[extropy-chat] Sorry, Robert Bradbury is no Fa....

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Hubert Mania wrote:
> Robert Bradbury is NO FASCIST, this definitely is an unappropriate term. His
> mind games are even worse than any historical left or right wing fascist
> movement has ever produced. So I really have to think about a new term for
> this incredible behaviour. For the time being I will call his thinking
> 
> "uglitarian".

Not ugly enough.  What's wrong with "casual genocide"?

> The only reason for thinking deeper is the urgent need for a new word that
> exceeds fascism. Because what RB proposed is worse than any other form of
> left and right wing fascism that has ever existed.

I'm not quite sure this is true.  What RB proposed is worse than anything 
any other fascism has ever *done*, including Nazi Germany, which worked up 
its way to wholesale extermination gradually, over a period of years.  But 
I seriously doubt it is worse than anything right-wing or left-wing fascism 
has ever *proposed*, on the equivalent of the email lists of those days.

I'd consider it vastly more than sufficient justification for asking for a 
Board member's resignation, if any director of the Singularity Institute 
said such a thing.  Did we not do so, I would expect - I would *hope* - 
that our donors would pack up and leave.  But ExI is not in the same 
circumstances as SIAI.

Still, if it were me, I'd ask for his resignation, and failing that, fire 
him.  I don't think Robert Bradbury grasps why people are offended by 
proposals of casual genocide, so he would probably be indignant at the 
suggestion that it merits being removed from ExI's Board.  This, however, 
is not an excuse.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence