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roystgnr comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong
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At this point, there should be little doubt that the best response to this "basilisk" would have been "That's stupid. Here are ten reasons why.", rather than (paraphrasing for humor) "That's getting erased from the internet. No, I haven't heard the phrase 'Streisand Effect' before; why do you ask?"
The real irony is that Eliezer is now a fantastic example of the commitment/sunk cost effect which he has warned against repeatedly: having made an awful decision, and followed it up with further awful decisions over years (including at least 1 Discussion post deleted today and an expansion of topics banned on LW; incidentally, Eliezer, if you're reading this, please stop marking 'minor' edits on the wiki which are obviously not minor), he is trapped into continuing his disastrous course of conduct and escalating his interventions or justifications.
And now the basilisk and the censorship are an established part of the LW or MIRI histories which no critic could possibly miss, and which pattern-matches on religion. (Stross claims that it indicates that we're "Calvinist", which is pretty hilarious for anyone who hasn't drained the term of substantive meaning and turned it into a buzzword for people they don't like.) A pity.
While we're on the topic, I also blame Yvain to some extent; if he had taken my suggestion to add a basilisk question to the past LW survey, it would be much easier to go around to all the places discussing it and say something like 'this is solely Eliezer's problem; 98% disagree with censoring it'. But he didn't, and so just as I predicted, we have lost a powerful method of damage control.
It sucks being Cassandra.
That's already true without the basilisk and censorship. The similarities between transhumanism and religion have been remarked on for about as long as transhumanism has been a thing.
An additional item to pattern-match onto religion, perhaps I should have said.
Also, note that this wasn't an unsolicited suggestion: in the post to which gwern's comment was posted, Yvan actually said that he was "willing to include any question you want in the Super Extra Bonus Questions section [of the survey], as long as it is not offensive, super-long-and-involved, or really dumb." And those are Yvain's italics.
Gwern, I made a major Wiki edit followed by a minor edit. I wasn't aware that the latter would mask the former.
When you're looking at consolidated diffs, it does. Double-checking, your last edit was marked minor, so I guess there was nothing you could've done there.
(It is good wiki editing practice to always make the minor or uncontroversial edits first, so that way your later edits can be looked at without the additional clutter of the minor edits or they can be reverted with minimal collateral damage, but that's not especially relevant in this case.)
Let me consult my own crystal ball... Yes, the mists of time are parting. I see... I see... I see, a few years from now, a TED panel discussion on "Applied Theology", chaired by Vernor Vinge, in which Eliezer, Roko, and Will Newsome discuss the pros and cons of life in an acausal multiverse of feuding superintelligences.
The spirits have spoken!
I'm looking forward to that.
At this point it is this annoying, toxic meta discussion that is the problem.
It's too late. This poll is in the wrong place (attracting only those interested in it), will get too few responses (certainly not >1000), and is now obviously in reaction to much more major coverage than before so the responses are contaminated.
Actually, I was hoping to find some strong correlation between support for the troll toll and support for the basilisk censorship so that I could use the number of people who would have supported the censorship from the answers to the toll question in the survey. But it turns out that the fraction of censorship supporters is about 30% both among toll supporters and among toll opposers. (But the respondents to my poll are unlikely to be an unbiased sample of all LWers.)
The 'troll toll' question misses most of the significant issue (as far as I'm concerned). I support the troll toll but have nothing but contempt for Eliezer's behavior, comments, reasoning and signalling while implementing the troll toll. And in my judgement most of the mutual information with the censorship or Roko's Basilisk is about those issues (things like overconfidence, and various biases of the kind Gwern describes) is to do with the judgement of competence based on that behavior rather than the technical change to the lesswrong software.
Just to be charitable to Eliezer, let me remind you of this quote. For example, can you conceive of a reason (not necessarily the officially stated one) that the actual basilisk discussion ought to be suppressed, even at the cost of the damage done to LW credibility (such as it is) by an offsite discussion of such suppression?
I thought this is more akin to Scientology, where any mention of Xenu to the uninitiated ought to be suppressed.
Sure does. Then again, it probably sucks more being Laocoön.
The basilisk is harmless. Eliezer knows this. The streisand effect was the intended consequence of the censor. The hope is that people who become aware of the basilisk will increase their priors for the existence of real information hazards, and will in the future be less likely to read anything marked as such. It's all a clever memetic inoculation program!
disclaimer : I don't actually believe this.
Another possibility: Eliezer doesn't object to the meme that anyone who doesn't donate to SIAI/MIRI will spend eternity in hell being spread in a deniable way.
