From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Fri Jan 15 1999 - 07:09:03 MST
Robin Hanson wrote:
> The related thing that most strikes me is the unfortunate
> lack of paper-length contributions on the topics which
> frequently appear on this list.
<snip>
> I think you can infer some things about a topic from
> the length of contributions made on it. If you only
> ever see short contributions on a topic, you might
> reasonably infer that people don't really take it that
> seriously. Either they don't care enough about it to
> take the next step, or the topic doesn't withstand
> careful scrutiny; those people who tried to write
> longer analyses realized it's all bunk and gave up.
Part of the problem is the nature of the topics we discuss. Honestly, how
many of us are qualified to write a rigorous analysis of a topic that spans
half a dozen disciplines? A detailed justification of any particular
Singularity scenario, for example, requires an understanding of every field
of technology you want to take into account, plus a bit of political
science, history and economics. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the
impossibility of covering the entire topic, and end up writing nothing at
all.
The traditional solution, of course, is to pick a sub-topic you can do
justice to. Unfortunately that doesn't work well when dealing with future
scenarios, because the different components are often mutually
interdependent. What we really is a better mechanism for doing on-line
collaboration - perhaps a web site set up for use as a moderated
discussion/collaboration forum.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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