73 Message 73: From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Mon Aug 9 11:51:27 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA21518; Mon, 9 Aug 93 11:51:25 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA10100; Mon, 9 Aug 93 11:50:58 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by panix.com id AA25269 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Mon, 9 Aug 1993 14:42:38 -0400 Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 14:42:38 -0400 Message-Id: <199308091842.AA25269@panix.com> To: Exi@panix.com From: Exi@panix.com Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: August 9, 373 P.N.O. [18:42:22 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Mon, 9 Aug 93 Volume 93 : Issue 220 Today's Topics: [2 msgs] ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation Front Madness [1 msgs] ECON: Interesting rumor from a couple months ago... [1 msgs] HUMOR: AI is HERE AT LAST! [1 msgs] INVEST: Transaction costs [1 msgs] Intellectual Property, ppl, etc. [1 msgs] NL: NCP - well stated, Thanks [1 msgs] Nightly Market Report [1 msgs] WACO: TV Sequel Cancelled [1 msgs] for my extropositivis [1 msgs] good predictors [2 msgs] physical law (and zombies) [1 msgs] physics: potential energy; extension [2 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 51293 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 14:40:37 WET DST From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: HUMOR: AI is HERE AT LAST! FutureNerd Steve Witham () writes: > > > There is a RACTER-like AI program running around in the sci.* groups > > (mostly sci.math, sci.physics, sci.space) with the handle S.H. > ... > > After preliminary research at the Usenet archives here at Software > Maintenance and Development Systems, Inc., I'm convinced S.H. is a > human being who doesn't speak English very well, doesn't know netiquette > or how to work his software very well, and has some missing social > skills, and lots of quazy energy. You might be right. The key things which led me to suspect that he was a program is 1) the fact that his responses have nothing to do with the thread. 2) he responds to a lot of messages 3) his grammar looks like Eliza and it quotes phrases, such as "Why do you say ``fermats last theorem has been solved''?" 4) He frequently includes little stories in his posts. This is a key feature of the racter program. His stories don't make any sense. For instance, Nick Szabo was in the middle of a DC-X debate and S.H. comes in and says "Where do you work? How old are you? etc" (e.g. he asked a lot of personal questions) > > Still, some people are actually fooled by it and try to flame it. > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > If this post was actually a joke, I was fooled. I wish it had been true; > I've always wanted to see RACTER put on the air... If anyone ever puts an AI on usenet, I hope it's better than RACTER. RACTER's responses are only marginally better than running disassociated press on posts. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 14:57:37 WET DST From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: physics: potential energy; extension D. Anton Sherwood () writes: > > I asked Tim whether potential energy has extension. It occurs to me later, that's a better question than I knew at the time. > > Between two masses there is negative gravitational potential energy > (-Gmm/d). Energy is equivalent to mass, so this negative energy has > negative gravity. Where is it? That is, somewhere in the system there > should be a locus of (very weak!) repulsion; is it in the masses, in a > cloud between them, in their joint center of mass, or what? Be careful. You are discussing the potential _gravitational_ energy. If this were to gravitate, we would have to say that "gravity gravitates." Potential energy represents the energy required to move an object along a path through a field. Thus, potential energy is a measure of the energy of the field. I know that electromagnetic fields can gravitate, I'm not sure about the other forces (strong, weak, gravity). Intuitively, I would guess that gravity doesn't gravitate because that would lead to a runaway affect. (analogous to the way Lenz's law is chosen to prevent self-feeding magnetic fields) What this all points out is that you have to be careful about how you apply E=mc^2. For instance, using E=mc^2 we can give mass to photons but we know that photons can't possess mass because they travel at the speed of light. E=mc^2 is only half the equation. The real equation for massless particles is E=pc, derived from E^2 = (pc)^2 + (mc^2)^2 (p is the momentum, let m=0) Also, figuring out how energy/mass gravitate