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This might be surpisingly common on this forum.
Somebody once posted a purely intellectual argument and there were people who were so much shocked by it that apparently they were having nightmares and even contemplated suicide.
Can I get a link to that?
Don't misunderstand me; I absolutely believe you here, I just really want to read something that had such an effect on people. It sounds fascinating.
What is being referred to is the meme known as Roko's Basilisk, which Eliezer threw a fit over and deleted from the site. If you google that phrase you can find discussions of it elsewhere. All of the following have been claimed about it:
Merely knowing what it is can expose you to a real possibility of a worse fate than you can possibly imagine.
No it won't.
Yes it will, but the fate is easily avoidable.
OMG WTF LOL!!1!l1l!one!!l!
Wait, that's it? Seriously?
I'm not exactly fit to throw stones on the topic of unreasonable fears, but you get worse than this from your average "fire and brimstone" preacher and even the people in the pews walk out at 11 yawning.
Googling the phrase "fear of hell" turns up a lot of Christian angst. Including recursive angst over whether you'll be sent to hell anyway if you're afraid of being sent to hell. For example:
And here's a hadephobic testament from the 19th century.
From the point of view of a rationalist who takes the issue of Friendly AGI seriously, the difference between the Christian doctrines of hell and the possible hells created by future AGIs is that the former is a baseless myth and the latter is a real possibility, even given a Friendly Intelligence whose love for humanity surpasses human understanding, if you are not careful to adopt correct views regarding your relationship to it.
A Christian sceptic about AGI would, of course, say exactly the same. :)
Oh, all this excitement was basically a modern-day reincarnation of the old joke...
"“It seems a Christian missionary was visiting with remote Inuit (aka, Eskimo) people in the Arctic, and had explained to this particular man that if one believed in Jesus, one would would go to heaven, while those who didn’t, would go to hell.
The Inuit asked, “What about all the people who have never heard of your Jesus? Are they all going to hell?’
The missionary explained, “No, of course not. God wants you to have a choice. God is a merciful God, he would never send anyone to hell who’d never heard of Jesus.”
The Inuit replied, “So why did you tell me?”
On the other hand, if the missionary tried to suppresses all mentions of Jesus, he would still increase the number of people who hear about him (at least if he does so in the 2000s on the public Internet), because of the Streisand effect.
<gd&r>
If you want to read the original post, there's a cached version linked from RationalWiki's LessWrong page.
Basically, it's not just what RichardKennaway wrote. It's what Richard wrote along with a rational argument that makes it all at least vaguely plausible. (Also depending on how you take the rational argument, ignorance won't necessarily save you.)
I don't know what you refer to but is that surprising? An intellectual argument can in theory convince anyone of some fact, and knowing facts can have that effect. Like people learning their religion was false, or finding out you are in a simulation, or that you are going to die or be tortured for eternity or something like that, etc.
Yeah...I've been chalking that all up to "domain expert who is smarter than me and doesn't wish to deceive me is taking this seriously, so I will too" heuristic. I suppose "overactive imagination" is another reasonable explanation.
(In my opinion, better heuristic for when you don't understand and have access to only one expert is: "Domain expert who is smarter than me and doesn't wish to deceive me tells me that it is the consensus of all the smartest and best domain experts that this is true". )