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David_Gerard comments on [LINK] Another "LessWrongers are crazy" article - this time on Slate - Less Wrong
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The debates are not technically, banned, but there are still strict limits on what we're allowed to say. We cannot, for instance, have an actual discussion about why the basilisk wouldn't work.
Furthermore, there are aspects other than the ban that make LW look bad. Just the fact that people fall for the basilisk makes LW look bad all by itself. You could argue that the people who fall for the basilisk are mentally unstable, but having too many mentally unstable people or being too willing to limit normal people for the sake of mentally unstable people makes us look bad too. Ultimately, the problem is that "looking bad" happens because there are aspects of LW that people consider to be bad. It's not just a public relations problem--the basilisk demonstrates a lack of rationality on LW and the only way to fix the bad perception is to fix the lack of rationality.
One of the problems is that the basilisk is very weird, but the prerequisites - which are mostly straight out of the Sequences - are also individually weird. So explaining the basilisk to people who haven't read the Sequences through a few times and haven't been reading LessWrong for years is ... a bit of work.
Presumably, you don't believe the basilisk would work.
If you don't believe the basilisk would work, then it really doesn't matter all that much that people don't understand the prerequisites. After all, even understanding the prerequisites won't change their opinion of whether the basilisk is correct. (I suppose that understanding the sequences may change the degree of incorrectness--going from crazy and illogical to just normally illogical--but I've yet to see anyone argue this.)
Are you saying it's meaningless to tell someone about the prerequisites - which, as I note, are pretty much straight out of the Sequences - unless they think the basilisk would work?
It's not meaningless in general, but it's meaningless for the purpose of deciding that they shouldn't see the basilisk because they'd misunderstand it. They don't misunderstand it--they know that it's false, and if they read the sequences they'd still know that it's false.
As I pointed out, you could still argue that they'd misunderstand the degree to which the basilisk is false, but I've yet to see anyone argue that.