is a bit more difficult than applying Newton's law of gravitation. (it takes General Relativity) People tend to go overboard when applying relativity's ideas of mass and energy. A common mistake is to ask "if mass increases as you go faster, why wouldn't a very fast spaceship turn into a black hole?" -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 12:23:25 -0700 From: tribble@netcom.com (E. Dean Tribble) Subject: physics: potential energy; extension exclude thread:: ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1993 16:42:25 -0400 (EDT) From: Carol Moore Subject: WACO: TV Sequel Cancelled NBC television announced it was not going to do a sequel to its first movie about the massacre in Waco. The first one ended the day of the Feb. 28 shoot out. The second one would have extended to the April 19 massacre. NBC says it canceled the sequel because it is trying to cut down on violence in its programming. Or maybe it just didn't want to make the government look any worse than it does already. Or maybe NBC felt that if they had to do an honest story it would make the government look so bad that they'd have trouble renewing their license. Especially with recent congressional hearings on the subject. Also, the government announced it is going to charge a bunch of the survivors with murder--including Paul Fatta, the gun dealer who wasn't even at the compound February 28th. That trial should help bring out the truth. The government is also alleging there was a suicide pact. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 14:02:49 PDT From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) Subject: ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation Front Madness I quite agree with Ray's comments. There are major threads of self-hatred running through the West right now (the evil Dead White Males, polluting industry, etc.) and this is just a few people on the "cutting edge" of this same memeset, "letting it all hang out". I'd sure like to figure out where the self-loathing (or, more precisely, the loathing of one's orgins and social environment) is coming from. Last year I was leafing through an Earth First! publication, and came across a piece bragging about how many EFers had sterilized themselves (it was quite substantial, perhaps even 50%) and wondering why the whole community hadn't done that. The capability for human self-genocide is here, and it doesn't have to take any violent, anti-social form. In fact just in family monetary terms, self-genocide may be quite a bit cheaper than trying to perpetuate, not to mention grow, our families or our civilization. And before you crow about "well, there won't be very many Earth Firsters for long" keep in mind it is a meme, a growing meme, and its typically spreads parasitically (eg via public schools), not via families (creating new memetic hosts). There are substantial populations going the other way: Mormon, fundamentalist Islam, much of Asia, etc. have booming populations and value the pristinity of the natural environment much lower than their social environment or material well-being. Alas, there doesn't seem to be any widely spread memeset that combines growth with a scientific outlook. (Before you point to Extropians: first, we're hardly a large number of people, and second, our demographics much more resemble Earth First! than a self-perpetuating community). Here are some of the big memes going through the ecofascist community at the moment: * anti-chlorine: they've discovered that chlorine is one of the major building blocks of modern industrial chemistry, a common thread in industrial evil (DDT, dioxins, CFCs, PCBs, etc.). So the idea now being promoted by Greenpeace et. al. that we should just ban use of chlorine, outright (except where it occurs naturally, eg salt). This isn't fringe: Greenpeace is quite large and mainstream compared to Earth First!, not to mention this voluntary human self-extinction movement. The "nanotechnology soon" movement aids and abets the ban-chlorine movement with vaporware promises of chemical replacements Real Soon Now. In fact Drexlerian nanotech is theoretical applied science, postulating what may be possible many decades from now. Meanwhile the nanotech meme has great potential for abuse by Luddites (another example below). (Of course it's also critical for ourselves, espeically in terms of cryonics, to expand theoretical applied science/advanced nanotech studies, I'm just pointing out the memetic side effects that could come back and bit us). * an ambitious plan, recently revealed, to confiscate substantial fractions of all rural lands in the U.S., to convert them to "wildlife corridors". However: * "Save