From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 01:18:10 MDT
Hal Finney:
>I'm not sure everyone understood Wei Dai's reference to the "Wisdom
>of Repugnance". This is a quote from Leon Kass, currently head of the
>U.S. President's council on bioethics and perhaps the most prominent
>opponent of Extropian concepts.
I've been too busy working to catch all of the stuff in the news.
>I think we should be able to agree that it would be a mistake to adopt
>the wisdom of repugnance as a moral principle for guiding our discussions.
>It would be validating some of the strongest anti-Extropian arguments.
OK, maybe not moral principle. Emotions are expressions and indicators
not to be ignored, however, and I don't agree to ask people not to
express their opinion, in whatever way that is suitable to them.
As one of the people who said that the life-killing discussions were
turning my stomach, I ask that you put that in context. It was only one
issue among many that I raised (you can see my old posts in the
archives). I see the repugnant thing amplified out of proportion to the
other issues regarding putting people in groups and assigning various
maladies and insufficiencies and inadequacies to them. That's what I
consider a waste of time as well as against the life-affirming values
that I thought this group stood for. Keep in mind that this is an
international list and with some women (minus 1), so I suggest using
those resources if you wish to get a realistic perspective.
I have to apologize: I have four conferences to prepare for, regular
travel every few weeks away, some papers and much other work, and I'm
moving to another country later this year. I don't know if my fury at
what I was reading here was the result of my poor interface between work
pressure and the extropians list or that the list really looked stinky
to me, or both, but I unsubscribed for a while to get a lot of work done
these next 6 months.
Pay attention to the Jupiter (EuroJove) conference in Lisboa Portugal
next month and the Asteroids, Comets, and Meterors conference in Berlin
in July. For sure, there will good and interesting news from those
conferences. I'll be exploring Portugal a bit with my bike too, so I'll
drop a line from there if I see an internet outlet.
Ciao,
Amara
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." --Annie Dillard
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