[extropy-chat] Group mind exploration

[Robert Bradbury]

On 11/28/06, Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In the vein of not working for free, what is your reaction to a similar
> proposal (a "rider" if you will) to your group-mind experiment that those of
> us with little "investment capital" venture 'works in kind' - such that
> there be an exchange of information of the type you are effectively
> "selling."  One may not have the reputation of Robert Bradbury, but surely
> any sufficiently rational mind can distill the relevant bits of useful
> information from the vast data streams available.  Would this be a
> worthwhile evolution of the premise of the experiment, or does it dilute
> your purpose such that it would be better suited to a different experiment
> altogether?


I've got no problem with it but I'm unclear of the form you are proposing.
Just throwing things out off the top of my head (a) creating Wikipedia pages
related to the book(s) under discussion; (b) creating an ExICh thread
discussing each book; (c) sharing the book (I send it marked up to someone
who sends it to someone else who sends it...) [sounds like a chain letter...
:-?]

Some of the books on my list are rather pricey and probably of interest to a
very small subset of the ExiCh list.  If we get lots of people interested in
reading them it would be possible to distribute the costs over a larger
group of people.  Since many of them fall into the category of college level
textbooks I doubt many would have the time or interest in reading them.

It raises interesting questions with respect to ones time and/or $
investment vs. perceived benefit.  I'm sure there are a lot of people on the
list who would love to explore various areas but either time or $ are
limiting factors.  The experiment is in part related to asking oneself
questions regarding what are the topics where one wants to know the "bottom
line" without having to invest the time to get there oneself [1].  For
example, we get a lot of feedback from time to time about what various
people are reading or have read but we don't get an opportunity to say "Hey
Damien, go read this and give me a one page summary."

Robert

1. This relates to long running threads about irrational thought and belief
systems where one is handed conclusions but doesn't have any confidence in
how those conclusions were reached.  Hopefully my summaries would be based
on a rational thought process as well as the integration of a wide range of
relevant contextual information.  Now of course there may be some who doubt
my capacity for rational thought but thats a different thread...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20061129/7c472118/attachment.html>