biodiversity" will start to lose steam. With Jurassic Park, the phrase "extinction is forever" has lost its power. They're moving away from the halfway-rational "preservation of logically deep genetic information" argument and to a more mystical notion of "ecological information", which of course cannot be preserved accept by closing down the plants and shutting off the forests to to humans. We'll see less appeal to preservation and more direct appeals to mysticism ("ancient Indian hunting grounds"), recreation, etc. * anti-biotech. The ecofascists will lose here, since it will soon be easy to genetically engineer organisms in your own barnyard lab with a few $1,000 of equipment, but meanwhile they can delay research by a decade or so, severely impacting the quality of our own lives (eg what kind of life extension and cryonic suspension capabilities we will have in 20 years). * animal rights (this will continue to grow as videocams get easier to hide in animal labs). * Leading-edge Luddism: I've heard two calls from the mainstream environmentalist community to halt or severely regulate nanotechnology research because of the much-hyped "graygoo" problem. (Graygoo is only a possible misuse of nanotechnology *very advanced* over today's state-of-the-art in sub-micron litho, designer catalysts, etc. but cf. the chlorine ban movement to see if details will get in the way of a greating-sounding meme). > One after I asked the question, "if technology is so bad, why > don't you stop using computers?" and another after I said "if you wish > everyone lived a tribal/farmer existence, why don't you get off the net and > start living by your principles to see how you like it." This remains a powerful argument, we just need to keep bashing away at it. Ditto the "why don't you just commit suicide argument". It pisses them off every time, and distracts them from harm they might otherwise be causing, and best of all it's right on the mark, it points out their hypocrisy for all to see. > The environmental movement will be a serious force for extropians > to reckon with in the future. It goes far beyond normal socialism and its > ultimate goal is not to protect human lives or an abstract notion of human > "society" but ecosystems. This is quite accurate. And while there are many "mainstream" environmentalists who would disagree with this, they are usually the ones sending in donations and the gawking Yosemite tourists, not the ones having a major memetic impact on the movement. Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 14:32:17 -0700 From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood) Subject: physical law (and zombies) Quoted passages are taken from multiple posts by Tim Starr over the past week, and cynically rearranged for my convenience. > Again, it's not an argument, it's a question! Oh. Sorry. As someone observed later, it's hard to tell a straight question from argument-by-question. > why must nature be mechanical? Because you can't imagine otherwise? What would the contrary mean? > What physical law makes me type these words? What physical law makes > us disagree about this issue? Human bodies behave in many ways that > seem inexplicable by mechanics. They don't behave in ways that are > contrary to mechanics[,] I admit. I don't mean to suggest that they can. > It just seems to me that mechanics doesn't include mental "objects." This seems to say that physical law is a set of prohibitions like "thy speed shall not exceed c, but apart from that, it's up to you." Do you ever get the feeling that you and your interlocutor are not speaking the same language? The laws describing physical forces do not _allow_; nature is a totalitarian (quantum uncertainty excepted, of course). We also see "unexplained" fallaciously equated with "inexplicable". The mechanist assumption is that animal behavior is a consequence of organic structure, which is a consequence of chemistry, which is a consequence of quantum physics (I suppose a taxonomist of science would break this down further). The falsification of this assumption would be a finding such as that sometimes an ion moves from cell to sell without osmotic pressure behind it. But Tim, you just said that doesn't happen; are you finding free will in the gap provided by quantum uncertainty, Brownian motion and the like -- or what? > . . . I can't explain > why I'm typing these words by mechanics any more that you can. > The content of the genetic code isn't explained by the known > laws associated with that system, therefore they are incomplete. >> What part of genetics are you not satisfied with? > For one thing, this claim that homosexuality is genetic. As I > understand it, it is based upon correlation alone. No "mechanism." Well of course not. Finding an phenomenon precedes explaining it. (I wasn't aware that the claim is as strong as that, by the way, more like "We have evidence that implies...") Are you saying a detailed explanation must precede a working hypothesis? (Why is someone so math-shy such a rationalist?) Without time machines there will never be a record of the mutations that led to the present genome [or do you mean something else by `content'?]