Why stop there? In fact, Roko was one of Eliezer's many socks puppets. It's your basic Ender's Game stuff.
We are actually all Eliezer's sock puppets. Most of us unfortunately are straw men.
We are the hollow men / we are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! / Our dried comments when / we discuss together / Are quiet and meaningless / As median-cited papers / or reports of supplements / on the Internet.
Another possibility: Eliezer does not want the meme to be associated with LW. Because, even if it was written by someone else, most people are predictably likely to read it and remember: "This is an idea I read on LW, so this must be what they believe."
It's certainly an inoculation for information hazards. Or at least against believing information hazard warnings.
Alternatively, the people dismissing the idea out of hand are not taking it seriously and thus not triggering the information hazard.
Also the censorship of the basilisk was by no means the most troubling part of the Roko incident, and as long as people focus on that they're not focusing on the more disturbing issues.
Edit: The most troubling part were some comments, also deleted, indicating just how fanatically loyal some of Eliezer's followers are.
Really? Or do you just want us to believe that you don't believe this???
No. I have watched Eliezer make this unforced error now for years, sliding into an obvious and common failure mode, with mounting evidence that censorship is, was, and will be a bad idea, and I have still not seen any remotely plausible explanation for why it's worthwhile.
Just to take this most recent Stross post: he has similar traffic to me as far as I can tell, which means that since I get ~4000 unique visitors a day, he gets as many and often many more. A good chunk will be to his latest blog post, and it will go on being visited for years on end. If it hits the front page of Hacker News as more than a few of his blog posts do, it will quickly spike to 20k+ uniques in just a day or two. (In this case, it didn't.) So we are talking, over the next year, easily 100,000 people being exposed to this presentation of the basilisk (just need average 274 uniques a day). 100k people being exposed to something which will strike them as patent nonsense, from a trusted source like Stross.
So maybe there used to be some sort of justification behind the sunk costs and obtinacy and courting of the Streisand effect. Does this justification also justify trashing LW/MIRI's reputation among literally hundreds of thousands of people?
You may have a witty quote, which is swell, but I'm afraid it doesn't help me see what justification there could be.
Laocoön died quickly and relatively cleanly by serpent; Cassandra saw all her predictions (not just one) come true, was raped, abducted, kept as a concubine, and then murdered.
I wouldn't call him that, and not because I have any doubt about his trustworthiness. It's the other word, "source", that I wouldn't apply. He's a professional SF author. His business is to entertain with ideas, and his blog is part of that. I wouldn't go there in search of serious analysis of anything, any more than I would look for that on RationalWiki. Both the article in question and the comments on it are pretty much on a par with RationalWiki's approach. In fact (ungrounded speculation alert), I have to wonder how many of the commenters there are RW regulars, there to fan the flame.
Stross is widely read, cited, and quoted approvingly, on his blog and off (eg. Hacker News). He is a trusted source for many geeks.
RationalWiki's new coat-of-arms is a troll riding a basilisk.
What if he CAN'T conceive a reason? Can you conceive a possibility that it might be for other reason than Gwern being less intelligent then EY? For example, Gwern might be more intelligent than EY.
Did you happen to catch the deleted post? Was there any interesting reasoning contained therein? If so, who was the author and did they keep a backup that they would be willing to email me? (If they did not keep a backup... that was overwhelmingly shortsighted unless they are completely unfamiliar with the social context!)
I saw it. I contained just a link and the a line asking for "thoughts" or words to that effect. Maybe there was a quote - certainly nothing new or origional.
Thanks. I've been sent links to all the recently deleted content and can confirm that nothing groundbreaking was lost.
I'm not convinced the Streisand Effect is actually real. It seems like an instance of survival bias. After all, you shouldn't expect to hear about the cases when information was successfully suppressed.
This is a bizarre position to take. The effect does not constitute a claim that all else being equal attempts to suppress information are negatively successful. Instead it describes those cases where information is published more widely due to the suppression attempt. This clearly happens sometimes. The Wikipedia article gives plenty of unambiguous examples.
It would be absurd to believe that the number in question would have been made into T-shirts, tattoos and a popular YouTube song no attempt was made to suppress it. That doesn't mean (or require) that in other cases (and particularly in other cases where the technological and social environment was completely different) that sometimes powerful figures are successful in suppressing information.
Heck, there is little doubt that even your paraphrased humorous alternative would have been much better than what actually happened. It's not often that satirical caricatures are actually better than what they are based on!
