From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Fri Jul 12 2002 - 19:56:37 MDT
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
> 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.
There doesn't seem to be any type of consensus of ideas among intellectuals,
much less teachers, writers, journalists, et al. "Dumbed down" and
"pop-culture" models have been around much longer than those now-common
phrases have been in existence, and the "long-lived part of culture" may not
have all that much more integrity than, for example, what we learned in our
history classes:
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/liesmyteachertoldme/liesmyteacher.html
http://eserver.org/bs/reviews/2001-6-29-9.10AM.html
I don't know - maybe history will be relegated more and more to irrelevance
as technological changes happen exponentially. But it seems as if so much
of what we learn and have learned (even in our rarefied halls of ivy and
towers of ivory) is built upon a foundation that is subject to liquefaction
(exempting science, with its objectivity).
Olga
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