Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Guardians of the Gene Pool - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 December 2007 08:08PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 December 2007 08:10:33PM 0 points [-]

Caledonian a Singularitarian? I doubt he knows what the word means. I don't recall him on the Singularity Institute donors list, or any of the mailing lists or websites. The term denotes activism, not belief - an "environmentalist" is not someone who believes in the existence of the environment.

Ben Jones, if the standard confirmation/disconfirmation bias is regarded as "Guardianship" then the guardian/discoverer distinction loses all meaning even with respect to scientists versus the Inquisition. The question is whether people exhibit their ordinary human biases to defend the status quo (or status quo ante), or to defend their new ideas and innovations. The latter case, though still ordinarily human-biased, is time-oriented toward the future.