JOIN Stuart Armstrong

From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2008 - 04:57:40 MST


Hello list!

I'm Stuart Armstrong, up until now a protected bystander lurking on
the edges of the list. But this one-way relationship is no longer for
me, so I decided to commit. And post.

>One list custom is the JOIN post, where you post whatever information
about yourself you're willing to share and which we might be
interested in.

That second category is much, much smaller than the first, so I'll try
and keep this brief.

I'm a British-Canadian mathematician, brought up in Hong Kong and
France, currently working in Vienna. My interest in
singularity-related stuff started when I discovered the Future of
Humanity Institute in Oxford, and hasn't declined since. Having read
quite a lot since, I now find my original ideas hopelessly naive and
unoriginal. I hope to continue this process, until it can't get any
further - then I'll have a chance a being useful and original.

I'd probably be a SL3.2 on the future shock list - I still get
over-excited on most singularity related issues. It's easy to tell
when I get over-excited - my posts get dull and pedantic (of course,
this situation has to be carefully distinguished from cases when I'm
dull and pedantic because I'm feeling depressed, elated, happy, sad,
angry, lazy, interesting, or dull).

I have to confess a certain scepticism to the whole concept of the
Singularity in mathematical terms (reaching some infinity/absurdly
high level in a short amount of time). I have no problem with the
physics analogy (rapidly reaching a situation so unimaginably
different that our ability to predict anything sensible completely
breaks down).

No childhood traumas of note (my parents were loving and supportive -
I'm planning to sue them when my autobiography fails to sell) and no
more epiphanies than the average guy (six and a half per lifetime,
according to the most recent statistics).

All in all, I hope I'll be a useful addition to this list.

>If you have something to say, don't phrase it in the form of a
question. This holds especially true for your first post.

Phew! Fortunately I managed to avoid that rookie mistake.
Or did I?



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