[extropy-chat] Reccommendations for a mailing list

[Dan Clemmensen]

Fred C. Moulton wrote:

>I fondly remember the list as it was in its beginning.  My memory
>(admittedly imperfect) of some of the differences between then and now:
>1.  Virtually everyone who posted a message on a topic knew what they
>were talking about.  If someone did not know about something then they
>would ask for a reference.  Argument by assertion and blustering
>bullsh1t were rare.
>2.  At the very beginning the volume was not very high but the quality
>was very good.  There were not a lot of time wasting posts which quoted
>an entire message with only a lame one line followup.
>3.  A corollary to #1 and #2 is that there were people who would read a
>lot and not post on every topic which came along.
>4.  People could read and comprehend what was written.  There was a lot
>less of the reply messages starting "Oh, you mean ..." followed by some
>bogus nonsense which was not even close to the original message.
>5.  Virtually everyone on the list was well versed in and committed to
>individual liberty and an improved future.  They generally had a good
>understanding of a wide range of topics from free-market economics to
>pan-critical rationalism to technology and science.
>6.  Many of the people who posted in the first few years dropped off for
>a variety of reasons.  I see some of them socially and occasionally on
>other lists, they are still around.
>
>Fred
>
>
>  
>
Fred, I was on the list in 1995-1996. I dropped off in disgust a couple 
of times over the
years and eventually came back each time. I almost dropped off last 
October as the
politics and extreme polarization  drove the SNR (signal to noise ratio) 
well below
0dB, and I did resort to mass deletes.  I've stayed since the election 
in the hope that
things would get better. They did for a brief while, but we are still 
seeing more politics
than science, and more history than futurism. Neither the politics nor 
the history is related
to extropy in any meaningful way that my weak mind can comprehend. I do 
understand that
politics and history can be extremely relevant to Extropy's stated 
goals, but I just don't see
it in these threads.

If a particular political position is directly relevant to Extropy, 
fine. But most of this
garbage just does not matter except via the most tenuous connections, 
and most such
connections operate on such long timescales that they will be overtaken 
by events before
they can affect the actual course of accelerating progress.

History is similar. Why is it relevant that the US paid Ho Chi Minh's 
salary during his
resistance against the Japanese during WWII, or that he was extremely 
careful to balance
the Russians against the Chinese?  Unless a historical post explicitly 
describes or discusses
a political effect on Extropian goals, it is noise, not signal.

Why does it matter that G.W. Bush evaded real military service by 
joining the Air National
Guard, or that John Kerry was a Gung-Ho brown-water Navy officer who 
wanted to get
his political ticket punched? Unless your post can explicitly describe 
the effect on the
date of the impending Singularity, you are wasting my time.

I give it about another week, and I'm off the list again. My request for 
the recommendation of a
mailing list was not a joke.