[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Charlie Stross wrote:
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> 
>>Damien Broderick wrote:
>>
>>>Only if posthumans are godschmucked idiots will 
>>>they wish to retrieve Mother Teresa.
>>
>>That's going too far, Damien.  So she screwed up.  Well, she was young - 
>>under a century, in fact, practically an infant.
> 
> I don't think that wilfully withholding pain relief medication from
> terminally ill patients on the grounds that suffering is "good for the
> soul" should be dismissed as lightly as that.
> 
> From any kind of extropian point of view, Teresa of Calcutta was a very
> nasty piece of work indeed -- just one with much better PR than your
> average grand inquisitor. She blighted many tens of thousands of lives,
> and she seems to have done so for no other reason than her own ambition
> to be immortalized in the pantheon of the Church of Rome.

Oh, I'm sorry.  I didn't realize the rest of us were perfect.

Look, there's within-species variance in altruism, and then there's 
between-species variance in altruism.  You know how, the same that, even 
though human beings think they have intelligence differences from other 
human beings, and think that "brains aren't everything in the real 
world", they don't invite chimps to be the CEOs of major corporations?

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