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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:56 MDT