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Yehuda Spacified

sat24jun2006—25w175d47%— 21h36m00s—0utc

Some things take time to sink in, time for time (and memory) to do its culling and for us to look at them with fresh eyes. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s email to his deceased brother was one of those things. I’ve been rereading it about once every week, for one reason or another, since I discovered it 52 days ago, and each time it has resonated ever more deeply inside me. Its call to action is ever more urgent. Its wisdom ever more piercing. Its optimism ever more evident — there’s some brutally naive optimism in this letter, one that stares at us in the face, but one that we refuse to see… because it’s so damn hard to simply entertain the thought, because the moment we accept we might be able to do something about death itself, the 150,000 human deaths every day become 150,000 murders that could be prevented.

I don’t want to forget it. I’ll paste it in my wall and create new remixes of the content, and in this spirit I spacified the whole thing into a 30k PDF. Opinions on both the text itself and the utility (or lack thereof) of the spacifying will be most appreciated.

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