You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (345)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: drethelin 26 February 2013 08:48:14AM 11 points [-]

At this point, let's not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.

As far as I can tell the entire POINT of LW is to talk about various mental pathologies and how to avoid them or understand them even if they make you very uncomfortable to deal with or acknowledge. The reasons behind talking about the basilisk or basilisks in general (apart from metashit about censorship) are just like the reasons for talking about trolley problems even if they make people angry or unhappy. What do you do when your moral intuitions seem to break down? What do you do about compartmentalization or the lack of it? Do you bite bullets? Maybe the mother should be allowed to buy acid.

To get back to meta shit: If people are complaining about the censorship and you are sick of the complaints, the simplest way to stop them is to stop the censorship. If someone tells you there's a problem, the response of "Quit your bitching, it's annoying" is rarely appropriate or even reasonable. Being annoying is the point of even lameass activism like this. I personally think any discussion of the actual basilisk has reached every conclusion it's ever really going to reach by now, pretty reasonably demonstrated by looking at the uncensored thread, and the only thing even keeping it in anyone's consciousness is the continued ballyhooing about memetic hazards.