[extropy-chat] Please don't feed the trolls!

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

spike wrote:
> 
> Since the UFO discussion wasn't going far, I decided to let it
> burn out by itself.  A poster suggested we read six books on
> the topic, then we would believe.  I know the ExI chat regulars
> well enough to be confident that if a flying saucer landed in
> their back yard, little green men got out and handed over six
> books on UFOs, got back in and flew away, even then they wouldn't
> invest the time in reading those six books.  They may cut back
> forthwith on the recreational pharmaceuticals, and puzzle for
> the rest of their lives over where those six books came from,
> but they wouldn't invest the time to read them.  I wouldn't.

Okay, *that* is going too far.

I think that even if a flying saucer landed next to me and little green 
men got out and handed over six books on UFOs, I would highly doubt that 
those little green men represented the biological descendants of a 
naturally evolved species within Earth's past light cone.  I would 
strongly suspect that the experience had somehow been produced by human 
ingenuity.

But I would read the books.

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