2) The rebuttal article that someone else in the group was writing turned into a much more general piece and we’ve convinced him not to frame it as a rebuttal to your paper since it ended up not really referencing it much at all.

3) I/we are still interested in doing a follow-up/rebuttal to your paper. Our primary argument is that, while your conclusions do generally follow from your assumptions, your assumptions are problematical and put you in a very unlikely state space to begin with. We recognize that you did include caveats in your paper about your assumptions — but you continued on even after the caveats appeared overwhelming.

I’m currently in the throes of revising two papers accepted for a July conference and writing a third for a November conference so I probably won’t get back to this until the end of next month (when the third paper is due . I do intend to get back to it then and would love to send a draft to you for comment if you are interested. Or, if you’re writing a follow-up sooner, I’d enjoy sharing our thoughts . . . .

4) Thanks for stopping by!

5) I am curious how you found this particular post though . . . . while it isn’t protected, I’m not aware of an easy path to it (or maybe I’m just underestimating the Google harvesting bot .

1) You misspelled my name.
2) How is the rebuttal article coming along?
3) Are you still looking for additional co-authors to collaborate on it? I am interested in doing a follow up paper to address any shortcoming of my original Leakproofing paper, so let me know if you are still interested.
Best,
Dr. Yampolskiy

Giving a crackpot a bully pulpit can divert effort away from progress. At a minimum, he can undermine the effectiveness of those in the foundation. Your wording that you “choose to remain duped” is telling. The real question is whether you gain more by using his infrastructure or whether it ends up both impeding you and your affiliation with it ends up hurting you. The fact that you have to even keep evaluating that question is a cognitive resource drain.

Oh, and I forgot to mention before — Yes, grey goo can be solar or dirt-powered — but at a tremendous reduction of efficiency due to the difficulty of extracting and concentrating energy from those sources energy.

I’ll concede that Eric Klien said the above quote, but it’s language unfortunately isn’t explicit. Another way to interpret it would be that the Trojan Horse is directed at frontier scientists who compete for scientific progress without giving thought to the humanitarian repercussions. As for the “Religion of Science” I don’t think either of us knows what that means, but is it unreasonable to interpret it as meaning the philosophy of science? Continuing in this vein when he states that they’re “dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements”, the Trojan Horse could be that some would say they may be impeding advancement in the short-term, this being at the expense of ensuring a worst case scenario safety net.

While Klien did organize this group, the organization is bottom-up. From what I understand the Advisory Boards serve to create a common forum for the free exchange of ideas via blogs, forums, and listservs. Even if I concede your entire argument, the only utility to an anti-scientist I can imagine would be for him to eavesdrop where likely advances may be heading so that he may then work to undermine said goals. However Klien may intend to sandbag scientific progress, many of his members would still benefit greatly from bouncing their ideas off other educated leaders in the field.

This, plus the fact that the foundation is funded by private donations and has no direct authority to restrict academic research, still leaves me leaning towards the side of staying with the group. Even if he does turn out to be a pro-religious, anti-science extremist, until I find explicit evidence of any shady behaviors I choose to remain duped and utilize the infrastructure he provides.

What exactly is the harm?

~Mike