[extropy-chat] Scientists and engineers must work within the system

Samantha Atkins sjatkins at gmail.com
Mon Nov 22 10:49:52 UTC 2004


You cannot "fix the system" by playing into its brokenness however. 
There is for instance no point in pretending that it is legitimate for
the State to overrule on manners of scientific fact.   Any pretense
that there is a reasonable debate here would only help the enemies of
science and technology and greatly harm us.   Similarly any pretense
that it is reasonable for some to limit the ability of all to benefit
from new technology or even explore it on grounds of the religious
beliefs of the would be controlling group is pure poison for the kind
of world we wish to inhabit and create.   Science is not a democratic
process.  Freedom to grow to one's fullest potential is not a matter
that should be subject to majority opinion.

- samantha



On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:01:04 -0500 (EST), Rik van Riel <riel at surriel.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2004, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> 
> > This effectively says that scientists and engineers must play politics
> > instead of doing science and engineering.  If so then this is a symptom
> > of an incredibly broken system that needs to be repaired as quickly as
> > possible.   Simply playing the broken system may do little more than
> > legitimize the brokenness and leave one's own work undone.
> 
> However, the only way of fixing the system is to play
> politics.  Oh, the irony...
> 
> Rik
> --
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
> 
> 
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