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

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