Re: Anti-singularity spam.

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2006 - 14:36:12 MDT


Damien Broderick wrote:
> It's time to stop taking pot-shots at the lazy anoxic fish
> in the brine barrel and go instead after the big sharks.

The big sharks tend to have addressed most obvious objections to their
ideas because they've given a few talks and taken audience questions.
You'd need an actual effort to shoot a big shark.

The really big sharks carefully weigh each detail before attaching it to
a prediction. The really big sharks are a lot harder to hit because
they present a much smaller profile; they won't put something forward
unless they don't think you can knock it down. And since the really big
sharks construct long, careful arguments with boring-sounding
qualifications, and don't have a sound-bite ready for every question
(e.g. "What will people wear in 2050?"), nonspecialists may not have
heard of them.

Careful futurism is rarely popular, popular futurism is rarely careful.

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


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