From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Tue Aug 15 2000 - 21:45:25 MDT
Franklin Wayne Poley wrote,
> It's rather disheartening to think we battled the dogmatic right in the
> 60's for freedom of speech so that a bunch of young left wing snots with
> their air-head profs could abuse this liberty now.
Yes, it indicates that we're all (more or less) susceptible to mass socio-genic
illness. It seems to me a potent element of extropy involves the process by
which social organizations recover from damage done by ideologues, demagogues,
and theologues.
> On a more positive note, I think Gelerneter has said a lot here. IMO the
> problem we have with actualizing a high tech society using the
> state-of-the-art technology is that of finding recognized political
> leadership. "Political" could include well-know high tech personalities
> like Moravec, Kurzweil, Gelernter etc. I'm not being elitist about this,
> just realistic, in terms of basic social-psych principles. So let's look
> at the "Oxygen Alliance Project" with its $50,000,000 grant at MIT. How
> can we get more out of it than a lot of interesting "gadgets" like
> computers you can wear on your glass frames or sew into your jacket?
> How about inducing them to design a REALLY intelligent house instead of
> the mickey mouse "smart homes" that are passed off on us today?
> FWP
How about a gadget that can immunize folks against infectious and entropic memes
such as those which have acted against John Stossel (or Galileo, for that
matter).
--J. R.
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