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David_Gerard comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (345)
That would only be the best response if the basilisk were indeed stupid, and there were indeed ten good reasons why. Presumably you do think it is stupid, and you have a list of reasons why; but you are not in charge. (I hope it is obvious why saying it is stupid if you believed it was not, and writing ten bad arguments to that effect, would be monumentally stupid.)
But Eliezer's reason for excluding such talk is precisely that (in his view, and he is in charge) it is not stupid, but a real hazard, the gravity of which goes way beyond the supposed effect on the reputation of LessWrong. I say "supposed" because as far as I can see, it's the clowns at RationalWiki who are trying to play this up for all it's worth. Reminds me of The Register yapping at the heels of Steve Jobs. The recent links from Stross and Marginal Revolution have been via RW. Did they just happen to take notice at the same time, or is RW evangelising this?
The current deletion policy calls such things "toxic mindwaste", which seems fair enough to me (and a concept that would be worth a Sequence-type posting of its own). I don't doubt that there are many other basilisks, but none of them have appeared on LW. Ce qu'on ne voit pas, indeed.
RW didn't push this at all. I have no idea why Warren Ellis latched onto it, though I expect that's where Charlie Stross picked it up from.
The reason the RW article exists is because we're getting the emails from your distressed children.
I can't parse this. Who are "we", "you", and the "distressed children"? I don't think I have any, even metaphorically.
It's not that hard. DG is using 'the Rational Wiki community' for 'we', 'your' refers to 'the LessWrong community', and 'distressed children' presumably refers to Dmytry, XiXi and by now, probably some others.
No, "distressed children" refers to people upset by the basilisk who feel they can't talk about it on LW so they email us, presumably as the only people on the Internet bothering to talk about LW. This was somewhat surprising.
Well then, that's the reputation problem solved. If it's only RationalWiki...
Or more likely, because RW has been the only place you could actually learn about it in the first place (for the last two years at least). So, I really don't think you have any reason to complain about getting those emails.
That's not strictly true; for instance, it may be discussed offline!
Haha, what is this offline you speak of? You're correct that I didn't think of that. However wouldn't they then already have someone to talk to about this, and not need to email people on the internet?
Either way, my point still stands. If you co-author an article on any topic X and let that article be linked to a way of contacting you (by either email or PM), then you cannot complain about people contacting you regarding topic X.
What do you tell them?
I presume it would include things that David Gerard could not repeat here. After all that's why the folk in question contacted people from the Rational Wiki community in the first place!
Actually, I may have just answered my own question by reading the RW page on the b*s*l*sk that three prominent blogs and a discussion forum recently all linked to. Does reading that calm them down?
The "So you're worrying about the Basilisk" bit is a distillation of stuff that's helped people and is specifically for that purpose. (e.g., the "Commit not to accept acausal blackmail" section strikes me as too in-universe, but XiXiDu says that idea's actually been helpful to people who've come to him.) It could probably do with more. The probability discussion in the section above arguably belongs in it, but it's still way too long.
Yes, RW was just the forum that willingly opened their doors to various anti-LW malcontents, who are themselves pushing this for all it's worth.
That's overly specific. Mostly they're folks who like to snicker at weird ideas — most of which I snicker at, too.
I didn't claim my list was exhaustive. In particular, I was thinking of Dmytry and XiXiDu, both of whom are never far away from any discussion of LW and EY that takes place off-site. The better part of comments on the RW talk pages and Charles Stross' blog concerning the basilisk are mostly copied and pasted from all their old remarks about the subject.
OK. What I heard in your earlier comment was that a wiki community was being held at fault for "opening their doors" to someone who criticized LW. Wikis are kind of known for opening their doors, and the skeptic community for being receptive to the literary genre of debunking.
That was a rather mind-killed comment.Wikis are suppoed to have open doors. RW is supposed to deal with pseudoscience, craziness and the pitfalls of religions. The Bsl*sk is easily all three.
In what way? How is merely stating it to be "mind-killed" supposed to change my mind?
You're misinformed.
My comment wasn't about whether or not RW should cover the Basilisk.
You might care about that sort of thing, you might not. I don' exactly have a complete knowledge of your psychology.
That's irrelevant. Wikis open thei doors to all contributors, and then eject those that don't behave. That's still an open door policy as opposed to invitation-only.
If it should cover the basilisk, why shouldn't it have contributions from the "malcontents".
I didn't make any such statement. Recall, DG was wondering where all this drama about the basilisk came from -- I advised him that it came from two particular users, who are well-known for bringing up this drama in many other forums and have more-or-less dominated the RW talk pages on the subject.
I didn't even say anything remotely close to that, and you know it.
Look, if this gets into metafictional causality violation, there's gonna be hell to pay.
Isn't it on RW that these people read the basilisk in the first place?
(answered at greater length elsewhere, but) This is isomorphic to saying "describing what is morally reprehensible about the God of the Old Testament causes severe distress to some theists, so atheists shouldn't talk about it either". Sunlight disinfects.