From: Chen Yixiong, Eric (cyixiong@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Aug 04 2001 - 21:03:56 MDT
<< Seeking out that one critic requires that you be willing to tell the ten thousand others to go do their repetitive babbling on some other mailing list that's actually interested. Smart critics are *valuable*. The one critic who's right isn't likely to stick around and put in the effort to make himself(*) heard if he sees that you aren't doing anything but arguing the same basic subjects over and over. >>
Point well stated and highly relevant. I had left (by contributing minimal amounts of posts) a few discussion groups because they cannot consider my ideas without bias. Someone even publicly and explicitly said that he had to reply because if he did not, then I would assume that the whole discussion group would think that my "ridiculous" views have validity.
While I dare not classify myself as "smarter", I do think I see things from an unusual prespective. I sometimes see repetitive discussion topics in certain discussion groups, such as one on creation of languages, and I try to break them up into more productive patterns. Most of the time, I only got through at first before someone slams the door on me later.
> Every objection, no matter how stupid, deserves to be answered; every
> critic, no matter how clueless, deserves to be debated; but most of them
> deserve to be answered and debated after the Singularity, not right now,
> when I'm busy.
This sounds like good advice, but often we cannot do this in practice. An FAQ or a consolidated publication would have a lot of usefulness in this aspect, and one can quote directly from them when confronted.
> Anyone want to revive the Committee on Un-Extropian Activities? I think
> this list could really use it.
Well, I don't know about this concept and its history, but I think we ought to have an Intellicratic forum for coordinating and developing extropian ideals.
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