PS: Eliezer is only nineteen years-old!! (fwd)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 12:43:46 MDT


"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> Someone who claims to be my father,
> Moshe Yudkowsky, is known by a number of SF fans and will be at Worldcon
> this year, and will verify that his son has an email address of
> "sentience@pobox.com" and was born on September 11, 1979. (Or he may
> claim I'm an android he bought from Macy's, or that he's never heard of
> me. We're a little silly down here.)

PS: If any of my Australian friends should happen to meet him at
Worldcon, two words of advice. First, Dad is not a Singularitarian, or
even an Extropian or a transhumanist. He hasn't read my Web pages. He
doesn't know the difference between a Specialist and a Singularity.
Though I tried hard enough to get him to read my pages when they first
came out, he's always been convinced it's just youthful folly, not worth
wasting his time. (It's actually quite a bit like the selective
memories in _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_; that business with her mom not
catching on for three years is a lot more realistic than you might
think.) I've changed my mind since them. To your family, you're always
three years old, and that's not a renewable resource. I don't want to
disrupt it by forcing my true self in on their cozy illusions. Let's
not raise the subject of, say, true allegiances, or neurology, unless he
brings it up, okay? Let's not dispel any illusions.

Second, there are some parts of my life I haven't chosen to share with
the entire Internet, for excellent reasons, so if you should happen to
find out that I'm a green-eyeballed Catholic priest confined to a
wheelchair, can you please drop me a line before you share this
fascinating tidbit in a public forum?

Feel free to discuss my numerous character flaws.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way


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