[ExI] Is the ExI email list slowly dying out? And if so, what can be done to reverse such an outcome?

[William Flynn Wallace]

Please grumpy bears among us, do explain how you can justify your attitude?

spike

I have a grumpy side.  News brings it out, so I never watch TV news, and
only
for maybe ten minutes a day do I check the NYT and Google news, which
always.confirm my worst opinions of humanity

I wonder how many younger people take advantage of all the knowledge Spike
talks about online.  I suspect not many.  It's too much like studying.
Somehow we teach kids to hate school and never want to go back to it.  All
the stuff online they ignore, mostly, and take it for granted.  Me? I
wanted to stay in grad school forever and would have done so if I could
teach on the
side.

Some of us (hello John!) are like the poor guy in Dogpatch (who remembers
the spelling of his name?) who always had a cloud overhead.  I am anxious
to see what happens when we get rid of him.

And Spike, how much knowledge was in a 1950s public library?  I went often
but the place was never visited much as I recall.  And it never occurred to
me
to go deeper into the subjects I was taught in school.  That's something
you do
and leave behind, isn't it?

I was born with a love of learning and of words.  Few people seem to be.
If we
look at that from an evolutionary point of view, what good would those
qualities
do for a person who was going to be illiterate and do mostly manual labor
type
things all his life?  The rare person who got them was likely going to be
self
taught.

Pessimistic?  Nah. Realistic.

bill w

On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 10:53 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
> Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat
>
>
> >...The 90s were an optimistic decade, you felt in the air that good things
> could happen and were about to happen. Space, bio/nanotech, the then young
> internet, virtual reality, new political systems... Now we live in a
> pessimistic and defeatist culture, and this shows here and elsewhere.
> Recovering the optimistic outlook of the early Extropians list is, I
> believe, what today's list (and world) need.
>
> >...Or perhaps it is just that we are all getting old and grumpy.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> So tragically true is this, but being the iconoclast misfit, I reversed the
> usual order by starting out as a grumpy young man and getting more
> congenial, open-minded, light-hearted and generally more hip as the years
> progressed.  Friends and neighbors are so puzzled by this.
>
> It helps to be into astronomy of course: oh what a time to be living for
> those of us who follow that, what a marvelous time.  Any prole can just go
> online and learn all kindsa cool stuff we have wondered about since we were
> kids, all of it freeeeee free free as a bird, just go in there and start
> searching around the internet and all this cool science and math and
> technology and all the cool yakkity yak and bla bla and you can even get
> excellent high-quality nekkid photos FREEEEEE along with all that cool free
> science education.
>
> Not only that: aaaaanyone can have all this stuff.  Anyone, no matter where
> you live, even with very limited public bandwidth, the best stuff doesn't
> require much bandwidth.  Everyone everywhere with a cheap Chromebook anyone
> can get practically free at Goodwill can get to it and learn up on any
> science, any technology, any life skill, heeeeheheheheheeee what a time it
> is.
>
> I still have not heard a good explanation for how one can justify pessimism
> in our times.  We lived to see it.  This is a dream world, certainly my
> dream world.  This is what we envisioned back in the 80s, ja?  We dreamed
> that someday we could just tap in a few keystrokes and have all the
> high-quality science stuff right there in our own home, only better than we
> envisioned in some important ways: the monitors are bigger and higher
> resolution than I realized they could be, and the scientific quality is
> eeeexcellent compared to even 20 yrs ago.
>
> Conclusion: we are living the dream.
>
> Please grumpy bears among us, do explain how you can justify your attitude?
>
> spike
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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