“Way to dismiss the rest of the human species out of hand. It’s people like you ’wot cause evaporative cooling. Nice little ingroup vibe there, sure to P.O. everyone who isn’t already in the cult.”
Forgive me for having the audacity to state the obvious out loud. We know from a huge number of precedents that, even if SIAI is wildly successful, 99% of the human species isn’t going to help. 99% of America doesn’t involve itself in something as popular and easily understood as national politics; what chance does transhumanism have? This is true regardless of how many people it P.O.’s.
Consider a book series as popular and well-written as the Feynman Lectures on Physics. How many people became physicists because they read Feynman’s lectures? The books were certainly read by a large number of physicists, but I doubt you would have seen any major decrease in the number of professional physicists had Feynman never lived. A lot of people can point to one or two books they read that first got them involved in whatever field they studied, but so far as I know, there’s no one, single book that got a lot of young people into any specific career. The closest things I can think of are TV dramas like CSI and ER, and they have millions of viewers nationwide.
“I can hire researchers who read the popular book as grad students, went on to read the massive tome, and then read a few dozen technical math books while refining their practice of rationality until they became ready to think about FAI without their head exploding”
This is a legitimate strategy, but again, this demographic is going to be much smaller than the total number of people who buy the book. You must know this. People don’t read dozens of additional books or study rationality intensively unless they have some compelling reason to- you mention this yourself (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/). The two compelling reasons you mentioned, transhumanism and making millions, aren’t going to attract a lot of people (the first due to future shock and sparsity in the memepool, the second due to skepticism over get-rich-quick schemes).
“Most of SIAI’s human intake today is from people who read stuff I wrote ten years ago.”
Most of the stuff you wrote ten years ago is on transhumanism, which does give people a compelling reason to stay involved.
“Even if the book was just a re-hash of the blog posts that are readily available, I’d buy it anyway”
I was talking about the ratio of people who help save the world/people who read the book, not the absolute number of people who read the book (which will probably be rather large).
“Almost nobody (relatively) will be rediscovering them in a few years. That’s simply the nature of blogging. Who’s reading 3 years old BoingBoing posts right now?”
“Way to dismiss the rest of the human species out of hand. It’s people like you ’wot cause evaporative cooling. Nice little ingroup vibe there, sure to P.O. everyone who isn’t already in the cult.”
Forgive me for having the audacity to state the obvious out loud. We know from a huge number of precedents that, even if SIAI is wildly successful, 99% of the human species isn’t going to help. 99% of America doesn’t involve itself in something as popular and easily understood as national politics; what chance does transhumanism have? This is true regardless of how many people it P.O.’s.
Consider a book series as popular and well-written as the Feynman Lectures on Physics. How many people became physicists because they read Feynman’s lectures? The books were certainly read by a large number of physicists, but I doubt you would have seen any major decrease in the number of professional physicists had Feynman never lived. A lot of people can point to one or two books they read that first got them involved in whatever field they studied, but so far as I know, there’s no one, single book that got a lot of young people into any specific career. The closest things I can think of are TV dramas like CSI and ER, and they have millions of viewers nationwide.
“I can hire researchers who read the popular book as grad students, went on to read the massive tome, and then read a few dozen technical math books while refining their practice of rationality until they became ready to think about FAI without their head exploding”
This is a legitimate strategy, but again, this demographic is going to be much smaller than the total number of people who buy the book. You must know this. People don’t read dozens of additional books or study rationality intensively unless they have some compelling reason to- you mention this yourself (http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/). The two compelling reasons you mentioned, transhumanism and making millions, aren’t going to attract a lot of people (the first due to future shock and sparsity in the memepool, the second due to skepticism over get-rich-quick schemes).
“Most of SIAI’s human intake today is from people who read stuff I wrote ten years ago.”
Most of the stuff you wrote ten years ago is on transhumanism, which does give people a compelling reason to stay involved.
“Even if the book was just a re-hash of the blog posts that are readily available, I’d buy it anyway”
I was talking about the ratio of people who help save the world/people who read the book, not the absolute number of people who read the book (which will probably be rather large).
“Almost nobody (relatively) will be rediscovering them in a few years. That’s simply the nature of blogging. Who’s reading 3 years old BoingBoing posts right now?”
This is a very good point.
I agree with you that it is a hard problem to make the rest of humanity see and care about these things, to which I say: All the more reason to try!
That it’s no point becouse it’ll probably not change the world all that much anyway, strikes me as a close-to fully general counterargument.