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Comment by makaimc | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree with Dr. Greenspun here. Despite the Singularity topic's lack of immediate value some people are still be interested in studying with some of the most famous futurists in the world. Many people (myself included) enjoy learning for the challenge of thinking in new ways and this program at least promises that opportunity.

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Did you miss the part about the $25,000? Best as I can tell from the TED website, that's the admission to twelve TED conferences. Or two to three years of state university tuition (depending on your home state). Or a very very large book collection. Or one hell of a lot of plane tickets to see the lectures that every "famous futurist" gives for free, or for a relatively modest conference fee, multiple times per year. (If they didn't give public talks all the time these people wouldn't be famous futurists! And I assure you that the more obscure futurists, toiling away in academia, are almost certainly available to chat with you at a personal one-on-one lunch for a lot less than $25,000, or even $2000.)

But, you know, one of the side effects of population growth is that there's now more than one sucker born every minute.

UPDATE: Someone else in the thread says TED costs $6000 for four days. So, only four TED conferences. Or something. If you have to ask you probably can't afford it. ;)

I remember hearing an interview on NPR where a stamp collector calculated the cost of a stamp at ~30,000$ per time he actually looked at it in his vault. For you or me that might seem stupid, but once you have more income than you can reasonably spend in your lifetime numbers below a million stop being meaningful.

Or as a factory worker in china might say you spent 7.50$ on a cup of coffee?

Whether or not the program is worth $25,000 is up to the market to decide, not just you. Basing the value of a program by arbitrarily declaring "that's just too much money for me!" does not address whether or not the program ultimately offers enough value to the actual students. That question will be resolved in time.

If I walk by a roulette wheel and I see someone put $10,000 on black, I deduce that the person who laid down that money is an idiot. I realize that one can make sophisticated arguments about "risk preference" and the idea that the market sets a price for everything and so on, but at a certain point you just have to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Or two rounds of YC funding? :-D

Perhaps, in exchange for the $25K, you will learn how to convince our future robot overlords to upload your brain into one of the good mainframes.

Yeah - I think though that the $25,000 pricetag is outlandish. It should be free. The benefit to society will be realized in the connections that result from brining together these 'minds' rather than from whatever topic they will or won't learn while there.

I think its a good step though - to actively foster innovation rather than assume academia (which I guess this is, though non-standard - which is good) business or war will generate it.

I saw an article in IEEE magazine about the singularity and it seemed more about people talking about the implications of technology rather than actually working to build technology. The singularians seem to be a group of very capable technologists - why don't they allocate their time and resources to improving technologies that could make the singularity happen instead of talking about it? Is hyping the singularity a meta-strategy to attract the resources and effort of others?

Charging 25k is a strong sign of cultish scam behavior. Go figure.

They are. There are many singularitarians working on concrete things in AGI/AI, life enhancements, cryogenics, biology... but of course, you'll hear more about the speakers and futurists, since that's what the news will go after.

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