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by arduanika 831 days ago
Is this sarcasm? (Genuinely can't tell.)

And also, are you the real Eliezer?

1 comments

No, not sarcasm, and I am Eliezer Yudkowsky. I was around on the old Extropians mailing list starting in 1996, and their leadership did not talk like this. Max More (the founder of Extropianism) was a careful thinker then, and I haven't heard anything different about him more recently than that.

"Extropy" is a term that was previously coined by a group of fairly nice people to describe themselves, and so far as I know is being stolen here without permission.

Oh wow, hello!

Seems like it was quite a time to be online. I mostly know of it through this version of events. Not sure how accurate you'd find it:

https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte...

The word "extropy" itself seems to go back several decades before the mailing list, if I'm reading correctly here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if many/most of the original mailing list members found this usage a corruption.