Desrtopa comments on Dreams of AIXI - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (145)
Let's just remind ourselves of a few real things first. About 100,000 people were crushed to death or buried alive in Haiti a few months ago. The same thing has happened to millions of others throughout history. It will happen again; it could happen to me or to you if we're in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is something that is terrible and true. For a person with the bad luck to be in a specifically vulnerable state of mind, thinking about this could become an obsession that destroys their life. Are we going to avoid all discussion of the vulnerabilities of the human body for this reason - in order to avoid the psychological effects on a few individuals?
On this website we regularly talk about the possibility of the destruction of the world and the extinction of the human species. We even talk about scenarios straight out of the Hell of tradition religious superstition - being tortured forever by a superior being. I don't see any moves to censor direct discussion of such possibilities. But it is being proposed that we censor discussion of various arcane and outlandish scenarios which are supposed to make someone obsessed with those possibilities in an unhealthy way. This is not a consistent attitude.
I don't know the content of the basilisk (I've heard that it's not a useful thing to know, in addition to being potentially stress inducing, so I do not want to want to know it,) so I'm not in much of a position to critique its similarity to knowledge of events like the Haiti earthquake. But given that we don't have the capacity to shelter anyone from the knowledge of tragedy and human fragility, or eternal torment such as that proposed by religious traditions, failing to censor such concepts is not a sign of inconsistency.