"Marginal, Shmarginal"

Michael Anissimov writes:

superlongevity, superintelligence, and superabundance are granted substantial apparent probabilities of occurring through arguments found in dozens if not hundreds of books and thousands of academic papers and reports. If none of these happen: fine.

To my way of thinking this is almost exactly like saying that "when I die I will go to heaven transformed into an angel -- the Bible tells me so. If it doesn't happen: fine."

"Superlativity" as I use the term very specifically in my critique isn't a synonym for "really big epochal technodevelopmental changes" (I expect those, too, assuming we don't destroy ourselves). Instead, it names the effort to reductively redefine emancipation in instrumental terms and then expansively reorient the project of that emancipation to the pursuit of personal "transcendence" through hyperbolic misconstruals of technoscientific possibility. That is to say, this personal transcendence is conceived in terms that translate the customary omnipredicates of the judeochrislamic deity into superpredicates that the faithful personally identify with but proselytize in the form of "predictions" of imaginary technodevelopmental outcomes.

Marginal, shmarginal. I have enough confidence in my own intelligence to believe what I feel is supported by the evidence and not worry about whether it is “marginal” or not. I have lots of other “marginal” notions, like that gays should be allowed to marry and that sentient animals should not be murdered for food.

Your self-image as a superior intellect and your "feelings" that you have enough evidence to support your superlative aspirations despite their conceptual confusion and pseudo-scientific marginality (their marginality, by definition, indicates that there is not "enough" evidence) is, of course, irrelevant to the extent that the claims you are making really are essentially scientific claims as you seem to want to insist they are.

Questions whether gays should be able to marry or whether we should murder animals for food are moral, ethical, political questions, and their present marginality or not is not what most matters for those who espouse these beliefs as good ones. Consensus science on the other hand is far from indifferent to such issues of marginality.

Although we know well that many warranted scientific beliefs began as marginal notions themselves, and so we cherish iconoclasts and stubborn fringe notions as one of the motors of technoscientific progress, we cannot fail to distinguish actually marginal notions from actually warranted scientific consensus else we risk the loss of the actual usefulness of science as the mode of reasonable belief-description that affords us powers of prediction and control.

Other modes of reasonable belief-ascription answer to different sorts of wants. But to the extent that you want to sell superlativity as science you really can't get away with that sort of thing. Of course, I for one have never fallen for the ruse of futurologists who want to sell their superlativity as science rather than faith in the first place.