From: David Clark (clarkd@rccconsulting.com)
Date: Thu Dec 01 2005 - 11:59:21 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org>
To: <sl4@sl4.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005 6:39 AM
Subject: Re: Cultishness as a high-entropy state
> First of all: Clearly, Marc is a highly intelligent person
> and not an "idiot."
>
> He has, in my view, posted a few really idiotic
> statements on this list. But so have I (though
> not as many, IMO), and so
> has Eliezer, though we each have our own particular
> variants of idiotic-ness.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org>
To: <sl4@sl4.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005 6:39 AM
Subject: Re: Cultishness as a high-entropy state
> First of all: Clearly, Marc is a highly intelligent person
> and not an "idiot."
>
> He has, in my view, posted a few really idiotic
> statements on this list. But so have I (though
> not as many, IMO), and so
> has Eliezer, though we each have our own particular
> variants of idiotic-ness.
Ben, I think you might be giving Marc more credit than he deserves. I could
make a program that spewed out a bunch of rubbish on philosophical and
meta-physical topics and some smart people could pick out some interesting
lines here and there. These few lines might be insightful to their
intelligent minds where the rest of the text was discarded as rubbish. The
program couldn't be considered intelligent at all and if not for the
intelligence of the reader, nothing of value could come from this randomly
created text. I believe this is what Marc Geddes does. If Marc can't back
up any of this hypothesis or insights with something other than he believes
it might be true, then what difference does it make if something he says
might be correct by accident. Does he get credit for something that he
never intended or understood?
When Marc first put out his TOE, I sent a few responses directly to him (off
list). Most of what I wrote was asking him to provide the reasoning for his
conclusions. His response was to come up with a fresh set of gibberish
without answering any of my complaints or comments at all. He has done this
consistently on this list for all the time I have been reading it. (I have
246 posts by Marc since February 25, 2004) Even the people who have tried to
agree with him on some minor point have been told that they weren't
expressing his opinions correctly and he would then add more conclusions
without any reasons or facts to base such conclusions on.
If Marc isn't an idiot then he is at least a waste of time to read because
he ignores any reasoned arguments that are ever posted in reply to his
posts. He includes all kinds of smiley faces when what he is saying isn't
humorous at all and he fancies that he is in some kind of competition with
Eliezer. Doesn't a competition between 2 people have to have both parties
participate to be called a competition? Eliezer, rightly, has ignored these
repeated challenges from Marc. The image of a delusional knight charging at
windmills comes to mind.
I have also been quite annoyed by many on this list for their nasty way of
replying to new posters and others they disagree with. For a list that
purports to have almost exclusively very intelligent people on it, I have a
hard time discerning the logic and rationality of many posts. Is it
difficult for someone to make a proposition and then follow it with
arguments as to why they think the proposition is true? Is it difficult for
others to refute or agree with that exact same proposition and explain why
they believe it to be wrong or right? Many people seem to reply to another
person's proposition with a different one of their own and then refute that
instead of the other persons'. This talking past each other has been
mentioned by others on this list. Wouldn't putting a little more structure
into our posts and responses make the information to signal ratio go up
substantially?
As a side note, I think Eliezer's comments about SL4 and transhumanism not
being a cult were very good and right on the money.
David Clark
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