From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 05:33:57 MDT
On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 02:56:24AM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> No, what you are doing is destroying the transhumanist movement from the
> inside. Just as a few violent muslim articles get quoted as being
> representative of the entire muslim world, your rantings will be quoted
> as representatitive of the transhumanist movement. The are all in the
> archive. They get served up by Google. They don't contain any smileys
> or hint that they aren't serious proposals. People read this stuff and
> think that we are pushing this agenda to destroy the plan to bring out
> some post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future a la Mad Max.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with a 'me too' to this. Transhumanism as
a moment hinges on the good ideas of its members. Stupid ideas kill it.
Radical thought experiments are often useful, and I think there is a
merit in exploring what to do if a major city gets nuked - the threat is
real, and we better examine options. But when suggesting responses they
better be based in reality instead of the same kind of fantasy as was
mentioned in the (excellent) article quoted by Carlos Gonzalia as
driving the jihaddis.
I have noted that the quality of foreign policy ideas posted here
generally tends to be notably low; while there are some quite advanced
threads on science, people in general here does not seem to be well
versed in political science, law or history (the fields most relevant to
saying anything useful about this kind of issue). That doesn't stop
anyone from posting and having opinions. But opinion is worthless, it is
just what we happen to think or feel, not good arguments based on facts
and tied to how the world really works. A good discussion makes people
bring up arguments for various positions, and then they are tested and
refined. In the end we will have learned something useful from it. But a
debate of opinions is just about showing the passion of views and does
seldom lead to any clarity.
Here is a suggestion to turn this thread into something useful: increase
the abstraction level to cool things down. Instead of assuming the nuke
to have been delivered by some specific Muslim countries (which anyway
makes the issue far more trivial), assume it was delivered by a global
ideological network of some kind. Let's ignore what their ideology is,
the important factor is that these people exist in and are citizens of
many countries (including the US) and they are not trivial to spot. What
policies would be reasonable then? What goals would we seek to
accomplish? (especially the last question is interesting. An obvious
goal would be no more nuked cities, but would that imply no more nuked
cities in the US or anywhere? At that point does precautions against
threats become threats in themselves?)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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