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From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Bioproduced nanocomputers
Message-ID: <21526@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 30-Oct-87 04:18:30 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.21526
Posted: Fri Oct 30 04:18:30 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Nov-87 06:30:39 EST
References: <8710290154.AA09880@agent99.wedge.com>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 40

I've been spending a lot of time listening to Eric Drexler recently, and
he has been talking a lot about:

How do you measure bogosity in sciences that don't exist yet? How does a 
quiet truth get heard in an explosion of data?

Drexler himself says that the examples in his book are not of what we
WILL do, but what we COULD do. He chose them not to be optimal, but to
be comprehensible.

For example, he spends a lot of time in his book on miniature mechanical
computers, not because he necessarily believes that we build them, but 
because the math is easier than for electronic computers on that size 
scale.  Since the math is easier, it is easier for the scientific community
to check him.  (The bogosity issue again.)

He feels the answer to the bogosity question is: hypertext authoring tools.
Imagine a system as easy to use and as complete as the average university
library, but where any document can be annottated by anyone at anytime.
(And any reader can choose to turn off any subset of annotations he does
not wish to see.)
In a system where everyone has his say, but most people spend most of their
reading time reading material that has been editted by editors they trust,
in a system where each document has fast links to every document it references
and each document that references it, flaky theories get their rebuttals
attached strongly and quickly.

Drexler likes to talk about one of Jeremy Rifkin's books "Entropy".
"Entropy"'s arguments hinge on a single, damning misunderstanding of
thermodynamics. Yet, the book was almost used as a text book in a
course at M.I.T. (a socialogy course) because the rebuttal wasn't as
widely publicised as the book itself.

Conclusion:
How can we evolve usenet news into such a system?
(There Nick, I've tied nanotechnology to Stuart II.)

--- David Phillip Oster            --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
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