unusual neurologies on SL4, not all of whom
have announced themselves. I suspect that this is because where the
Extropians tend to focus on the bodily aspects of future self-modification,
we tend to focus on the mental aspects of future self-modification. And by
the same logic that makes transgender insignificant on an Extropian scale,
an unusual neurology is not significant on SL4.
I know from experience that people with all sorts of unusual neurologies,
including autism, can write perfectly coherent SL4 posts. On this forum,
you get held to the same standard as everyone else - so welcome home.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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