[extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
> Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 9:19 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] uh oh, something's right
> 
> 
> spike wrote:
> > Things are working. ...
> > Let us congratulate ourselves unapologetically, shall we?

> 
> Definitely! Congrats to everybody who gets everything to work!

Thanks Anders.  Coming from you, it means much.

> 
> ... that may be a much better measure of progress than looking at how
> much time, energy, FLOPS or whatever are produced. Maybe we should try to
> index it?
> 
> --
> Anders Sandberg,


Ja, we have some indices, but I am not sure their actual value.  Example,
the number of FLOPS produced by my own favorite idle-CPU background project
GIMPS.  We were going exponential for several years, then it leveled out a
couple years ago at about 70,000 machines and gradual linear increase now
around 20 Teraflops.  

Taking into account the proportion of multi-machine contributors, we can now
estimate the total number of this particular type of math geeks on the
planet: around 50,000.  Considering the total human population, that makes
us rarer than one in a million.  I never would have guessed we were so few.

Are there any internet groksters here interested in setting up a page to
collect trends in accordance with Anders' idea?  We can call them Anders
Indices.  We could take contributions of whatever indices folks think are
relevant, GIMPS output, crime stats, GDP over time, personal wellbeing stats
of various kinds.  With a sufficient number of Anders Indices we might have
a page with a number of trends showing that something is definitely right.

spike