. So? Do we throw out Darwin? Mathematical proofs can be done bottom-up, but if if publication of Mendel's or Darwin's observations were deferred pending complete exposition of the mechanisms behind them, I doubt there'd ever be a science of genetics. An unexplained correlation is a flag to scientists, saying "Investigate me! Why do I happen?" > I've also observed that people whose intellectual orientations tend to > be towards "hard" science . . . also seem to tend to act as if Searle > must be wrong. People who tend to be more philosophical . . . seem to > be more sympathetic to the possibility that, although we may come up with > machines that seem just like they have minds to an outside observer, they > may fail to have minds in ontological fact. (Would this paragraph mean something else without the words "tend to"?) If (by definition) we cannot tell zombies from RealPeople(tm), why should we care that they may exist? Anton Sherwood dasher@netcom.com +1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 16:02:17 PDT From: Robin Hanson Subject: Intellectual Property, ppl, etc. David Friedman writes (on 31 July): intellectual property protection is not likely under anarcho-capitalism, ... The question is whether B is obliged to respect A's intellectual property in something A has written, invented, or whatever. Suppose we start in a world where B has no such obligation, and change to one where he has the obligation. ... everyone else's mutual obligations ... are held fixed ... 2. B is poorer and nobody is richer as a result of B choosing not to use some of A's intellectual property that A happens to have priced at more than its value to B. ... 3. A and B are poorer by whatever they spend on negotiating and enforcing the licensing agreement. 4. A and B are richer as a result of the increased amount of intellectual property that A produces, due to his being able to collect license fees from B. ... 2 and 3 are net losses. 4 is a ... tiny gain. The change increases by 1 the number of people obligated to respect A's intellectual property rights, which causes only a very slight increase in the amount of intellectual property A produces. And only that part of the benefit of the increase that goes to B gets counted in term 4. The benefit that goes to C, D, ... who do not respect A's property right is an external benefit due to the legal change, so does not get included in the calculation. The benefit to X, Y, and Z who are already respecting A's property rights is internal, since it is transferred to A via licensing fees, but it just balances the cost to A of producing the new item of intellectual property--that is why he would not produce it until the legal change added the additional licensing fee from B. This argument made sense when I first read it, but now I wonder. If no copyrights or patents (or any other form of intellectual property) were the efficient pairwise contract, folks would want to contract that way regardless of their initial situation. So since such contracts are not now forbidden, folks now should be striving to contract such rights away, at least up until the point where transaction costs make it too much trouble. This might explain the prevalence of broad patent cross-licencing, such as where HP and IBM each agree they can use all the other guy's present and future patents. But wouldn't it also predict McGraw Hill trying to sell each of us rights to copy (for personal use) all future books they will produce? Or Sony records selling the rights to copy all their future albums? Or Disney selling the rights to copy all future videos? If there is a bug in David's argument, I'd guess it regards changes in the price A could charge other customers as a result of B's purchases. Why doesn't a monopolist agree pairwise to sell at their marginal cost? Because others would find out and want that price too. But I'm just an econ amateur, so I'm not very confident here. Robin Hanson ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 19:29:26 PDT From: hfinney@shell.portal.com Subject: INVEST: Transaction costs Harry Browne's ideas are used in a particular mutual fund called the "Permanent Portfolio". You can find prices listed every