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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: David_Gerard 15 February 2013 11:17PM

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Comment author: gwern 25 February 2013 04:53:06PM 19 points [-]

The real irony is that Eliezer is now a fantastic example of the commitment/sunk cost effect which he has warned against repeatedly: having made an awful decision, and followed it up with further awful decisions over years (including at least 1 Discussion post deleted today and an expansion of topics banned on LW; incidentally, Eliezer, if you're reading this, please stop marking 'minor' edits on the wiki which are obviously not minor), he is trapped into continuing his disastrous course of conduct and escalating his interventions or justifications.

And now the basilisk and the censorship are an established part of the LW or MIRI histories which no critic could possibly miss, and which pattern-matches on religion. (Stross claims that it indicates that we're "Calvinist", which is pretty hilarious for anyone who hasn't drained the term of substantive meaning and turned it into a buzzword for people they don't like.) A pity.


While we're on the topic, I also blame Yvain to some extent; if he had taken my suggestion to add a basilisk question to the past LW survey, it would be much easier to go around to all the places discussing it and say something like 'this is solely Eliezer's problem; 98% disagree with censoring it'. But he didn't, and so just as I predicted, we have lost a powerful method of damage control.

It sucks being Cassandra.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2013 05:43:32AM 3 points [-]

Gwern, I made a major Wiki edit followed by a minor edit. I wasn't aware that the latter would mask the former.

Comment author: gwern 26 February 2013 06:55:13PM 6 points [-]

When you're looking at consolidated diffs, it does. Double-checking, your last edit was marked minor, so I guess there was nothing you could've done there.

(It is good wiki editing practice to always make the minor or uncontroversial edits first, so that way your later edits can be looked at without the additional clutter of the minor edits or they can be reverted with minimal collateral damage, but that's not especially relevant in this case.)