If you’d have told a 14th-century peasant that there’d be a huge merchant
class in the future who would sit in huge metal cylinders eating meals
and drinking wine while the cylinders hurtled through the air faster than
a speeding arrow across oceans and continents to bring them to far-flung
business opportunities, the peasant would have classified you as insane.
And he’d have been wrong to the tune of a few gazillion frequent-flyer
miles.
What makes this the Galileo Gambit is that the absurdity factor is being turned into alleged support (by affective association with the positive benefits of air travel and frequent flier miles) rather than just being neutralized. Contrast to http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ where absurdity is being pointed out as a fallible heuristic but not being associated with positives.
-- someone on Usenet replying to someone deriding Kurzweil
In general, though, that argument is the Galileo gambit and not a very good argument.
There’s a more charitable reading of this comment, which is just “the absurdity heuristic is not all that reliable in some domains.”
What makes this the Galileo Gambit is that the absurdity factor is being turned into alleged support (by affective association with the positive benefits of air travel and frequent flier miles) rather than just being neutralized. Contrast to http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ where absurdity is being pointed out as a fallible heuristic but not being associated with positives.
That’s the way I interpreted it. (How comes I tend to read pretty much anything¹ charitably?)
Well, not really anything. I don’t think I would have been capable of this.