[extropy-chat] Freedom and Practicality

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

John K Clark wrote:
> "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
> 
>>The overreaction to this event will be a hundred times worse than the
>>damage caused by the actual terrorist act." The last thought was
>>understated by, oh, three orders of magnitude or so.  I would estimate that
>>the overreaction to 9/11 was around five orders of magnitude worse than
>>9/11.
> 
> A bit of hyperbole here. 911 killed about 3000 people and bad as the idea of
> going to war in Iraq was it has not killed 300 million nor is it likely to;
> but I may be too analytical and should treat it as poetic license because I
> think the point you were trying to make was largely correct.

*Blinks.*
*Thinks.*

Yes, this was silly, heat-of-the-moment hyperbole.  You'd need an 
Iraq-war-inspired terrorist to release a supervirus before the 
overreaction to 9/11 caused in the realm of 1e5 x 9/11 damage.

Actually, "a hundred times" worse is probably a fair estimate both 
economically and in terms of lives lost.  I think I pretty much foresaw 
correctly that first morning - the Iraq war is only two or three times 
as bad as I expected, not a thousand times as bad as I expected.  I 
guess it could have been worse.

Or maybe you just need to wait for the Iran war.

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