Skeptic Project

>That Fresco guy is a creepy troll and it is really unsettling watching him discuss free sexuality with people in their late teens to early twenties.

Where does Fresco say that, exactly?

I don't see anything unusual about it given Fresco's background as a 20th Century "futurist." A lot of forward-thinking intellectuals in the 1960's like Robert Rimmer (who wrote "The Harrad Experiment"), Albert Ellis, Robert Heinlein, Timothy Leary and F.M. Esfandiary said and wrote similar things.

When it comes to the Venus Project, people are confusing vision with solution, that includes Fresco himself.

A rebooted "futurology" would probably also incorporate all the work done on human cognitive biases which contribute to our tendency to make bad predictions about the future.

Of course, I don't blame 90-something year old Fresco for his inability to absorb all the new scientific information that has appeared in recent decades. The human brain undergoes "belief hysteresis" early in life; most people after the age of 30 or so tend to reject information at odds with their stabilized world views.

The human brain certainly starts to resist novelty after that age, as we can see by the musical and food preferences of older people. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has written about this phenomenon.

The internet has the ability to turn all kinds of undistinguished people into celebrities. Remember the "Leave Britney alone" freak on YouTube a couple years back?

Fresco labored in obscurity for decades; apparently he lacked the ability to make a breakthrough on his own until the Zeitgeist filmmaker Peter Joseph used the internet to turn Fresco into a significant figure.

I'll only comment briefly, but I think Fresco's ideas are generally nice and he says a lot of stuff I agree with which is why I was in the ZGM for as long as I was.

The problem with Fresco is he never tried to get in with the engineering community, he didn't try and get any grants or write any research papers to get recognised. Now he has no money... The way I see it, if he was such a great engineer/designer and wanted to really get started on his Venus Project stuff then he should have spent 5 years designing things commercially. After he's made a few million or something he then starts building actual working prototypes of his Venus Project designs which could lead to further engineering recognition, grants and so on. Unfortunately after decades of working at this all he has is a small tourist attraction on the brink of closing with some nice models and drawings. If he isn't a complete kook, its a shame. He is too senile to do anything about it now.

EDIT: Oh yea, just to add I also don't think his Venus Project society would work practically but that's a separate issue to the above.

>The problem with Fresco is he never tried to get in with the engineering community, he didn't try and get any grants or write any research papers to get recognised. Now he has no money...

Fresco might not have gotten very far any way. Buckminster Fuller, whom Fresco resembles, had a _huge_ following in the 1960's for someone who gave rambling speeches about technical subjects. I remember when you could find paperbacks of Fuller's books for sale in supermarkets in Tulsa, which suggests how far awareness of his ideas had reached into American culture circa 1970.

But who remembers Buckminster Fuller now? For one thing his inventions don't work very well, like his notoriously leaky Geodesic Domes, which now have a bad reputation. For another he made bad predictions, for example that by 1985 we could have "sustainable abundance for all" using his "design science" ideas; or that we would have reached either "utopia or oblivion" by now (as he titled one of his books), instead of just muddling through (something humans seems exceptionally good at).

Fresco, like Fuller, displays a similar bias where he catastrophizes the problems facing humanity and then promises that he's figured out the capital-S Solution to Save Us All. Even if Fresco had attained Fuller-like celebrity and influence a few decades back, I suspect he wouldn't have left much more of a legacy than Fuller's because his ideas lacked sufficient power even if they had resulted in some interesting architecture.

@Sky,
They won't have someone to have an answer for everything. Just add a pendulum to a car and that's the end of drunk driving!

Slightly off topic, but what's Roxanne's relation here? I've wondered this for the better part of a decade. Are they lovers, life partners, what's the deal with that? I mean I can't be the only person who wants to know.

But I've often though (and the video slightly makes me think this more) that Fresco is a little light in the loafers. If he's not, that guy in yellow seems so, if not that little get-up he has is a fashion faux pas.

Edward writes:

>Slightly off topic, but what's Roxanne's relation here? I've wondered this for the better part of a decade. Are they lovers, life partners, what's the deal with that? I mean I can't be the only person who wants to know.

I talked to Jacque and Roxanne on the phone about 15 years ago, and as I recall Roxanne told me that she had met Jacque on a cruise ship some time in the 1970's. I guess their relationship had a romantic component at the time.

