X-Message-Number: 31204 Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:52:06 -0800 (PST) From: Julian Conrad <> Subject: Intellectual fad management WAS Re: financial stability In Cryonet No. 31165 (Nov. 13), Mr. Best writes: >And those of you who are wondering what caused this financial crisis might be interested to read this history: >http://www.benbest.com/polecon/buscycle.html#housing I wonder how odd the gurus and intellectual role models adopted by today's cryonicists will look in a century or two. I can see our revivers asking about the "Ludwig von-who? Ayn who? Robert who-lein? etc." that some of us talk a lot about, while the future society we'll find ourselves in had long ago solved today's problems with ideas owing little or nothing to the 20th century intellectuals who seem inordinately smart or insightful to some of us now. Consider that not that long ago forward-thinking people (the sort who would have written for the Edge.org website if the internet existed back then) viewed Marxism, General Semantics, eugenics and psychoanalysis as the cutting edge concepts in the progress of human understanding. Today we can see that these ideas suffer from serious problems, even though they still have proponents often called "cranks." Will many of today's cryonauts become tomorrow's cranks because we have trouble incorporating a future society's world view that conflicts with our current pseudo-explanations for the way the world works? Regards, Julian Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31204