[extropy-chat] give a small window into the military mind

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> If you still think otherwise, then fine, come and bitch at me once
> you've gone and dismantled the 90% of the US government that ISN'T
> constitutionally allowed. Until then, you've got a lot bigger fish to
> fry than my veterans benefits. At the time I enlisted, I was a
> republican. You could say the Air Force made me a libertarian, so in
> that sense, the US military made the world a slightly better place by
> one person (though some may dispute that).

I would, on the strict grounds that convincing people of ideologies counts for 
nothing - is no triumph for the ideology.  Only what people do matters.  It 
benefits humanity nothing when one more human becomes convinced of, say, the 
Singularity Institute's reading material, unless that human should be 
motivated to do something differently thereby, and even then the belief still 
matters nothing of itself.  This is something that I emphasize in all causes I 
join, doing my helpful part to prevent those causes from becoming religions; 
belief counts for nothing.

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