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Hi Stefano,<br>
<br>
Where are you getting all this from? Especially specifics like
"since 1870"?<br>
<br>
All I have is anecdotal evidences, but here's a few things I see
that seem to say otherwise?<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>Back in the 90's there wasn't even a WTA. Now the WTA is
huge, has many chapters and significant activities, and is
growing, right?</li>
<li>Mormon Transhumanism is certainly growing! Before 2006,
John Grigg and I were the only Mormons I knew about. The MTA
really took off in 2007, and now there are almost 300 of
them. They have a very active board of directors (I got
voted off last year, to many other way better than I people)
and they know have their annual conference which is also
growing each year...</li>
<li>The average life span continues to go through the roof,
despite the 100 year old DNA limit wall that seems to have
been placed in front of us.</li>
<li>I, as a type 1 juvenile diabetic, last year, was on the
verge of needing major laser surgery for my eyes, because the
'bleeders' were getting so bad. (And the eyes mirror what is
happening in the rest of the nervous and vascular system
throughout the body, which can't be fixed like the eyes can.)
But this year I finally got a "real time glucose monitoring
system" which has finally given me sufficient knowledge about
blood sugar levels (still very far from perfect) so I can
achieve far better blood sugar level controls. Now that I've
been on this for almost a year, with way better control, my
eye doctor says the 'bleeders' in my eyes are now almost
completely healed and gone. So I just in time dodged that
bullet.</li>
<li>My son was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Before 5
years ago, they had almost nothing that could help him, other
than things like shock therapy. Today, there is a mountain of
drugs that are still crude, and often risky, but life is way
better with all that. And the best one he is on now, though
VERY $1000/month expensive, didn't exist till last year.</li>
<li>Everyone thinks the costs of medical care are going up
because of reasons like efficiency, law suites, insurance
companies, and so on. But that is all absurd and mistaken
ignorance of the crowd. I work in the medical information
efficiency field at 3M Health Information Systems, and trust
me, the types of AI and computer systems finally starting to
help with all that is improving things, especially efficiency,
and we can do so much more important life saving analytics
now, by leaps and bounds. The reason the cost of health care
is going through the roof, is because there are an exponential
number of life saving things like data analytics, new drugs
like the one I mentioned for my son. New systems like this
real time glucose monitoring system (the "pump" (i.e.
artificial pancreas) is more than $8000, and it costs >
$1000 / month run.) which all didn't exist last year. I get
so angry when hear all the political candidates say things we
need to "stop the out of control price increases" or limit it
to inflation or worse. Which is saying to me, they want to
stop things like what my son and I just got last year!! We
need to have a visionary political leader to tell us the real
reason health care costs are going up. The fact that the
average life span continues to grow, isn't free!! And it is
most definitely way more than worth it. We are all going to
be much more poorer, spending a significantly increased
percentage of what we earn in life, on health care, but the
significantly increased quality of life span is going to be
way worth it. We've got to help educate the clueless and
immoral crowd on this issue, or we're headed for a huge and
destructive train wreck on this issue.</li>
<li>We're continuing the working on the "Consciousness Survey
Project" at Canonizer.com - now with people like Dennett,
Chalmers, Hameroff, Lehar, and so many other contributing
world class leaders. And the amount of expert consensus, in
this field where everyone things there is no consensus at all,
is totally shocking. The only remaining disagreement is in
the exact relationship between phenomenal qualities like
redness and greenness, and the underlying neural correlates or
actual physics that are responsible for such. All the leading
theories are making real predictions on just how to test for
each of them, to the falsification of all others. (forcing all
experts into one camp) I'm predicting this discovery of the
relationship between something like a redness quality, to the
underlying physics, (and the way it will enable us to do
things like solve the 'problem of other minds' so that you can
know if your upload is really you or not, will be the greatest
scientific discovery of all time. And the fact that there is
so much expert consensus in this field, already, shows that
we've made way more progress than anyone realizes. The
growing consensus is, we're finally about to really crack the
nut of consciousness, and surely that will change the world
more dramatically than any other scientific achievement to
date.<br>
</li>
<br>
</ul>
Brent Allsop<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 11/4/2012 6:17 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAPoR7a4hpk+S47RL=Xj31b9S1YUqfK=H+kGqUO6S-Tr+RH_-Yw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div>But one area where the two issues overlap is a general
cultural environment where not only does popular prometheism
and futurism seem at an all-time low since 1870, together with
investments in, and societal commitment to, fundamental
R&D, but expected breakthroughs are delayed or never
happen also because of a lack of grand, original,
out-of-the-box, lateral-thinking visions in many fields of
fundamental science.<br>
</div>
<br>
</div>
--<br>
Stefano Vaj<br>
<br>
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