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nyan_sandwich comments on Questions on SI Research - Less Wrong Discussion
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I gave a quick talk about the singularity a few days ago. One guy kept heckling me about 'rapture for geeks'. It's definitely a thing.
This is a good illustration of how hucksters and differentiated meme virulence mean we can't have nice things.
People really want X (e.g. to live forever, to lose weight, etc.). Hucksters take advantage of this by promising X, and memes that persuade people they can achieve X by adopting the meme (e.g. Christianity in the case of living forever) spread. Then people develop antibodies to the hucksters or memes, and the antibodies end up attacking anything that promises X (since it resembles the mistaken claims).
As Randall Munroe joked:
Hence my proposed slogan for cryonics, "Cryonics: A scheme for living forever that might actually work". Of course, we should only use the slogan if it might actually work, which looks highly doubtful to one LWer who is a neuroscientist.
If that one LWer has a technical critique of cryonics, they should write it up. cf, oh, just about everything on my blog. http://blog.ciphergoth.org/
That's a really nice explanation of the situation.
If one guy heckled you about 'rapture for the geeks' I'd agree - it's definitely a thing. If one guy kept heckling you about the same thing then sure, I'd still agree but I'd suggest that all the additional heckles of the same trite jest tell little about the 'thing' and present an almost entirely social problem regarding presentations and how to combat heckling.