day in the newspaper. A few years ago I sent for a prospectus, but it did not seem like the fund had seen very good performance. It looked like in hedging away the risk they had also hedged away the returns; gains in one component tended to be offset by losses in another. I don't recall to what extent Browne was involved in the fund. Putting a larger fraction of assets into stocks would increase the return, although you then give up more hedging. I read one of Browne's books perhaps four years ago (not the one Eric mentioned, but one published in the mid-1980's), and his emphasis was on surviving future financial disasters, whether hyper-inflation, debt repudiation, deflation, or whatever. His portfolio was designed to retain as much value as possible through all of these eventualities. It did seem that to do so you had to give up quite a bit of performance. I know Browne offered figures that appeared to indicate that good performance could still be obtained, but I wasn't completely convinced. Unfortunately, I won't have access to my records until next month. Eric Watt Forste wrote: > People who keep gold in a > safe deposit box at a bank might as well just sell it and put the > proceeds into a money-market fund. I don't think this is completely true, as gold provides a hedge against inflation even when it is vulnerable to government attacks. It might be true to say that you could sell the gold and put the proceeds into a gold mutual fund, or some similar commodity-based investment. As I recall, the "Permanent Portfolio" fund included investments in natural- gas and other mineral companies (as well as gold and silver) as part of its inflation-hedge 25%. Hal Finney hfinney@shell.portal.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 93 00:10:04 EDT From: The Hawthorne Exchange Subject: Nightly Market Report The Hawthorne Exchange - HEx Nightly Market Report For more information on HEx, send email to HEx@sea.east.sun.com with the Subject info. News Summary as of: Mon Aug 9 00:10:03 EDT 1993 Newly Registered Reputations: (None) New Share Issues: Symbol Shares Issued SGP 10000 Share Splits: (None) Market Summary as of: Mon Aug 9 00:00:01 EDT 1993 Total Shares Symbol Bid Ask Last Issued Outstanding Market Value 1000 .10 .20 .10 10000 2000 200.00 110 .01 .10 - 10000 - - 150 .01 .10 - 10000 - - 1E6 .02 .10 - 10000 - - 1E9 .01 .10 - 10000 - - 200 .10 .20 .10 10000 2000 200.00 80 .01 .10 - 10000 - - 90 .01 .20 .10 10000 2000 200.00 ACS .10 .15 .50 10000 1124 562.00 AI .01 .50 .20 10000 1000 200.00 ALCOR 2.00 3.80 2.00 10000 3031 6062.00 ALTINST - .15 .15 10000 2500 375.00 ANTON - .01 - 10000 - - ARKU - .15 - 10000 - - BIOPR .01 .20 .10 10000 1500 150.00 BLAIR .01 30.00 50.00 10000 25 1250.00 CYPHP .15 .17 .17 10000 100 17.00 DEREK - .42 1.00 100000 8220 8220.00 DRXLR 1.00 2.00 2.00 10000 2246 4492.00 DVDT .75 1.55 1.63 10000 9900 16137.00 E .58 .70 .60 10000 5487 3292.20 ESR - - - - - - EXI 1.00 3.00 1.30 10000 3025 3932.50 FAB - - - - - - FCP - 1.00 - 80000 4320 - GHG .01 .30 .01 10000 6755 67.55 GOBEL .01 .30 1.00 10000 767 767.00 GOD .10 .20 .10 10000 1000 100.00 H .76 .76 - 30000 18750 - HAM .01 .30 .20 10000 5000 1000.00 HEINLN .01 .25 - 10000 - - HEX 100.00 125.00 100.00 10000 3368 336800.00 HFINN 2.00 10.00 .75 10000 1005 753.75 IMMFR .25 .80 .49 10000 1401 686.49 JFREE .01 .15 .10 10000 3000 300.00 JPP .25 .26 .25 10000 2510 627.50 LEARY .01 .20 .20 10000 100 20.00 LEF .01 .15 .30 10000 1526 457.80 LEFTY .01 .45 .30 10000 3051 915.30 LIST .40 .75 .50 10000 5000 2500.00 LP .01 .09 - 10000 - - LSOFT .58 .60 .58 10000 7050 4089.00 LURKR .06 .07 - 100000 - - MARCR - - - - - - MED21 .01 .08 - 10000 - - MLINK - .09 .02 1000000 2602 52.04 MMORE - .10 - 10000 - - MORE .75 1.25 .75 10000 3000 2250.00 MWM .15 .15 1.50 10000 1260 1890.00 N 20.00 25.00 25.00 10000 98 2450.00 NEWTON - .20 - 10000 - - NSS .01 .05 - 10000 - - OCEAN .11 .12 .11 10000 1700 187.00 P 20.00 25.00 25.00 1000000 66 1650.00 PETER - .01 1.00 10000000 600 600.00 PLANET .01 .10 .05 10000 1500 75.00 PPL .11 .25 .10 10000 400 40.00 PRICE - 4.00 2.00 10000000 1410 2820.00 R .49 2.80 .99 10000 5100 5049.00 RAND - .06 - 10000 - - RJC 1.00 999.00 .60 10000 5100 3060.00 ROMA - - - - - - RWHIT - - - - - - SGP - - - 10000 - - SHAWN .01 1.00 - 10000 - - SSI - .05 - 10000 - - TCMAY .40 .63 .75 10000 4000 3000.00 TIM .25 .50 .50 10000 500 250.00 TRANS .01 .05 .40 10000 1511 604.40 VINGE .20 .50 .20 10000 1000 200.00 WILKEN 1.00 10.00 10.00 10000 101 1010.00 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 419561.53 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 00:23:26 -0100 From: carlf@media.mit.edu (Carl Feynman) Subject: good predictors >I'm looking