[extropy-chat] Correcting oneself (was: PR: Lanier trashing >Hism again...)

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> And I propose that there is no safe way to use rational
> thinking alone to guard against its highjacking by your internal PR
> department; you need external, immovable indicators to tell you that
> you are on or off track.

I would tend to agree with that.

> With tech, I find that it's often pretty difficult to evaluate a
> technology without doing something semi-serious with it; the devil is
> usually in the detail. I agree about the expensive software bit, you
> can safely ignore it imo (and in the end, what choice do you have?)

Not just expensive software.  Hardware too: there exists hardware
cheap enough to play with on a hobby basis, although this is rarer than
with software.  (One of the end goals of personal manufacturing is to
lower hardware costs in order to enable more hardware to be played with
on a hobby basis.  Imagine what biotech would be like, if playing with
cells could be made as cheap as playing with programming code.)

> Have you given it a go?

Going to in the near future, probably later this week, once I have
enough free time (and sufficiently few "really should be done in the
near future" tasks to distract me).  My conclusion that I should play
with AJAX came this past weekend.

> After "loving it" for a month or so, and building something serious
> in
> it, I sat back and evaluated the whole thing. It sucked, and for real
> reasons that I could enumerate. But I feel far more secure in saying
> that now, because I've given it a serious go, and tried to like it.

Yeah.  One can try to honestly review something without trying it, and
come up with rational reasons for one's dislike, but that's difficult
and imperfect in the long run.

Another backup technique I've acquired is keeping some credible tech
news source in my daily news feed.  In my case it's Wired News, but
there are others out there (I used to read Slashdot, but I kept getting
distracted by the comments in order to verify if seemingly signidicant
stories were on the money...not that the comments were usually much
help with that).  Anything that starts getting mentioned a lot, I try
to find out at least the basics about - just enough to find out if I
need to investigate in depth.

I've kind of spun this into a pseudo-business.  When I meet people
professionally, and they think I'm running a business but don't know
quite what it is, I tell them I'm a technology matchmaker: I keep my
ear to the ground for the new and emerging technologies, then when I
happen across businesses in need of them, I introduce them - for a fee.
In reality, I don't actually do much of this (I'm closer to a serial
entrepeneur, matching tech solutions to problems and putting in just
enough effort to swing a profit), but the story is quite believable.
Unfortunately (or sometimes fortunately), it also keeps the usual
business networking institutions at arm's length: I'm unusual enough
that I don't fit nicely into their categories.  This leaves me time to
concentrate on my actual businesses...