[extropy-chat] the non-transparent society

[Jef Allbright]

On 3/8/07, Keith Henson <hkhenson at rogers.com> wrote:

> At 12:27 PM 3/8/2007 +0000, Charlie Stross wrote:
>
> snip
>
> >2. What the news article Damien cited did *not* mention was that this
> >law was an attempt to deal with the problem of "happy slapping" which
> >seems to have crossed the channel.
> >
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_slapping
>
> That is really bizarre.
>
> Though I guess it could have been expected by analogy to other acts such as
> recording sexual encounters.
>
> I wonder what else might be expected to crop up in the interaction of high
> tech with stone age brains?

It seems to me that *all* of our deepest evolved drives can be
expressed via modern technology.  On balance, this is quite
encouraging since there's a general negative correlation between
fitness and depravity.

On a similar note, have others noticed that virtually all spam and
phishing attempts contain obvious errors of spelling and grammar ?
(I'm not talking about the intentionally creative spellings intended
to confuse the anti-spam systems.)  Is this not a strongly encouraging
sign that spam and similar abuse of the commons appears to be very
strongly correlated with lower intelligence and thus lower fitness in
a world of accelerating intelligence?

- Jef