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Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, 23-29 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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How do you deal with the risk of people using high-power laser pointers on you? Where I am many "kids" are "playing" with strong laser pointers they ordered over the Internet. The strong ones can easily cause permanent damage or permanently blind you. If this becomes more prevalent, what can we do to protect ourselves?
Using Dark Arts for a good cause: Let's invent an urband legend about a psychopathic killer who murdered five kids who pointed at him laser pointers. Then spread the legend to make sure most of the kids in your environment (and their parents) know it.
Yeah, technically there always is a risk that this story could inspire a real mentally unstable person, but... torture versus laser pointers... I say let's do it.
Good one, although I was more thinking along the lines of glasses.
Successfully spreading the legend would keep people from playing with laser pointers, but would also lower the status of rationalists who aren't in on the plan, since they would object that there's no evidence this happened, but by hypothesis nobody would believe them. Furthermore, if you spread such rumors, you have little grounds to object the next time someone spreads a false rumor about a kid who recovered from illness using homeopathy (and you probably primed the general populace to believe such rumors anyway since you've trained them to believe things without evidence).
That's a general problem with spreading lies for a cause, of course.
I doubt it. Urban legends focusing on socially or at least parentally discouraged behavior are pretty common; witness the popular and long-lived one about the killer targeting teenagers who have sex with each other in their cars. They don't seem to deter many people, though.
Remember, by hypothesis we have kids with the resources to get dangerously powerful lasers and the will to use them. These aren't five-year-olds that can be cowed into good behavior by spinning a tale about the alligators that'll eat you if you go outside after dark; indeed, I didn't find that entirely convincing when I was five. You might even get people trying to match the legend's conditions just to see what'll happen; show of hands, who here tried to invoke Bloody Mary as a child by standing in front of a dark mirror and chanting her name?
...stand back and look at what you've written. I don't know whether to laugh or cringe. What connection could this... "Rationalist"-fanfic-thinking possibly have to the real fucking world?! This is not how urban legends work, how teenagers work, how speading disinformation works... not to mention the ethics of it (which would not come into play in practice, as you'd just get called out on your bullshit).
This sort of utter fucking idiocy comes from a long-time and highly-upvoted LW user! No wonder LW is already seen as a fucking joke in some circles, and not for the transhumanist/singularity stuff either.
And/or, it was a joke.
Was this a joke?
Do you know a fable about a boy and a wolf?