for writers who 1) Have/had a consistently good record of >prediction or 2) made one, or perhaps a few, lucky hits. > >Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu I take it you are interested in writers of fiction. In general, it was easier to predict things before much had been predicted. So prolific early science fiction writers like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback are good for lots of predictions that came true: space flight, nuclear war, cellular phones. Of course, they're also responsible for lots of predictions that didn't pan out. Robert Heinlein came up with the teleoperated remote manipulator, the powered exoskeleton, and the waterbed. That's all I can think of, from a long and prolific career. The only recent writer that springs to mind-- and I've read almost all the science fiction published in book form before 1979-- is John Brunner. In _The Shockwave Rider_ (circa 1975) he predicted computer viruses. In _Stand on Zanzibar_ (circa 1972) he predicted designer drugs, music videos, how we can receive satellite broadcasts from other countries on our home anntennas but don't bother because they're boring, the dissemination of scientific literature as on-line hypertext, brand-name clothing, and the prevalence of murderers who shoot lots of strangers in a kill-crazy rampage. It's impressively plausible, and a good book too. It's hard to be the first person to think of something which is both new and likely to happen. Most science fiction writers don't think up such notions themselves; they get them from the works of other writers or futurists, and then write a story around them. By the time somebody writes a story about something, it's usually been in the culture for a while. For example, in _Ender's Game_, by Orson Scott Card, >the networks which Ender's brother and sister use to >basically take control (under pseudonyms) are amazingly similar to what >the internet is becoming. Also, I believe the their pen-pads, or whatever, >are similar to products coming out these days. But _Ender's Game_ was written in the early 80's, by which time the Internet was already in full swing, and the prediction of pen-driven laptop computers (Alan Kay's Dynabook) was several years old. --carlf Internet: carlf@media.mit.edu Telephone: (508)635-9238 Mail: 1 Gregory Ln., Acton MA 01720, USA Holler: "Yo! Carl Feynman!" ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Aug 93 21:21:00 -0500 From: michael.morgan@ehbbs.com (Michael Morgan) Subject: for my extropositivis ---------------------------------------------------------------------- On 08-08-93 05:07, Arkuat wrote to Michael Morgan regarding: "For my extropositivist cr"... > You are claiming that metaphysical/mathematical/logical axioms are > testable. They are not. As axioms, they must be accepted on faith alone. Ar> Wow. "They must be accepted on faith alone" really jerks *my* knee. Well, I've written in the past there is intelligent and unintelligent faith. Ar> *And* as long as the system that the axioms lead to does not obviously Ar> diverge from what we observe in reality, there is no problem. I think Ar> this was Anton's point. I think that for the most part I agree with your opinion. However I'd like to add a time qualifier. In the future we may be able to test some axioms which we think untestable today. ... You shall know the truth, and it shall make you freak. --- Blue Wave/QWK v2.10 ---- +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Ed Hopper's BBS - Home of uuPCB - Usenet for PC Board | | Node 1 - USR HST - 404-446-9462 Node 2 - V.32bis - 404-446-9465 | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 0:47:01 PDT From: szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) Subject: good predictors Dan Goodman: > Robert Heinlein came up with the teleoperated remote manipulator, the > powered exoskeleton, and the waterbed. Heinlein made ten explicit predictions in 1950, commented upon in his 1980 _Expanded Universe_. Alas the book is still packed up in boxes, but three I recall vaguely are: (1) predicted the downfall of Communism. Although in 1980 he was lamenting that this now looked less likely to come true! (Indeed, in 1980 Communism was at its zenith in terms of governments controlled by Communist or Marxist-Leninist parties). (2) birth control would cause a major change in sexual mores (this had come true by the late 1960's). (3) All planets in the solar system would be explored by 2000. This came partly true: (a) they were explored by robots, not astronauts on-site, and (b) we won't get to Pluto by 2000, though a currently planned NASA mission may come close. (4) Predicted the failure of SDI, ABMs, etc.: "The