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chaosmage comments on xkcd on the AI box experiment - Less Wrong
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I'm actually grateful for having heard about that Basilisk story, because it helped me see Eliezer Yudkowsky is actually human. This may seem stupid, but for quite a while, I idealized him to an unhealthy degree. Now he's still my favorite writer in the history of ever and I trust his judgement way over my own, but I'm able (with some System 2 effort) to disagree with him on specific points.
I can't think I'm entirely alone in this, either. With the plethora of saints and gurus who are about, it does seem evident that human (especially male) psychology has a "mindless follower switch" that just suspends all doubt about the judgement of agents who are beyond some threshold of perceived competence.
Of course such a switch makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it is still a fallible heuristic, and I'm glad to have become aware of it - and the Basilisk helped me get there. So thanks Roko!
Yeah, you gotta work on that hero worship thing, still ways to go.
This is a good point. I've gotten past my spiral around Eliezer and am working on crawling out of a similar whirlpool around Yvain, and I think that Elizer's egotistical style, even if it is somewhat justified, plays a big part in sending people down that spiral around him. Seeing him being sort of punctured might be useful, even though I'm sure it's awful for him personally.
What makes you think it's more common in males?
It seems that strictly hierarchical systems, such as military officers and clergy, are practically entirely dominated by males. When you include historical examples from around the world, the skewedness of these hierarchies towards male members is - in my estimation - too strong to be entirely cultural.
It'd be easy to come up with evopsych narratives to make this plausible (along the lines of the Expendable Male argument), but I think the sociological/historical evidence is strong enough by itself.