Re: Miller's The Mating Mind

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Sep 28 2002 - 14:54:01 MDT


mike99 wrote:
>
> Question: What does all this say about the potential for getting deep pocket
> donors to support SIAI?

Personally, I knew about it in advance and had already taken it into
account. If you're curious, mostly it means that deep pocket donors
interested in supporting SIAI are likely to fall into one of two categories:

1) People who know the arts of abstract thinking and are capable of
following complex logical arguments - i.e., dot-com millionaires - enough
to sort out feelgood charity from actually effective charity.

2) People who "get" the Singularity enough to actually care about it -
who want a Singularity, in particular, rather than something interesting
to do with this month's charitable donation.

(And, of course, those who fall into both categories.)

In any case, I would advise against thinking in terms of deep pocket
donors, and suggest that you think in terms of building a Singularity
movement. The things you'd do to build a Singularity movement are, in
fact, the same things that would result in people in categories (1) or (2)
hearing about us. And as a mode of thinking, it lends itself to going out
and building, rather than eternally waiting for a killer strike.

--
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence






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