dots in the shark

Wow!
This is the best blog I have seen in a while.
You complain about the 12 tone music system!
You seem to know enough "Law and Economics" and evolutionary theory to be disturbed by articles like this even if the conclusions of the papers aren't compelling.
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/jcollie/sle/index.htm

You make posts like the ones at the bottom of this page, which I will now respond to.

It seems to me that if nanotechnology is as likely to kill us all as to make us live forever (I agree) and if the likelihood that it will make us do this is so great because of the inconsistant ideas and behaviors of its developers (I think it is) that constitutes a very big problem.
I hope you will write to me at michaelaruna@yahoo.com and follow up on these and other ideas.





"Part of the reason these ideas are so unsettling to me is that they are subtle. I would have thought that a society full of patchwork selves would exhibit more inconsistent behaviors, and more problems due to them. I also would have thought that a hyper-proclivity to see pattern and agency where there is none would show up as a higher incidence of delusion, and more problems due to that.

I suppose, depending on your political allegiance, you might think that the mechanisms behind religion and behind conspiracy theory worldviews are pretty harmful. But even if you think so, as far as worlds full of delusional schizophrenics goes, ours seems pretty mild.

[I absurdly believe ]That nanotechnology is as likely to kill us all as to make us live forever (and that both likelihoods are high).

That people are disappointingly easy to understand. When they look complex, it is usually because the observer is considering a question with no answer."