"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