[ExI] Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis

[Brent Allsop]

Hi ben,

What is the final result of any science?  It is a scientific consensus.  We
can't get any closer to any trueth.
And that which you measure improves and speeds up.

And the only reason there is a "popular consensus" canonizer algorithm (1
person one vote) is so we can track the clueless still bad thinking people
and know what kinds of arguments better convert them to superior ways of
thinking.

The more important consensus is the expert consensus, and one method of
achieving that is Peer Ranking
<https://canonizer.com/topic/53-Canonizer-Algorithms/19-Peer-Ranking-Algorithms?>,
but even that won't convince some people.

We all know even scientific consensus is a bad way of doing things.  People
say science progresses one funeral at a time.  There must be a faster way
for the scientific, trusted scientific and moral consensus to improve.

Right now the popular consensus is functionalism, that qualia emerge from a
pattern of some kind.  I'm in the minority, materialism, that says
consciousness is built out of physical qualities of something in our brain,
and that without whatever physical thing that has redness, redness will not
be possible.  I'm hopeing that we can get all the functionalists to realize
the error of their ways, without having to wait for all of them to die.
And if I'm the one that has the rong opinion, I have faith that one of you
in the right camp will finally come up with an argument or demonstration
that will convert me.  All I want to do is formally track all that.  The
consensus I am building is slow, but it is progressing, and you can see the
cracks in the functionalist camps.

Another important issue is that this is a necessary theoretical scientific
consensus tool.  We get everyone to admit how their camp can be falsified,
for the supporters of that camp.  If it isn't falsifiable, it isn't real
science.  Then once all that theoretical science is done, it is up to the
experimentalists to do those experiments to force the scientific consensus.

I challenge you to come up with a better more formal way to measure
scientific consensus on revolutionary still theoretical science.


On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 1:55 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 30/06/2026 20:08, Brent Allsop wrote:
> > "But the emerging consensus is that the plan isn’t just overly
> ambitious; it would require several technological revolutions to overcome
> glaring engineering challenges."
> >
> > Right, and the emerging popular linear progress thinking consensus is
> that humanity will never achieve immortality.
> >
> > It's too bad we lack a more formal way to build and track "emerging
> consensus"; without that, we're screwed.
> >
>
>
> Consensus is just a way of tracking people's opinions. You know what they
> say about opinions: they're like arseholes, everyone has one.
>
> If consensus was a good way of figuring out what's actually true, we'd
> have to conclude that there really is a god, that Mao Tse Tung and Stalin
> were good people, and that astrology, homoeopathy and chiropractic work.
>
> If you want the closest approximation to the truth that is possible, do
> science instead of asking for people's opinions.
>
> --
> Ben
>
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>
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