[extropy-chat] MIT Technology Review Announces $20, 000 SENS Challenge

Jeff Medina analyticphilosophy at gmail.com
Fri Jul 29 01:46:49 UTC 2005


I'm baffled as to why this is considered worthy of $20,000. If it's a
technical critique that's sought, it's near pointless, because SENS's
failings would show up soon enough during its attempted
implementation. If it's an ethical critique as to why SENS shouldn't
be undertaken no matter how achievable it is, that'd be too easy to
get published to warrant the $20K bounty, and would no doubt do
little-to-nothing in terms of stopping Aubrey & other likeminded
biologists from pursuing SENS.

It's also pretty worthless, when you realize that the developmentally
challenged Discovery Institute cretin-creationists have gotten at
least one defense of creationism published in a scientific,
peer-reviewed biology journal. Peer review isn't reliable enough to
make it the determinant of a winning critique.

On 7/28/05, Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> It would seem
> more productive to offer the $20,000 to anyone who can solidly make the
> case either way: that is, if they can prove that there's something
> worth investigating *or* prove (rather than just claim with little
> evidence) that it's rubbish.

Can't do that, because, by the measure proposed (which is acceptance
of the arguments presented in the form of publication in a
peer-reviewed journal in the field), Aubrey's already won.

-- 
Jeff Medina
http://www.painfullyclear.com/

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/

Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
http://www.ieet.org/

School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/



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