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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion
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If such a universal basilisk exists, wouldn't it almost by definition kill the person who discovered it?
I think it's vaguely plausible such a basilisk exists, but I also think you are suffering from the halo effect around EY. Why would he of all people know about the basilisk? He's just some blogger you read who says things as though they are Deep Wisdom so people will pay attention.
There are a bunch of tricks that lets you immunize yourself to classes of basilisks, without having access to the specific basilisk- sort of like vaccination, you deliberately infect yourself with a non-lethal variant first.
Eliezer has demonstrated all the skills needed to construct basilisks, is very smart, and have shown to recognize the danger of basilisks. I don't think that's a very common combination, but conditional on eliezer having basilisk weapons most others fitting that description equally well probably do as well.
Wouldn't the world be observably different if everyone of EY's intellectual ability or above had access to a basilisk kill agent? And wouldn't we expect a rash of inexplicable deaths in people who are capable of constructing a basilisk but not vaccinating themselves?
Not necessarily. If I did, in fact, possess such a basilisk, I cannot think offhand of any occasion where I would have actually used it. Robert Mugabe doesn't read my emails, it's not clear that killing him saves Zimbabwe, I have ethical inhibitions that I consider to exist for good reasons, and have you thought about what happens if somebody else glances at the computer screen afterward, and resulting events lead to many agents/groups possessing a basilisk?
It would guarantee drastic improvements in secure, trusted communication protocols and completely cure internet addiction (among the comparatively few survivors).
Are basilisks necessarily fatal? If the majority of basilisks caused insanity or the loss of intellectual capacity instead of death, I would expect to see a large group of people who considered themselves capable of constructing basilisks, but who on inspection turned out to be crazy or not nearly that bright after all.
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Oh, shit.
The post specified fatal so I followed it.
For non-fatal basilisks we'd expect to see people flipping suddenly from highly intelligent and sane, to stupid and/or crazy. Specifically after researching basilisk related topics.
Yes, this can also be reversed for a good way to see what topics are practically basilisk construction related.
Yes, but you would get false positives too, such as chess (scroll down to “Real Life” -- warning: TVTropes). Edited to fix link syntax -- how comes after all these months I still get it wrong this often?
Yup, this is entirely correct. Learned that the hard way. Vastly so, with such weak basilisks constantly arising from random noise in the memepool, while even knowing how and having all the necessary ingredients a Eliezer-class mind is likely needed for a lethal one.
Great practice for FAI in a way, in that as soon as you make a single misstep you've lost everything forever and wont even know it. Don't try this at home.
First of, there aren't nearly enough people for it to be any kind of "rash", secondly they must be researching a narrow range of topics where basilisks occur, thirdly they'd go insane and lose the basilisk creation capacity way before they got to deliberately lethal ones, and finally anyone smart enough to be able to do that is smart enough not to do it.