From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Sep 06 1999 - 07:42:08 MDT
Elizabeth Childs wrote:
>
> Interesting. I am always aware of the permanence of my remarks, and have
> often killed a post because I didn't want it coming back to haunt me.
>
> I try never to say anything that Jesse Ventura wouldn't say. :)
I've often wondered whether, in a few decades CRNS, it will become the
custom to undergo a permanent change of name at age twenty, or some
other significant milestone of maturity - perhaps married couples will
both adopt a new last name instead of hyphenating, in a triumph for
sexual equality. The driving factor in this cultural revival of an old
custom won't be a mark of maturity or a religious ritual, but the need
to outrun all the posts you made to the Internet when you were fourteen
years old. Lord knows, I've considered doing so often enough. In fact,
I'm considering it now, since my twentieth birthday is essentially my
last chance to decide.
Or perhaps it will simply be wiser to give ourselves version numbers,
providing an intriguing way of tracking internal changes, providing some
mental distance between ourselves and our past opinions, and allowing an
increment of the major version whenever we need to make a clean break.
Eliezer Yudkowsky v3.3, signing off.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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