Re: Retrenchment

From: justin corwin (outlawpoet@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Aug 18 2005 - 15:25:40 MDT


On 8/18/05, Richard Loosemore <rpwl@lightlink.com> wrote:

<snicker-snack explanation of proposed self-selecting communities of experts/>

> Meanhile, I don't want to debate the above in this forum. You can't
> debate issues that touch people's core paradigmatic commitments. Read
> Kuhn or Feyerabend to understand why.

You know, maybe I'm just too thick to be insulted, but.. what was the
relevance of that? Were you saying that all the people responding to
your emails belonged to one of your invented communities?

Unfortunately, most of the people on this list are not deep experts. I
have always hoped that sl4 or extropians would produce a pool of
deeply competent people in clearly defined areas of expertise I could
call upon. But most of the active participants here are either
generalists, or reaching somewhat beyond their specialities when
talking here. Most sl4-ers do not work for ultratechnology companies.

Most of us got here *through* generalism. This is not a new concept.
There are, insofar as I am aware, very few people here who think that
something like SOAR is ever going to work. I only know of one person
who thinks highly of Cyc, and he works/worked there. Many of us have
our own painfully gathered databases of knowledges we believe are
relevant. There are software engineers and artists on this list, and I
can't think of any active posters who display the characteristics you
were describing.

Did you have specific behaviors you wanted to react to? Those probably
are better addressed on a case-by-case basis. I just got the feeling
that this 'Retrenchment' may have had something to do with me, or was
in response to one of the discussions you had which I took part in,
but I just couldn't figure out how.

-- 
Justin Corwin
outlawpoet@hell.com
http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com
http://www.adaptiveai.com


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