most important military fact of the latter half of the 20th century will be, there is no good way to defend against attack from space." (note that 1950 is at least 5 years before the first operational ICBM). (5) Predicted the failure to achieve human-like AI or robotics. (But also missed out on PCs, etc. -- the characters in his pre-1960's books look things up in log tables, carry around slide rules, etc., and look badly outdated now). Alas, many of the other predictions were stated in rather vague terms, eg "technology XYZ will be important". Also in Heinlein's "Future History" mileau, c. 1940, he predicts fundamentalist TV preachers. He goes even farther, and has his Pat Robertson clones take control of the U.S. government (thus providing stories in which his scientifically-correct heroes fight back). Heinlein missed out predicting ecofascists, but the film "China Syndrome" in 1980, in its psychological tone is practically a clone of "Blowups Happen", Heinlein's 1940 story about a dangerous nuclear reactor. At that point the first nuclear fission had just happened and was known to only a few insiders, the Manhattan Project had not yet started. (Harking back to my last post, this should be a lesson for all those expressing deep concern about "graygoo": despite the fact that it's starting to look like a non-problem, those worries will likely be with us and breeding Luddism for a long time to come). Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 8:33:48 GMT From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu Subject: ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation Front Madness >From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) >Subject: ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation Front Madness > > On many occasions I have commented on the the anti-extropic values in >the environmental movement, ISIL's veep, Jim Ellwood, has dubbed them "democratic feudalists," along the lines of Monty Python's anarcosyndicalist commune in The Holy Grail. In France, they're called the "khmer verde." Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 9:00:33 GMT From: starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu Subject: What's Perry's Notion of Natural Law? I've been unable to find any source that supports Perry's view of natural law, and I've rounded up all the usual suspects. For instance, E.D. Hirschfeld, Jr.'s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Miffin, 1988) has the following entry on natural law on page 99: "natural law The doctine that human affairs should be governed by ethical principles that are part of the very nature of things and that can be understood by reason." Funny, while it does imply that there is a naturalistic notion of right and wrong, it doesn't specify whether these must be based upon a theistic cosmology, nor does it imply that moral imperialism is justified. Then again, this text has been attacked for superficiality, with some justice, so let's move on to one of Mark Venture's favorite books, Liberty and Nature, An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order, by Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl (Open Court, 1991) for what more scholarly sources have to say about natural law, p. 78: "We could begin our discussion directly with an analysis of natural rights. But within the Aristotelian tradition there is an older, more long-lived concept: natural law. MacIntyre asserts that the concept of rights is not to be found anywhere before about 1400. Strauss claims that the great significance of Hobbes was that he separated the right of nature from the law of nature - a separation that has continued throughout modernity. Finnis placed Suarez at the watershed of the move away from speaking in terms of natural law and towards rights; and Villey goes as far back as William of Ockham in locating the origin of the modern conception of rights. In addition, Tuck goes even further back in his sophisticated analysis of the history of rights, arguing that the uses to which IUS and DOMINIUM were put in the later Roman Empire have similarities to the modern subjective sense of the term 'rights' without much of the historical baggage supplied by modernity. "Whatever scholarly disputes there may be about origins, all commentators are agreed that a shift away from natural law theory took place and that the concept of rights is essentially modern." I also recall Tibor Machan lecturing upon the origins of libertarian thought (from Taoism to Christianity) and saying that Ockham's contribution was the notion of moral "space" or "territory" within which to conduct oneself without outside interference. Chalk another one up for us