From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 23:54:59 MDT
This list needs posts like this at regular intervals to remind it about
quality. But that doesn't mean that the "extraneous" discussions are
useless. The important thing is to think about "is this post going to
increase extropy?" before posting (quite a few potential posts end up
deleted at my end because of negative answers to that question).
What is the correct balance between talk-talk and concrete efforts? A
list without the talk-talk would lack direction - the principles aren't
enough to guide practical efforts, we need to discuss the whys and aims
beforehand. Otherwise we will just be rushing ahead in some arbitrary
direction. On the other hand only talk doesn't get us anywhere; even if
all the talk were highly transhumanistic ideological discussions it would
not get any spam stopped or genes hybridized. But it might change
positions of presidential advisors - the power of talk (relevant talk!)
is that the best parts of it can be spread around in the memesphere and
help guide the actions of a lot of other people. This has worked great in
the past for some groups that never themselves did anything practical.
However, we are the heirs of a practical enlightenment tradition and want
something more: practical feedback. For that we need to do things, and
hence we will have to be somewhere in between only using this list as
ideological inspiration and only using it to report our
personal projects.
I don't know how to set the correct balance, but I have a hunch that we
can self-regulate it. If Robert screams "DO SOMETHING!" when we get to
talky, I scream "THINK ABOUT YOUR IDEOLOGY!" when we get too wrapped up
in other ideologies or trivia, "GET REAL!" when we debate angels and
pinheads too much (and others contribute their versions), we get a crude
but potentially efficient way of keeping ourselves on track in a
distributed manner. As long as the readers and posters remember that the
aim here is to achieve a positive transhuman future and try to achieve
that partially through this list such a system might work.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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