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Hul-Gil comments on How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours -- What Just Happened - Less Wrong
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Hi there, Vaniver. I figured I'd ask you about this, because others seem too disturbed by the idea for me to want to bring it up again. Anyway, I've been reading through old threads, and encountered mention of this "basilisk"... and now I'm extremely curious. What was this idea that made so many people uncomfortable?
Edit Update: On the advice of several people, I am leaving this alone for now. If I do go ahead and read it, I'll edit this post again with my thoughts.
Thanks! I had been wishing for a PM system... and here we had one all along.
I know, it took me months to realize that the 'someone replied to me' envelope was actually a re-purposed indicator for a feature I had no idea existed.
I actually prefer conversations to be public if possible. It doesn't really harm anyone and it helps understanding of long dead threads to see more discussion of them
Some conversations are more personal and wouldn't be appropriate if public.
we don't disagree
Please abandon this project, for your safety and comfort, that of people you might tell, and that of others who your "benefactor" might be disposed to tell if you succeed in weakening someone's resolve to keep it safely secret.
Since several posters reported that they were not affected by the basilisk, I am thinking my mental safety and comfort might not be affected. (I'm assuming you're referring to the possibility of anxiety, etc? I do suffer from anxiety, but I've had to learn to deal with fairly horrific things, so I am not easily disturbed any more.) I certainly won't tell anyone, even if I had someone to tell, and if someone has resolved to keep it secret I doubt they will tell me in the first place.
I'm not too worried about finding out, though; if no one wants to say, I won't pressure anyone to. That's why I have asked someone who wasn't affected: they will surely be able to judge without fear making them irrational. If they still don't want to say, I'll just live with being curious.
I encourage you to accede to the tribal wishes and not tell anyone about the idea at least within the tribe and the scope of where lesswrong can claim any influence whatsoever (as you've already agreed). As you say, you don't sound like the sort of person who could be harmed by reading it personally so need not be concerned for your own sake.
It seems like it would be easy to predict an individual's reaction to the thing by looking for correlated reactions between that and some other things from people who have seen it all, and then seeing how a given innocent reacts to those other things.
I bet some pretty strong patterns would emerge, and we could predict reactions to the thing. I do not think that protecting people from harm now is a true objection, for it could be dealt with by identifying vulnerable people and not making the whole topic such forbidden fruit.