@Brenton:

>>>>>Ed, I think the point missed in such a contention is that that's not what they're interested in.

You've probably heard Roxanne Meadows say "It [a resource-based economy] could've been done a hundred years ago. It's not the technology, but the social direction'.

In other words, what's most important is a value shift. To facilitate this change. A resource-based economy (in a primitive form) could operate within the present social architecture - all it takes is for people to decide to co-operate rather than compete, to share rather than acquire, etc,.<<<<<

Yes Brenton, I realise they aren't interested in that. But why not? You think its better to slave away in obscurity trying making little models and designing things that will probably never get made and devoting all your time to "getting the WORD out"? All they really want is for people to go is just TELL everyone about the Venus Project and how well has that worked out for them for decades? And now Jacque is too senile and old (unfortunately) to even answer questions properly (not just noticed by me but apologised because he is old).

What is the reason he couldn't have spent a mere 5 years out of - what is it now? - almost half a century of doing this and design enough commercial things to get GOOD MONEY to invest into the Venus Project?

When I asked on the JREF some engineers said to me of of the main issues was that essentially ALL of Jacque's designs are hypothetical. They are all either on paper or plastic display models, you can't check out a working prototype or study any actual schematics to see if they agree if it will work or not. You just basically have to have faith that what he is saying will work. (A lot of his ideas also rely on hypothetical technology that doesn't exist yet despite him saying a VP society was possible back in the 30's, but that's another issue)

The idea that they didn't want to go make some real money to go make those working prototypes and get some recognition in the engineering community because "that's not what they're interested in", is like a homeless guy saying he doesn't want to get a normal job because he wants to fly planes for a living. That if he doesn't fly planes he is just gonna just have to be homeless.

For me the bottom line is the excuses for not engaging the engineering community are rubbish. The excuses for not making real money commercially so you can move your personal project along (Venus Project) are stupid.

Just consider: What's the first thing they want to do? They want to raise enough money to make a "feature film", yes just another "get the word out!" ideas again. But even so if they wanted to do that all they'd need is a few hundred thousand dollars to make something very decent. Really big engineering contracts can get you millions which he'd already have if he'd done what I said earlier, he'd be recognised in the community so he could get funding and help from them and you'd be more likely because of all that to get some grants and other funding.

The best I can say is that this behaviour shows how incompetent he has been in getting this up and going for all these years.

@advancedatheist:

youwrote: "So even if Fresco had done something like Fuller decades ago to show people his ideas in operation, he might still have wound up obscure and ignored by now from the fact that his ideas didn't work that well. "

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This is really my point.

If Fresco CAN'T do what I said, NOT just that he WON'T, then he isn't as good an engineer and designer as he and Zeitgeist makes out. Bad for his credibility to show failures like that, much easier to make nice models and drawings so people have an easier time HOPING you are right.

If he CAN do those things I said, but chooses not to because he'd rather work on his tourist attraction and "getting the word out", then he is incompetent. In the same way a homeless man is who refuses to take a job because he only wants to fly planes for British Airways.

The movement might not like the word incompetent but after nearly a century accomplishing essentially nothing I can't think of any other word that fits.

"It's this notion that we need to establish right relations between all of humanity. That is, in many ways, the core of the work."

So its utopian bullshit.

@atheist:

Seems like these utopian cult folks never take into account the 4 out of 100 (or whatever the figure is now) people that are sociopaths.

>"Just consider: What's the first thing they want to do? They want to raise enough money to make a "feature film", yes just another "get the word out!" ideas again."<

Making a fiction movie to promote some kind of movement is the dumbest idea I ever heard of. Just like the several fictional 9/11 conspiracy movies that came out in the wake of Loose Change that no one remembers.

Just seems that if folks like Brenton really cared about making the world a better place they'd use the time and money they spend on stupid shit like this and apply it towards charities.

Instead its posts on Internet forums about how we should love one another and shit. Which is fine, I'm certainly in favor of being nice to one another, but I don't really see the need for some e-guru to tell me to.

What do Peter Joseph or this Fresco clown really *do* for the world besides make Internet videos? And I really doubt the relevancy of Brenton's personal anecdote about "many, many" people knowing who Fresco is.