[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

On September 11th, shortly after I turned on my computer in the morning, 
I had three thoughts.

First:  "I'm glad it wasn't nuclear."

Second: "So it finally did happen.  I guess I really am living in the 
Future."

Third:  "The overreaction to this event will be a hundred times worse 
than the damage caused by the actual terrorist act."

The last thought was understated by, oh, three orders of magnitude or 
so.  I would estimate that the overreaction to 9/11 was around five 
orders of magnitude worse than 9/11.

On the day a small fission explosion goes off in a major American city 
and kills 50,000 people, the world will go mad.  Nearly all of the 
damage will come from that madness, not the fission explosion.

But when the second American city gets nuked, people will start to get 
used to it.

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