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Toggle comments on [LINK] Another "LessWrongers are crazy" article - this time on Slate - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (129)
Looks like a fairly standard parable about how we should laugh at academic theorists and eggheads because of all those wacky things they think. If only Less Wrong members had the common sense of the average Salon reader, then they would instantly see through such silly dilemmas.
Giving people the chance to show up and explain that this community is Obviously Wrong And Here's Why is a pretty good way to start conversations, human nature being what it is. An opportunity to have some interesting dialogues about the broader corpus.
That said, I am in the camp that finds the referenced 'memetic hazard' to be silly. If you are the sort of person who takes it seriously, this precise form of publicity might be more troubling for the obvious 'hazard' reasons. Out of curiosity, what is the fraction of LW posters that believes this is a genuine risk?
Not sure I agree with your point. There's a standard LW idea that smart people can believe in crazy things due to their environment. For "environment" you can substitute "non-LW" or "LW" as you wish.
That's a valid point.
To the extent that the article is narrowly targeted at this website, it could be read as an 'expose' on groupthink or the dangers of epistemic closure. That's a more charitable reading. But consider sentences like: "What you are about to read may sound strange and even crazy, but some very influential and wealthy scientists and techies believe it." Which is to say, the author seems to be using LW as a centered example of the social category "intellectuals with a focus on science and technology", rather than using LW as a test case of a community with unusual conventions.
Vanishingly small - the post was deleted by Eliezer (was that what, a year ago? two?) because it gave some people he knew nightmares, but I don't remember anybody actually complaining about it. Most of the ensuing drama was about whether Eliezer was right in deleting it. The whole thing has been a waste of everybody's time and attention (as community drama over moderation almost always is).
'Moderation' was precisely the opposite of the response that occurred. Hysterical verbal abuse is not the same thing as deleting a post and mere censorship would not have created such a lasting negative impact. While 'moderator censorship' was technically involved the incident is a decidedly non-central member of that class.
Nearly four years ago to the day, going by RationalWiki's chronology.
Talking about it presumably makes it feel like a newer, fresher issue than it is.
Eliezer specifically denied the possibility of a basilisk, although no theory of acausal blackmail in reflective equilibrium exists yet.
Roko's post was deleted because of how people reacted to it, not because it was a real memetic hazard.
ETA: on a second review, that's the reason Yudkowsky gave after the fact. I'm not convinced it was his initial motivation.
Surely there's some non-zero possibility of acausal blackmail?
Well, I guess the standard caveat applies here: there's nothing that has really 0 chance of happening.
I don't know about, but if it turned out acausal blackmail was logically impossible, that would deserve a probability as small as we can allow ourselves.
Isn't this precisely what TDT solves?
I sincerely have no idea. I don't even know if TDT stands on its own as a completed theory.
Given that nobody else ever complained, AFAIK, it seem that he was the only person troubled by that post.
EDIT: not.
I got email from basilisk victims, as noted elsewhere in this thread (this is why I created the RW article, 'cos individual email doesn't scale).
Point taken.
I'd say it about as much of a risk as a self-loathing basilisk who punishes only people who supported its creation. It's wrong in the same way Pascal's Wager is wrong, with some extra creepiness added.
From what I've seen, it seems like very few people who know the basilisk believe it (<10 maybe?), but there are some people (still not a lot, but significantly more than 10), who avoid the basilisk just in case it is dangerous, because of EY's reaction.
It sounds like the actual unusual paradigm on LW is not so much "worried about the basilisk" as it is "unusually accommodating of people who worry about the basilisk".
Modest proposal: practice "ontological rejection therapy" to decrease worry about basilisks, etc.:
Negative result: Nothing happens. Gain increased sanity and epistemological confidence.
Positive result: Devoured by Mind Flayers or equivalent. Surviving peers gain experimental data of immense value.
I was getting email from LW readers obsessing and worried by the basilisk, even though they knew intellectually it was a silly idea, and unable to talk about it on LW. That's why I started the RW article (which, btw, this Slate article neither mentions nor links to), because individual email doesn't scale. None since that.
I had a similar but much lesser reaction (mildly disquieting) to the portrait of Hell given in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I found the portrait had strong immediate emotional impact. Good writing.
More strangely, even though I always had considered the probability that Hell exists as ludicrously tiny, it felt like that probability increased from the "evidence" of a fictional story.
Likely all sorts of biases involved, but is there one for strong emotions increasing assigned probability?
I found Ian M. Banks' Surface Detail to be fairly disturbing (and I'm in the Roko's-basilisk-is-ridiculous camp); even though the simulated-hell technology doesn't currently exist (AFAWK), having the salience of the possibility raised is unpleasant.
Surface Detail's portrayal of Hell struck me as ugly and vulgar but not very disturbing. Some of the gratuitous nastiness in Consider Phlebas was worse, for example (the Eaters scene in particular), and so were some of Vatueil's simulated battle scenes; I think they came across as more salient because they didn't map onto cultural tropes I'd already rejected, and because they didn't come across as being scripted for a quasi-political morality play.
I also was disgusted by "Player of Games", the only Banks novel I read. Is all of Banks' writing like this?
My first Banks was The Wasp Factory, which is pretty much a tour de force of tastelessness; all further examples are much less severe.
He tends gave one scene of severe nastiness every book.
I don't recall anything disgusting in Player of Games?
What about when the protagonist visits the brothel?
The alien culture in that one is all about brutality and domination. I didn't see a point to reading it, unless you like reading about fantasy violence.
In the context of the Culture novels, the polite way of putting it would be that Banks had a penchant for using scenes of extreme horror and depravity as contrast to the utopian aspects of his writing, not to mention the SF spy games and gun porn. I've never read a novel of his that didn't have at least some of the same, though, and I've read some of his non-SF work.
I think people totally privilege hypotheses they've read about in compelling fiction. It's taking on board fictional evidence. I find it helps to keep in mind that a plausible story has too many details to be probable - "plausible" and "probable" are somewhat opposites - though it's harder to remember for a compelling story.