Yet another weird SF fan


I'm a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan. Common sense? What's that?

Go to first entry


 

Archives

<< current
 
E-mail address:
jhertzli AT ix DOT netcom DOT com


My Earthlink/Netcom Site

My Tweets

My other blogs
Small Sample Watch
XBM Graphics


The Former Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse:
Someone who used to be sane (formerly War)
Someone who used to be serious (formerly Plague)
Rally 'round the President (formerly Famine)
Dr. Yes (formerly Death)

Interesting weblogs:
Back Off Government!
Bad Science
Blogblivion
Boing Boing
Debunkers Discussion Forum
Deep Space Bombardment
Depleted Cranium
Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
EconLog
Foreign Dispatches
Good Math, Bad Math
Greenie Watch
The Hand Of Munger
Howard Lovy's NanoBot
Hyscience
Liberty's Torch
The Long View
My sister's blog
Neo Warmonger
Next Big Future
Out of Step Jew
Overcoming Bias
The Passing Parade
Peter Watts Newscrawl
Physics Geek
Pictures of Math
Poor Medical Student
Prolifeguy's take
The Raving Theist
RealityCarnival
Respectful Insolence
Sedenion
Seriously Science
Shtetl-Optimized
Slate Star Codex
The Speculist
The Technoptimist
TJIC
Tools of Renewal
XBM Graphics
Zoe Brain

Other interesting web sites:
Aspies For Freedom
Crank Dot Net
Day By Day
Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO Homepage
Fourmilab
Jewish Pro-Life Foundation
Libertarians for Life
The Mad Revisionist
Piled Higher and Deeper
Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationalism
Sustainability of Human Progress


























Yet another weird SF fan
 

Sunday, September 02, 2007

What Accurate Predictions of the Present Would Have Seemed Absurd in the Past?

The above question is being considered by Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias giving examples of present-day phenomena that would have seemed incredible at the beginning of the 20th century.

I came up with a list of statements about present-day society that would have seemed incredible to me at various times in the past. For example:

  • As of 1974:
    • That nobody has been to the moon since 1972.
    • That the Soviet Union no longer exists and there has been no nuclear war. (One or the other would have been plausible but not both.)
    • That we're still using fossil fuels on a large scale. (I expected that we would have run out of oil by now and relying on nuclear energy.)
    • President Ronald Reagan … who did a better job than anybody else in my lifetime.
  • As of 1982:
    • That there is a major communications network that is not run by any single organization.
    • That there would be a high-quality computer operating system based on free software.
    • That a corporate publicity campaign would walk out of the swamps of left-wing paranoia into real life.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

 
Profiles
My Blogger Profile
eXTReMe Tracker X-treme Tracker


The Atom Feed This page is powered by Blogger.