You are basically telling outsiders a strawman if you try to summarize the basilisk debate. In a lot of fields there are complex argument that seem strange and silly to outsiders, the existence of those cases is no argument against those fields.
-- A whole lot of arguments on LW seem silly to outsiders. I just got finished arguing that it's okay to kill people to take their organs (or rather, that it's okay to do so in a hypothetical situation that may not really be possible). Should that also be deleted from the site?
-- LW has a conflict of interest when deciding that some information is so easy to take out of context that it must be suppressed, but when suppressing the information also benefits LW for other reasons. Conflicts of interest should generally be avoided because of the possibility that they taint one's judgment--even if it's not possible to prove that the conflict of interest does so.
-- I am not convinced that "they're crazy enough to fall for the basilisk" is strawmanning LW. Crazy-soiunding ideas are more likely to be false than non-crazy-sounding ideas (even if you don't have the expertise to tell whether it's really crazy or just crazy-sounding). Ideas which have not been reviewed by the scientific community are more likely to be false than ideas which have. You can do a legitimate Bayseian update based on the Basilisk sounding crazy.
-- Furthermore, LW doesn't officially believe in the Basilisk. So it's not "the Basilisk sounds crazy to outsiders because they don't understand it", it's "even insiders concede that the Basilisk is crazy, it just sounds more crazy to outsiders because they don't understand it", which is a much weaker reason to suppress it than the former one.
A whole lot of arguments on LW seem silly to outsiders. I just got finished arguing that it's okay to kill people to take their organs (or rather, that it's okay to do so in a hypothetical situation that may not really be possible).
That debate is shared with academic ethics as, IIRC, a standard scenario given as criticism of some forms of utilitarian ethics, is it not? I think that's a mitigating factor. It may sound funny to discuss 'quarks' (quark quark quark! funny sound, isn't it?) or 'gluons' but that also is borrowed from an academic field.
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