Comment by Ben6 on Bloggingheads: Yudkowsky and Horgan · 2008-06-08T01:29:46.000Z · LW · GW

I found the discussion really interesting, though I'm still fairly lost as to what this singularity stuff is. Don't worry about talking too much; as a regular bhtv viewer, I'd insist that John Horgan generally talks to much. He kinda likes to make forceful claims about admittedly non-scientific questions, generally of the form "branch of science X won't amount to anything useful." He'll give non-scientific reasons why he supports that position, but then responds to criticisms of his argument by either a) repeating his claim or b) shrugging off the objection as non-scientific.

I was quite surprised by your quoting Robert Pirsig, as I've taken him to be pretty marginalized by a lot of thinkers. Do his ideas play into singultarity?