I'm made of sterner stuff than that! And if they're not, well, sucks to be them :P

So far, the premise of mine and the premise of DataPacRat's seem very different, and so it's not clear how rivalrous comparisons will be. (I've only read the first chapter of theirs so far.)

As GLaDOS knows this is well documented already (in sources that have bias but the facts are good).

I'll try to get the results in writing the next time we have a discussion. Human memory is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances.

Of course I can, just like David can engage in unfair snark about what a number on a poll might mean.

Thanks. He says it much more better than I could. He speaks of importance of small problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go.

Speaking of which, one thing geniuses do is generate the right problems for themselves, not just choose from already formulated.

Science fiction is full of artificial minds, good and evil. It has minds improving themselves, and a plenty of Frankensteins of all kinds. It doesn't have things like 'a very efficient universal algorithm that given mathematical description of a system and constraints finds values for free parameters that meet constraints', because it is not a plot device. Fiction does not have wolfram alpha in 2010. It has Hal in 2000 . Fiction shuns merely useful in favor of interesting. I would be very surprised if the solution would be among the fictional set. The fictional set is as good place to look in as any, yes, but it is small. edit: On second thought, what I mean is that it would be very bad to be either inspired or 'de-spired' by fiction to any significant extent.

Sequences contain a rational world view. Not a comprehensive one, but still, it gives some idea about how to avoid thinking stupid and how to communicate with other people that are also trying to find out what's true and what's not. It gives you words by which you can refer to problems in your world view, meta-standards to evaluate whether whatever you're doing is working, etc. I think of it as an unofficial manual to my brain and the world that surrounds me. You can just go ahead and figure out yourself what works, without reading manuals, but reading a manual before you go makes you better prepared.

This is not only unfair, but misses an important point: Myers works with preserving brains every day. He would love it if brains could be preserved. When he explains in detail why they can't, he's not doing with triumphalism at being more sceptical than singularitarians, he's doing it with annoyance that we can't do this thing he'd really, really love to be able to do.

What can we do about reactions like this?

I haven't studied these issues, but I will note that Steve Sailor and VDARE.com are considered by many people to be racist bigots. Here, for example, is a VDARE article defending white supremacy:

White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.

This doesn't mean that Sailor's claims in the article you quoted are false, but it might mean that Sailor is unusually susceptible to motivated cognition in a particular direction when it comes to racial issues.

Also, as a matter of community strategy, I'll note that citing sources like VDARE.com with apparent approval might make people of color feel unwelcome on LessWrong, even if the specific quoted claims are correct — just like citing Roissy might make women feel unwelcome even if you only quote true claims he has made.

Hi! I have read for a while. I read HPMOR and enjoyed the sequences. I prefer not to say where I live.