From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Sep 13 2001 - 11:34:39 MDT
On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 07:02:29AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
>
> Anders wrote:
> > You mean just like the extremely successful War on Drugs?
>
> There is a fairly big difference here. A not insignificant
> number of Americans have always opposed that "war". You
> are unlikely to find a signifant number opposed to a war
> on terrorism.
Here in Sweden we have a very tough policy on drugs, with strong popular
support. It still doesn't work. Do you really think the American war on
drugs would really work better if less people were opposed to it?
The risk right now is that a lot of decisions are taken on the basis of
the current mood - decisions which are going to haunt the US and the
world for a long time. People are right now run by their amygdalae :-(
> It is of course open to speculation whether a war on terrorists
> is more difficult than a war on drugs.
In many ways it is, since a terrorist is free to decide when, where and
how to strike, while the drug trade involves a lot of logistics for
moving money, drugs and equipment between origin and customer. And since
anybody with a grudge is a potential terrorist and could start his own
campaign (think of the Unabomber), you need much more information to be
effective.
> > No ideas are worth dying or killing for. Ideas are for living, not
> > death.
>
> No Anders, I'd have to disagree. I'd be with Brian and Miriam
> on this one. While I'd hope to be clever enough to find ways
> to live, if one can find ideas which offer ways for one's death
> to have extropic value then they are worthy of consideration.
Why are we holding ideas? Because we want to survive and live better
lives. While I agree that in a lose-lose situation it might be
preferable to make one's death pro-extropic, in situations where the
choice is between survival and some abstract good I would generally
argue that survival is the goal. Of course, you might have a long
discount factor and estimate that the consequences of temporarily not
pursuing (say) freedom will be so bad that the survival option has a
lesser value than the death option. I would respect such a conclusion,
but I think it is exceedingly rare that such situations really appear.
The problem with talking about ideas worth dying for is of course that
this is exactly the kind of thinking and value system that underlies the
terrorist mindset. And in the current situation there seems to be a lot
of people who think there are plenty of ideas *others* should die for.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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