XiXiDu comments on [LINK] Another "LessWrongers are crazy" article - this time on Slate - Less Wrong

9 Post author: CronoDAS 18 July 2014 04:57AM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 18 July 2014 10:27:19AM *  7 points [-]

Eliezer Yudkowsky's reasons for banning Roko's post have always been somewhat vague. But I don't think he did it solely because it could cause some people nightmares.

(1) In one of his original replies to Roko’s post (please read the full comment, it is highly ambiguous) he states his reasons for banning Roko’s post, and for writing his comment (emphasis mine):

I’m banning this post so that it doesn’t (a) give people horrible nightmares and (b) give distant superintelligences a motive to follow through on blackmail against people dumb enough to think about them in sufficient detail, though, thankfully, I doubt anyone dumb enough to do this knows the sufficient detail. (I’m not sure I know the sufficient detail.)

…and further…

For those who have no idea why I’m using capital letters for something that just sounds like a random crazy idea, and worry that it means I’m as crazy as Roko, the gist of it was that he just did something that potentially gives superintelligences an increased motive to do extremely evil things in an attempt to blackmail us. It is the sort of thing you want to be EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE about NOT DOING.

His comment indicates that he doesn’t believe that this could currently work. Yet he also does not seem to dismiss some current and future danger. Why didn’t he clearly state that there is nothing to worry about?

(2) The following comment by Mitchell Porter, to which Yudkowsky replies “This part is all correct AFAICT.”:

It’s clear that the basilisk was censored, not just to save unlucky susceptible people from the trauma of imagining that they were being acausally blackmailed, but because Eliezer judged that acausal blackmail might actually be possible. The thinking was: maybe it’s possible, maybe it’s not, but it’s bad enough and possible enough that the idea should be squelched, lest some of the readers actually stumble into an abusive acausal relationship with a distant evil AI.

If Yudkowsky really thought it was irrational to worry about any part of it, why didn't he allow people to discuss it on LessWrong, where he and others could debunk it?

Comment author: [deleted] 18 July 2014 01:27:14PM *  11 points [-]

"Doesn't work against a perfectly rational, informed agent" does not preclude "works quite well against naïve, stupid newbie LW'ers that haven't properly digested the sequences."

Memetic hazard is not a fancy word for coverup. It means that the average person accessing the information is likely to reach dangerous conclusions. That says more about the average of humanity than the information itself.

Comment author: lfghjkl 18 July 2014 04:43:28PM *  9 points [-]

Good point. To build on that here's something I thought of when trying (but most likely not succeeding) to model/steelman Eliezer's thoughts at the time of his decision:

This basilisk is clearly bullshit, but there's a small (and maybe not vanishingly small) chance that with enough discussion people can come up with a sequence of "improved" basilisks that suffer from less and less obvious flaws until we end up with one worth taking seriously. It's probably better to just nip this one in the bud. Also, creating and debunking all these basilisks would be a huge waste of time.

At least Eliezer's move has focused all attention on the current (and easily debunked) basilisk, and it has made it sufficiently low-status to try and think of a better one. So in this sense it could even be called a success.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 July 2014 11:10:44PM 11 points [-]

I would not call it a success. Sufficiently small silver linings are not worth focusing on with large-enough clouds.

Comment author: Emile 18 July 2014 11:53:02AM 3 points [-]

There were several possible fairly-good reasons for deleting that post, and also fairly good reasons for giving Eliezer some discretion as to what kind of stuff he can ban. Going over those reasons (again) is probably a waste of everybody's times. Who cares about whether a decision taken years ago was sensible, or slightly-wrong-but-within-reason, or wrong-but-only-in-hindsight, etc. ?

Comment author: Rain 18 July 2014 08:40:26PM 9 points [-]

Who cares about whether a decision taken years ago was sensible, or slightly-wrong-but-within-reason, or wrong-but-only-in-hindsight, etc. ?

XiXiDu cares about every Eliezer potential-mistake.

Comment author: Jiro 20 July 2014 03:44:11AM *  2 points [-]

We're discussing an article that judges LW for believing in the basilisk. Whether the founder believes in the basilisk is a lot more pertinent to judging LW than whether some randomly chosen person on LW believes in it, so there's a good reason to discuss Eliezer's belief specifically.

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