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gwern comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Done. Too bad the basilisk question wasn't on it; I hope that will one day be possible.
It would have been a nice insurance agains possible future PR shitstorms. Was that your primary reason for suggesting it?
Yes.
There is no disagreement that only a small percentage of LWers believe in it (just as there's no disagreement that only a small % of scientologists are even aware of the more arcane aspects of their "religion"). But yeah if you had a survey the actual % may be worth listing on RW.
Define "believe in the basilisk". Even Eliezer doesn't believe in the basilisk exactly as stated. But he does believe that basilisk-like ideas could be dangerous for basilisk-like reasons.
There's no such thing as basilisk exactly as stated, because it has never been stated exactly.
The coverage of the basilisk I've seen in the media does not include that, IIRC.
Given the widespread mockery of those aspects & their failure to keep it under wraps, I'm not sure how ignorant the rank and file these days really are.
But then, media is not really focussing on the peripheral aspects of the movement. They're interested in what's being radiated from the core, that's why it is basilisk in the spotlight and not some random insane guy pondering the efficacy of shooting people rather than blowing them up, even though the latter is in principle more outrageous.
There's just so many stupid details besides the big concepts like thetans...
The census provides a lot of ways to define core and most of them likely would give the answer that the majority of the LW core think differently than Eliezer about the basilisk.
Media is not writing about you. Or LW. It is writing about that FAI thing for which LW is just an online board that is in and of itself unremarkable.
The basilisk isn't a very central idea of that FAI thing.
If you define remarkability the way Seth Godin does, LW might be remarkable in this case.
I don't know whether FAI is central enough that a journalist get's tasked to do a story about FAI and then finds LW and writes a story about the basilisk. It might very well have been that the journalist heard about LW and then found that it makes a good publishable story.
Lastly the article that could be said to be written about me because they write directly about my person are in the context of QS and not FAI.
What counts as a central idea? Does it have to be believed by a majority of the rank and file? Or is it sufficient that it is believed by the leader?
Central ideas are those that matter for the discourse about the idea. In academia that means ideas in academic papers. Ideas that are important enough that they get space in textbooks.
Given low little academic papers MIRI publishes there might be central ideas that are unpublished and still important but I don't think the basilisk is among them by any reasonable count..
The most important tenet of the Catholic Church is probably something like "Jesus died for our sins".
The tenets of the Catholic Church that critics pay the most attention to are their beliefs on abortion, contraceptives, homosexuality, etc. even though they are widely ignored by Catholics and certainly less central than "Jesus died for our sins". Why? Because even though the church would describe them as less important, they are the ones that get non-churchmembers the most worried. And they are consequences of the church's core beliefs, even if not (by church standards) the most important ones.
And it's completely legitimate to criticize the church for its stand on abortion, and not criticize it for the matters that the church considers more important.
The basilisk is every bit as central to criticsm of LW as abortion is to criticism of Catholicism, even if it's not central to the church and most LWers don't believe it. Most Catholics are fine with abortion too.
Well, the point is, almost nobody cares about LW and where LW fits in. Few people have some ideas that are interesting due to the sheer ridiculousness, rest of the board is of no interest.
If you are dealing with media and the write partly about you, it's quite useful to understand what they do care about in more detail.