Aristotelians! This makes it difficult to make sense of Perry's claims to have been speaking of some Modern notion of natural law somehow different from the medeival and ancient understandings of the concept. It seems that natural law isn't the modern innovation at all, but natural rights, as I and James Donald have argued. I suppose you could attribute this to the fact that we haven't been subjected to Columbia University's vaunted core curriculum (The idea of a "core curriculum" is one that originated at Harvard when it could no longer resist accusations that it had abandoned the liberal arts model for the university in favor of the technical school model, thus impoverishing the learning of students in order to get more research grant money. So, they came up with classes in the same style as technical ones, only switched their content to a hodgepode of the liberal arts. Despite utter failure of this to improve the learning of students, this deflected enough of the accusations that Harvard was able to keep getting lots of them to hold hostage for the ransom money called "tuition" from their families and the taxpayers that other schools quickly emulated this approach. A notable example of this is Stanford's Cultures, Ideas, and Values class, which was changed from being a study of Western civilization to a study of such great thinkers as Rigoberta Menchu - Locke was replaced with Franz Fanon, who owes a great intellectual debt to Locke - after a group of students were led in protest by Jesse Jackson, chanting: "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!"), but I don't know whether this speaks ill of us or of Columbia. So, what is Perry talking about when he complains that most natural law adherents are theistic moral imperialists? Could he be taking the Christian Right as a representative sample? They arose out of the attempt to provide a theologial defense for slavery, resulting in today's "Bible Belt" in the South of the USA. Extropian minds want to know. Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! Assistant Editor: Freedom Network News, the newsletter of ISIL, The International Society for Individual Liberty, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 864-0952; FAX: (415) 864-7506; 71034.2711@compuserve.com Think Universally, Act Selfishly - starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 08:30:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Bob Kuhfahl Subject: NL: NCP - well stated, Thanks Perry states: > > The Non-Coercion Principle, which is the "quick way" of stating the > "libertarian constraint." Its basically this: > > "Thou shalt not initiate non-consentual force, or threaten to do so, > against persons or their property." > > Here is roughly the problem I have with the "Natural Law and Rights" > orientation. > ... /* long (but clear) part excluded for brevity */ It would seem from your arguement that you agree with the NL "concept", at least basically. There are always radicals whom take an interpretation "to far IMHO", but I don't see where your problem is with the "Natural Law and Rights" orientation. I've had a guiding principal, "my rights end where yours begin" that has made deciding "right from wrong" very easy for me all these years. While I am not sure if it will remain so "clear cut" to me after doing more reading about these topics, sometimes I wish more people used that basic rule. I thought about sending this direct to Perry but I see no return address? -- Bob Kuhfahl *** Learning more each day! Thanks to you all. bekcda@digex.net *** Working hard so I can play hard - wish all I had *** to do was bang on the drum all day! ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 10:04:44 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: ECON: Interesting rumor from a couple months ago... Phil G. Fraering says: > A couple months back I heard a rumor that the Russians were > blackmailing the U.S. to send more aid by threatening to make > the ruble convertible to gold (at which point the relative currency > values would change places or something like that; part of this > rumor held that most of the SU's immense gold reserves are still > there. And please remember how much reserves they still have of > the relatively obscure and useless metal Gallium.). Last I heard, they have very little gold left -- certainly not nearly enough to back their currency. They also suffer from the extreme problem that the central bank is printing money and the equivalent at an amazing rate, which is causing dramatic inflation. Given this, I doubt that your rumor is true. Perry ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #220 ********************************* &