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Topic: virus: Singularitarians farked (Read 602 times) |
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David Lucifer
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virus: Singularitarians farked
« on: 2004-01-13 09:46:21 » |
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Source: http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=789629
The reaction to the SFGate article http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/LVG1J459UE1.DTL has
been generally hostile. Here's one of the more clever comments...
Quote:You people make me sick!
These men have a goal with their life. True, it's a goal that will end in Doom for us alll; but damn it, at least they know what
they want. They're not afraid to reach for the stars. They're not afraid to shout at the world, "Look at me, World! One day my
creation will destroy you!!"
What are you doing with your life that comes close? How are you different from the guy who lives next door? Do you think that a
hundred years from now your life will mean anything?
This man's noble goal is that centuries from now, the small tribes of humans that manage to survive the destruction will read about
him on crude sheets of thick leather. They will read the strange symbols written in mud and human waste, and they will raise their
fists to the heavens and yell...
"Damn you, Eliezer Yudkowsky, servent of the Devil! Why did you send this plague upon your fellow men!?"
That is immortality, friends. Immortality like that of Alexander. Immortality, like that of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, who is
even now known as the God Osiris. Immortality that only comes from grand, world-changing acts.
So I say; Bravo! Reach for the Stars, my friends. Reach for the Stars with cold mechanical hands.
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David Lucifer
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Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.75
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
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Re: virus: Singularitarians farked
« Reply #1 on: 2004-01-13 10:14:14 » |
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David McFadzean wrote:
> Source: http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=789629
>
> The reaction to the SFGate article
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/11/LVG1J459UE1.DTL
> has been generally hostile.
Eliezer's response was pretty good:
Quote:#1: You guys wait until you ever have the slightest tiniest little contact with the media and they take everything out of context
and portray you however the feel like portraying you that day, and I am going to read your article when it gets farked and laugh
like hell. I'm a nerd, for God's sake, what do I know about talking to the press?
#2: Read the frickin' original sources! Nothing interesting ever gets through the Media Filter. Do you think that what you're
reading is anything like what we're about? "Do you think that's information you're reading now?" If you've got a biatch about the
Singularity Institute's online papers (http://singinst.org/) and feel like making fun of them, great, but if you do it from an
article you're getting it secondhand and you know you're going to get it wrong. Okay, it's not like you have an infinite amount of
time to spend on this. But the attitude on Fark right now is "Gondor has no clue, Gondor needs no clue!"
#3: Making fun of someone who's just been reported on is not really all that much different from making fun of someone who's just
been mugged. Another reason why, if you've got to make fun of something, take 30 seconds to grab something from an original source
to make fun of.
#4: Pomposity: Posting your intelligence percentile was shooting your own foot off in a conversation like this. Talk about pandering
to the stereotype.
#5: I suppose it's your own business whether or not you care about my sex life, but wouldn't you rather look at boobies than talk
about whether or not someone else should have a girlfriend? Incidentally, I wasn't the one who brought it up to the reporter, but
once she asked I had to be honest.
#6: Academic types will probably be most interested in the paper "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence" at
http://singinst.org/LOGI/.
#7: We're going to try fairly hard not to build Skynet. And there is a lot to be said about that subject, from the evolutionary
psychology of human emotions, to Bayesian decision theory, to prospect theory, and so on. If you are a techie and you say to
yourself, "Okay, this time I'm not going to blow up the world" and you do your reading and put some effort into thinking
technically, you find there's actually something you can do about it; it's not a matter of flipping a coin, closing your eyes and
trusting to fate. (Although no matter how good you are, how much you know, or how carefully you plan, a roll of 18 is always a
critical failure.)
#8: Okay, visualize this. You're talking to a reporter and she says, "Well, what about your childhood?" You don't think that's
relevant to anything you want to talk about, so you toss off some random thing like, "Oh, I had a pseudotraumatic childhood" and
change the subject. The reporter thinks this is a snappy phrase so she finds an opportunity to use it in the article. This is how
life works when you get interviewed. I would not begin to compare myself to anyone who actually did have a traumatic childhood, and
I'm proud to say that my parents are nice people all the way.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled uninformed mockery. Bring it on.
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