[ExI] The president's letter

[Bill Hibbard]

Merry Christmas Spike! And a happy, healthy 2020!

Perhaps you are old enough that hearing Christmas music
this time of year gives you a warm feeling? It does for me.

I also get a warm feeling from the hefty checks I send to
my nieces and nephew, although none of them has a son named
Tiny Tim.

> The mind boggles.

Exactly. Technological change is disrupting society and
making the whole world crazy. Where politics are relatively
free both the left and the right are increasingly nuts. In
China, and other places, they are trying to avoid craziness
by locking their societies down tight. We may follow China
down that path.

Meanwhile, do what you can and Merry Christmas!


On Wed, 18 Dec 2019, spike at rainier66.com wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
> Bill Hibbard via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] The president's letter
>
>> The presidents 6 page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi contained 6
>> errors of objective fact, 9 misleading statements, and 5 exaggerations.
>
> And partridge in a pear tree
>
> Merry Christmas!
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Bill suppose we go along with the notion and even grudgingly admit we
> understand what you really mean with the term "Christmas."  What does it
> really mean to be "merry"?  How can we even know when we are being merry?
> Perhaps the whole notion of merry is really just a state of mind, or an
> illusion of consciousness.
>
> Eh... well, retract, of course merry is a state of mind.  What I really want
> to know is when we are being merry, do you mean more merry that our usual
> state of merriness?  Or if we are persistently and inexplicably merry the
> rest of the time, is there a practical known limit to merriness that one may
> not exceed, kinda like the velocity c?  If we call that limit m, and the
> usual merriness level is about 0.5m, are you suggesting we temporarily
> adjust that to some higher value, say .6m?
>
> At what level of m does one begin to resemble a drunken frat bro?
>
> And if the level of m is adjustable by the user, why don't we just set it
> higher always?
>
> And if we set m higher, can we do so without being conscious of the fact
> that it is really just artificial m?
>
> The mind boggles.
>
> spike
>
>