[extropy-chat] Re: Raelians

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote:
> Then I think that:
> The Raelians have 60.000 paying members worldwide and a lot of money.
> All transhumanist associations together have perhaps 300 paying members.
> I wonder what conclusions we should make.

You should conclude that... the other 100 cults that tried to get started 
using flying-saucer nonsense didn't make it big, so you never heard about 
them in the media?

It's sort of like the way that every successful founder of a company 
rhapsodizes on the importance of Pluck and Perseverance.  IIRC, 75% of new 
companies fail, 95% of Internet startups during the dot-com era.  Who's to 
say that the founders of the failures put in any less Pluck and 
Perseverance?  To figure out the *distinguishing* ingredients of success, 
you have to do longitudinal tracking.

Maybe memes make it big more or less at random.  Maybe the Raelians 
randomly made it big so you hear about them in the press and so on, and a 
hundred similar cults failed and you never heard about them, and no 
transhumanist organization has randomly made it big yet.

You cannot conclude by looking at other people's successes, from Bill Gates 
to Richard Smalley, that *planned* success is possible.  To succeed on 
purpose is a great deal harder.  That is one of the reasons I greatly 
respect Einstein; he succeeded twice in a row, proving that the first time 
was deliberate rather than accidental.

Succeeding reliably, on purpose, without being able to rely on any 
probabilities fortuitously falling your way, may be far harder than you 
would think from looking at successes that included a component of luck.

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