Fwd: On joining organizations to "keep an eye on them"

From: Anand (trans_humanism@msn.com)
Date: Wed Oct 09 2002 - 10:07:01 MDT


----- Original Message -----

From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
To: "SingularityAction" <SingularityAction@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Tue Oct 8, 2002 6:51 pm
Subject: On joining organizations to "keep an eye on them"

An interesting anecdote: During Israel's early days, there existed a
certain terrorist organization. Mossad infiltrated this organization so
thoroughly that they later found that one in ten members was a Mossad
agent. Moreover, they later found that the only reason the organization
had been staying afloat was that the Mossad agents were the only ones
actually paying their dues.

I'd thus like to advise everyone not to join organizations unless they
really, truly believe that the organization will be effective and is
something they wish to be part of. Otherwise, everyone joins a bad
effort "to keep an eye on it" and keeps it alive where the effort
would otherwise have died a quiet death.

Sincerely,
Eliezer.

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


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:41 MDT