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Sunday, February 22, 2015

Futurological Methodology

So much "futurological methodology" simply amounts to conventional con-man discipline: pick your buzzwords, keep a straight face, stay upbeat, stick to your story...

More Futurological Brickbats here.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> conventional con-man discipline: pick your buzzwords,
> keep a straight face, stay upbeat, stick to your story...

See, e.g.,

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now/
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[Mike Darwin, April 19, 2011]

Over the past few years there has been increasing friction between a subset of cryonicists, and people in the Transhumanist (TH) and Technological Singularity communities, most notably those who follow the capital N, Nanotechnology doctrine.[1, 2] Or perhaps more accurately, there has been an increasing amount of anger and discontent on the part of some in cryonics over the perceived effects these “alternate” approaches to and views of the future have had on the progress of cryonics. . .

If nanotechnology had stayed nanotechnology, instead of becoming Nanotechnology, then it would all have been to the good. . .

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. . ., and a clique of people emerged who were heavily emotionally invested in a 19th century mechanical approach to achieving a “technological singularity.”. . .

[I]t isn’t the ideas of accelerating technological advance, nanotechnology, or any combination of these ideas per se that have been so pernicious; rather, it is the adoption of a utopian (all positive) framework which is socially **enforced** as the mandatory context in which these ideas must be viewed, that has been so destructive [to cryonics]. . . I would go so far as to argue that it was at least as much the responsibility of the cryonics organizations that systematically purged people who didn’t adhere to this party line for (among many reasons) the simple fact that failure to project this idealized and easily grasped view of the future was not good for sales. These ideas, presented in an inevitably utopian framework, do in fact get **customers**. And customers were exactly what every then (and now) extant cryonics organization wanted, and still want: not members, not people to join in the task at hand, but **customers**. Customers pay their money, get their goods and services, and that’s it. . .
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Dale Carrico said...

Their faith ate our pseudo-science!