From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu Jun 08 2000 - 19:58:09 MDT
> Why will you not concede the point: you may consider yourself an Extropian
> if you agree with the principles (and in my opinion follow them). You are
> not an Extropian if you cannot do that.
That's a silly tautology: "I define X as people who believe Y, so
people who don't believe Y are not X". So what? The opposition
isn't arguing that, though they might think they are. What they're
really arguing is one of (a) The use of words to identify things
should be less rigorous than set theory in some contexts; (b) the
set of people who believe Y really /ought/ to believe Y', so the word
X should refer to Y'-believers as well; (c) while belief in Y is
common among those calling themselves X, it's really a consequence
of those people having condition Z (which may or may not include
beliefs), so we ought to use X to refer to Z-people, most of whom
also happen to believe in Y, but not necessarily; (d) Y itself is
so imprecisely defined that some people we don't think are X might
actually be X after all, because their vision of Y is clearer.
All of those are prefectly rational reasons for people to call
themselves "Extropian" when they espouse beliefs that are apparently
contrary to the principles. Those people really ought to more
clearly state which of the above (or some other one I might have
missed) is the case, and argue for it more clearly, but we can't
dismiss them with tautologies and bluster over definitions.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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