As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.
What ideas does the general population of atheists have in common besides the lack of belief in God? And what interesting ideas can you derive from that? F.Dostoevsky (who wasn't even an atheist) seems to have thought that from this one could derive that everything is morally permitted. Maybe some atheistic ideas seemed new, interesting and outlandish in the past when there were few atheists (e.g. separation of church and state), but nowadays they are part of common sense.
No, the claim of this hypothetical Chesterton would not be that atheism creates new weird ideas. It would be that by rejecting god you lose the defense against various weird ideas ("It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." - G.K.Chesterton). It is not general atheism, it is specific atheist groups. And in the history of the world, there were a lot of atheists who believed in strange things. E.g. some atheists believe in reincarnation or spiritism. Some believe that the Earth is a zoo kept by aliens. In previous times, some revolutionaries (led not by their atheism, but by other ideologies) believed that just because the social order is not god given it could be easily changed into basically anything. The hypothetical Chesterton would probably claim that had all these people closely followed church's teachings they would not have believed in these follies since the common sense provided by the traditional christianity would have prevented them. And he would probably be right. The hypthetical Chesterton would probably think that the basilisk is yet another thing in the long list of things some atheists stupidly believe.
Yes, on LessWrong the weirdness heuristic is used less than in more general atheist/skeptic community (in my previous post I have already mentioned why I think it is often useful), and it is considered bad to dismiss the idea if the only counterargument to it is that is weird. Difference in acceptance of weirdness heuristic probably comes from different mentalities: trying to become more rational vs. a more conservative strategy of trying to avoid being wrong (e.g. accepting epistemic learned helplessness when faced with weird and complicated arguments and defaulting to the mainstream position). This difference may reduce a person's defenses against various new and strange ideas. But even then, one of the most upvoted LW posts of all times already talks about this danger.
Nevertheless, while you claim that general population of atheists "laughs them off when you describe them to them.", it is my impression that the same is true here, on LessWrong, as absolute majority of LWers do not consider it as a serious thing (sadly, I do not recall any survey asking about that). It is just a small proportion of LWers that believe in this idea. Thus it cannot be "whatever makes LW different from the wider population", it must be whatever makes that small group different from the wider LW population, because even after rejecting following tradition (which would be the hypothetical Chesterton's explanation) and diminished usage of weirdness heuristic (which would be average skeptic's explanation) majority of LWers still do not believe it. And the reasons why some LWers become defensive when someone brings it up are probably very similar to those described in a blog post "Weak Men Are Superweapons" by Yvain.
One could argue that LessWrong thought made it possible to formulate such an idea. Which I had already addressed in my previous post. Once you have a wide vocabulary of ideas you can come up with many things. It is important to be able to find out if the thing you came up with is true.
I do not think that thinking about basilisk is dangerous to us. Maybe it is to some people with OCD or something similar, I do not know. I talked about absurdity, not danger. It seems to me that instead of restricting our imagination (so as to avoid coming up with absurd things), we should let it run free and try improve our ability to recognize which of these imagined ideas are actually true.
I do not know what exactly did Eliezer think when he decided. I am not him. In fact, I wasn't even there when it happened. I have no way of knowing whether he had actually had a clear reason at the time or simply freaked out and made an impulsive decision, or actually believed it at that moment (at least to the extent of being unable to immediately rule it out completely, which might have led to censor that post in order to postpone the argument). However, I have an idea which I find at least somewhat plausible. This is a guess.
Suppose even a very small number of people (let's say 2-4 people) were affected (again, let's remember that they would be very atypical, I doubt that having, e.g. OCD would be enough) in a way that instead of only worrying about this idea, they would actually take action and e.g. sell the large part of their possessions and donate it to (what was then known as) SIAI, leave their jobs to work on FAI or start donating all their income (neglecting their families) out of fear of this hypothetical torture. Now that would be a PR disaster many orders of magnitude larger than anything basilisk related we have now. Now, when people use the word "cult", they seem to seem to use it figuratively, as a hyperbole (e.g.), in that case people and organizations who monitor real cults would actually label SIAI as a literal one (whether SIAI likes it or not). Now that would be a disaster both for SIAI and the whole friendly AI project, possibly burying it forever. Considering that Eliezer worried about such things even before this whole debacle, it must have crossed his mind and this possibility must have looked very scary leading to the impulsive decision and what we can now see as improper handling of the situation.
Then why not claim that you do this for PR reasons instead of caring about psychological harm of those people? Firstly, one may actually care about those people, especially if one knows one of them personally (which seems to be the case from the screenshot provided by XiXiDu and linked by Jiro). And even in more general case, talking about caring usually looks better than talking about PR. Secondly, "stop it, it is for your own safety" probably stops more people from looking than "stop it, it might give us a bad PR" (as we can see from the recent media attention, the second reason stops basically nobody). Thirdly, even if Eliezer personally met all those people (once again, remember that they would be very atypical) affected and explicitly asked not to do anything, they would understand that he has SIAI PR at stake and thus an incentive to lie to them about what they should do, and they wouldn't want to listen to him (as even remote possibility of torture might seem scary) and, e.g. donate via another person. Or find their own ways of trying to create fAI. Or whatever they can come up with. Or find their ways to fight the possible creation of AI. Or maybe even something like this. I don't know, this idea did not cause me nightmares therefore I do not claim to understand the mindset of those people. Here I must note that in no way I am claiming that because a person has an OCD they would actually do that.
Nowadays, however, what most people seem to want to talk about is not the idea of a basilisk itself, but rather the drama surrounding it. As it is sometimes used to dismiss all LW (again, for reasons similar to this), many people get very defensive and pattern match those who bring this topic up with an intent of potentially discussing it (and related events) to trolls who do it just for the sake of trolling. Therefore this situation might feel worse for some people, especially those who are not targeted by the mass downvoting or have so much karma they can't realistically be significantly affected by it.
I feel like I am putting a lot of effort to steelman everything. I guess I, too, got very defensive, potentially for the reasons mentioned in that SlateStarCodex post. Well, maybe everything was just a combination of many stupid decisions, impulsive behaviour and after-the-fact rationalizations, which, after all, might be the simplest explanation. I don't know. Well, as I wasn't even there, there must people who would be better informed about the events and better suited to argue.
I think many users do not think it's a serious danger, but it's still banned here. It is IMO reasonable for outsiders to judge the community as a whole by our declared policies.
Coming up with absurd ideas is not a problem. Plenty of absurd things are posted on LW all the time. The problem is that the community took it as a genuine danger.
If EY made a bad decision at the time that he now disagreed with, surely he would have reversed it or at least dropped the ban for future posts. A huge part of what this site is all about is being able to recognize when yo... (read more)