[extropy-chat] Depressing thought of the day

[kevinfreels at hotmail.com]

How often do you choose to attack the spam sender rather than delete the
message? My guess is that most people simply choose to ignore and delete it
rather than make the deicion to attack.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Samantha Atkins" <samantha at objectent.com>
To: "ExI chat list" <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 4:42 AM
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Depressing thought of the day


> On Tuesday 04 November 2003 23:11, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > Ones and zeroes.  We can see them completely and clearly; the entire
realm
> > is absolutely under our control; it is a world that we built and that
runs
> > entirely on our rules.
>
> Uh, the world includes *us* and many of us are not good little digital
> citizens at all.   *We* use these digital tools and thus *we* are what
needs
> some control, not the simple world of 1's and 0's  (not that it is very so
> simple either).
>
> And no, the world of programs itself does not run entirely on our rules or
at
> least we have very imperfect understanding of the implications and
> interactions of the rules we thought to impose with one another and the
world
> they are embedded within.
>
> > Destroying the intruder is as easy as making the
> > decision.
> >
>
> Hardly.  First you must determine what is and is not an intruder.  This is
> non-trivial.   Then you must determine what is the appropriate amount of
> destruction or other action to acheive the desired result with a minimum
of
> side-effects.  OOPS, I left out that you must formulate with some clarity
> what the goal state is.
>
> > And yet we still can't get rid of spam.
> >
> > Active shields against grey goo?  Yeah, right.
>
> Actually, handling spam is not an implausible warm-up exercise.
>
> - samantha
>
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