xkcd on the AI box experiment

FiftyTwo

I guess there'll be a fair bit of traffic coming from people looking it up?

At this point I think the winning move is rolling with it and selling little plush basilisks as a MIRI fundraiser. It's our involuntary mascot, and we might as well 'reclaim' it in the social justice sense.

Then every time someone brings up "Less Wrong is terrified of the basilisk" we can just be like "Yes! Yes we are! Would you like to buy a plush one?" and everyone will appreciate our ability to laugh at ourselves, and they'll go back to whatever they were doing.

"selling little plush basilisks as a MIRI fundraiser."

By "selling", do you mean giving basilisks to people who give money? It seems like a more appropriate policy would be giving a plush basilisk to anyone who doesn't give money.

2Ishaan12y

It should be a snake, only with little flashing LEDs in its eyes. The canonical basilisk paralyzes you if you look at it. Flickering lights carry the danger of triggering photosensitive epilepsy, and thus are sort of real-life basilisks. Even if the epilepsy reference is lost on many, it's still clearly a giant snake thing with weird eyes and importantly you can probably get from somewhere without having to custom make them. (AFAIK Little LEDs should be too small to actually represent a threat to epileptics, and it shouldn't be any worse than any of the other flickering lights.) EDIT: Eh, I suppose it could also be stuffed with paperclips or something, if we want to pack as many memes in as possible.

0TheMajor12y

Yes, brilliant idea!

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xkcd on the AI box experiment

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xkcd on the AI box experiment

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