[ExI] H+ Census- why it matters to know if you matter.

[Brent Allsop]

Transhumanists,

I'm glad people are asking / interested in this.  Knowing this, 
concisely, and quantitatively is critically important to our movement.   
There is usually the beliefs of the general population.  Then there is a 
minority belief of experts, out in front of this hurdling and very noisy 
crowd.  Often time, the expert signal is completely lost in all the 
noise of the crowd.  Because of the way our critical scientific / expert 
publication system, and all of our communication systems for that 
matter, work, all of the conversation stops when there is any 
agreement.  What are you going to do, publish the same paper and add a 
"me to" on the end?  You only publish something, when you have a 
disagreement, no matter how trivial.  This is precisely the problem.  We 
need to develop a system that enables the experts to build as much 
consensus on as many things as possible, so the general crowd 
distinguish that unified expert voice signal from lonely crazy aunt 
sue.  Even experts in any given still theoretical moral / scientific 
field are completely clueless as to how much expert consensus there is 
on the most important things.

In addition to measuring for expert consensus, we need to measure what 
the following crowd is still believing and why.  Telling them the 
evidence that convinces us, isn't enouogh.  But we need to find out what 
it is, that is required to convince them.  And we need to measure for 
such, and see how much progress we are making, what works for everyone 
else, and so on.  That which you measure can improve, that much faster.

We need to measure for much more than just "are you a transhumanist".  
(see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/54/16 ).  We need to survey for 
each and every moral and theoretical issue facing society such as these 
huge emerging transhumanist values consensus camps (see: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 and 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/40/2 and so many other critically 
important issues).  I bet you everyone would be truly shocked at just 
how many people, not just people that called themselves trans humanists, 
value general transhumanist morals.  And if we measured for what 
everyone else was believeing, and why, we'd have significantly more 
ability to speed up this process of herding the masses, following these 
experts, into the singularity.

If you claim there are 6 transhumanists, in the UK, how many people are 
going to want to doubt you?  And what people want is what is all 
important.  But if you have signed online current decelerations with far 
more than this, nobody can deny just how many people have that 
particular value, on that particular moral issue.  And as usual, the 
primitive ignorant crowd camps will be a complete and immoral clueless 
mess.  We've simply all got to start speaking with one unified expert 
voice on all moral issues.

We definitely need to find some way to help the moral wisdom of the 
crowd be amplified so that it can better track and keep up with what the 
leading experts already know.  Everyone needs to get all their 
transhumanist friends to sign the most important moral declarations, and 
get their friends to do the same with their friends...  You can't do a 
survey, unless people are willing to participate.  Just like voting, if 
you don't work at it, you shouldn't expert anything any better than the 
ignorant morality stuck in the disagreeable mud of the dark ages we now 
have.  Help us speak to the rest of the world with a unified voice.

Brent Allsop




On 2/14/2012 4:01 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 2012-02-13 22:47, Ben Zaiboc wrote:
>> The Avantguardian<avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com>  asked:
>>
>>>
>>> Does anybody have a clue how many total people are involved
>>> in transhumanism-related movements in the United States and
>>> worldwide?
>>
>> I can confirm that there are at least 6 transhumanists in the UK.
>
> If you counted me, make that 5 certain transhumanists, since I am for 
> the moment in Sweden. :-)
>
> Seriously, the question does come up again and again (a French 
> journalist asked me it last week). And I think it doesn't have any 
> good answer: counting people on mailing lists will likely give a 
> number of a few hundred. But plenty of people are not on mailing 
> lists, do not come to any regular meetings and do not call themselves 
> transhumanists.
>
> Ideally we should be able to calculate backwards: given some 
> assumption (for example based on other movements) of how many 
> "lurkers" there are to active people, one could make an estimate based 
> on (say) sales of Humanity+ Magazine.
>
>
>