From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2000 - 06:10:04 MST
At 04:01 AM 28/02/00 -0800, 'gene wrote:
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:
>
> > Conclusion:
> > These people are deliberately avoiding all mention of diamondoid and
> > drextech. I'm not sure whether they're good guys or bad guys, but I
> > don't trust them.
>
>Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.
Not in this case. My sense is that the mainstream nano people regard
Drexler et al as bogosity writ large. This is probably unfair, and to some
extent ahistorical (but then again, the new academic work seems almost
wholly independent of Drexler's). As I probably stated previously,
scientific reviewers of THE SPIKE found it defective precisely because of
the respectful attention I paid to the plausibility of drextech and its
promoter. They wanted MEMS. This wasn't ignorance (at least one had met
Eric, attended Foresight, finds him over the top). It's a judgment call.
And an institutional paradigm thang. If Drexler and his followers ever
build a positional assembler, everyone will change lanes fast. Until then,
expect the same reaction mainstream scientists (surely correctly) have
toward claims of `hydrinos'.
Damien
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