From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 05:19:32 MST
On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 09:45:41PM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> > they envision- by placing perfection in a future where symbolic
> > mediation has abolished hierarchy, rather than in a past where such
> > mediation has not yet appeared
>
> What? Who's "placing perfection in a future where symbolic mediation
> has abolished hierarchy"? What does symbolic mediation have to do
> Extropy? What hierarchy is being abolished? Who says or believes that
> perfection will result?
His point with this sentence is that extropians are similar to the
primitivists yearning for the good old days of the paleolithic "natural"
world in that they perceive the current world as imperfect and worth
striving away from. Instead of placing the golden age in the past we
place it somewhere in the future. This future is envisioned as a digital
utopia where information technology frees us from social hierarchies -
we get the digital anarchy, cryptoanarchy or digital tribes that were
such glowing visions when this text was written in the mid-90's. In a
way he is talking about the recurring idea in our community about total
autarchy that Robin Hanson has critiqued in _Dreams of Autarchy_. In
short, extropians think that history is progressing towards a utopia
that will come about thanks to information technology.
See Damien's point about the compression of terminology? I personally
think that one should do one's best to write clearly and comprehensible
for one's intended audience, but if that audience is intended to be
specialists it would not be proper to use baby speak. Unfortunately,
many academics (me included) tend to get stuck in terminology mode
(especially when we are not thinking about it) and end up speaking in
polysyllabic academese even when we try to reach a larger non-expert
audience.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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