That would only be the best response if the basilisk were indeed stupid, and there were indeed ten good reasons why. Presumably you do think it is stupid, and you have a list of reasons why; but you are not in charge. (I hope it is obvious why saying it is stupid if you believed it was not, and writing ten bad arguments to that effect, would be monumentally stupid.)
But Eliezer's reason for excluding such talk is precisely that (in his view, and he is in charge) it is not stupid, but a real hazard, the gravity of which goes way beyond the supposed effect on the reputation of LessWrong. I say "supposed" because as far as I can see, it's the clowns at RationalWiki who are trying to play this up for all it's worth. Reminds me of The Register yapping at the heels of Steve Jobs. The recent links from Stross and Marginal Revolution have been via RW. Did they just happen to take notice at the same time, or is RW evangelising this?
The current deletion policy calls such things "toxic mindwaste", which seems fair enough to me (and a concept that would be worth a Sequence-type posting of its own). I don't doubt that there are many other basilisks, but none of them have appeared on LW. Ce qu'on ne voit pas, indeed.
RW didn't push this at all. I have no idea why Warren Ellis latched onto it, though I expect that's where Charlie Stross picked it up from.
The reason the RW article exists is because we're getting the emails from your distressed children.
I can't parse this. Who are "we", "you", and the "distressed children"? I don't think I have any, even metaphorically.
It's not that hard. DG is using 'the Rational Wiki community' for 'we', 'your' refers to 'the LessWrong community', and 'distressed children' presumably refers to Dmytry, XiXi and by now, probably some others.
No, "distressed children" refers to people upset by the basilisk who feel they can't talk about it on LW so they email us, presumably as the only people on the Internet bothering to talk about LW. This was somewhat surprising.
Well then, that's the reputation problem solved. If it's only RationalWiki...
Or more likely, because RW has been the only place you could actually learn about it in the first place (for the last two years at least). So, I really don't think you have any reason to complain about getting those emails.
That's not strictly true; for instance, it may be discussed offline!
Haha, what is this offline you speak of? You're correct that I didn't think of that. However wouldn't they then already have someone to talk to about this, and not need to email people on the internet?
Either way, my point still stands. If you co-author an article on any topic X and let that article be linked to a way of contacting you (by either email or PM), then you cannot complain about people contacting you regarding topic X.
What do you tell them?
I presume it would include things that David Gerard could not repeat here. After all that's why the folk in question contacted people from the Rational Wiki community in the first place!
Actually, I may have just answered my own question by reading the RW page on the b*s*l*sk that three prominent blogs and a discussion forum recently all linked to. Does reading that calm them down?
Yes, RW was just the forum that willingly opened their doors to various anti-LW malcontents, who are themselves pushing this for all it's worth.
That's overly specific. Mostly they're folks who like to snicker at weird ideas — most of which I snicker at, too.
I didn't claim my list was exhaustive. In particular, I was thinking of Dmytry and XiXiDu, both of whom are never far away from any discussion of LW and EY that takes place off-site. The better part of comments on the RW talk pages and Charles Stross' blog concerning the basilisk are mostly copied and pasted from all their old remarks about the subject.
OK. What I heard in your earlier comment was that a wiki community was being held at fault for "opening their doors" to someone who criticized LW. Wikis are kind of known for opening their doors, and the skeptic community for being receptive to the literary genre of debunking.
That was a rather mind-killed comment.Wikis are suppoed to have open doors. RW is supposed to deal with pseudoscience, craziness and the pitfalls of religions. The Bsl*sk is easily all three.
In what way? How is merely stating it to be "mind-killed" supposed to change my mind?
You're misinformed.
My comment wasn't about whether or not RW should cover the Basilisk.
You might care about that sort of thing, you might not. I don' exactly have a complete knowledge of your psychology.
That's irrelevant. Wikis open thei doors to all contributors, and then eject those that don't behave. That's still an open door policy as opposed to invitation-only.
If it should cover the basilisk, why shouldn't it have contributions from the "malcontents".
I didn't make any such statement. Recall, DG was wondering where all this drama about the basilisk came from -- I advised him that it came from two particular users, who are well-known for bringing up this drama in many other forums and have more-or-less dominated the RW talk pages on the subject.
Isn't it on RW that these people read the basilisk in the first place?
(answered at greater length elsewhere, but) This is isomorphic to saying "describing what is morally reprehensible about the God of the Old Testament causes severe distress to some theists, so atheists shouldn't talk about it either". Sunlight disinfects.