Nornagest comments on Checking Kurzweil's track record - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
Is this true? It could be, or alternatively it could simply appear true from your perspective of familiarity. I'm only vaguely aware of Kurzweil and have never heard any mention of him among my group of largely grad student / geek friends.
I doubt it's true. I think it would be relatively easy to find technically sophisticated people who're unaware of Kurzweil's specific predictions; it'd be harder to find technically sophisticated people who're consistently unaware of his general thesis, but I'll bet you could still do it. You'd just need to look outside the transhumanist/singularitarian/AI enthusiast cluster.
Since those clusters are pretty tightly grouped in terms of conceptual underpinnings, it should be easy to filter them from a sample. Getting a good sample would be harder -- LW wouldn't do it, and personal blogs wouldn't either. Gwern's idea below looks promising but I have no idea how you'd go about it.