Re: news spin on cryonics

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jul 12 2002 - 17:42:49 MDT


On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 10:20:58AM -0400, Artillo5@cs.com wrote:
>
> TT definitely has a good point. If Transhumanism/Extropianism was to go
> "mainstream", I would be afraid that it would become a *dumbed down* version
> for the masses.

The way of going mainstream is in any case not to sell oneself to pop
culture - at least if you want to retain the integrity of the ideas and
have them become a long-lived part of culture. The trick is instead to
sell the ideas to the intellectuals in Hayek's sense: the people whose
profession it is to combine and transmit ideas. They are teachers,
journalists, scholars, pundits, traditional intellectuals and writers.
By reaching them our ideas become part of the great cultural discourse
and will spread into the rest of society over time. The flow of ideas is
to a large extent from these intellectuals to popular culture, rather
than the reverse. Hence the ideas that are accepted among the
intellectuals become the paradigm that sets the mood and meaning of
other ideas.

-- 
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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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