You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

JoshuaFox comments on xkcd on the AI box experiment - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: FiftyTwo 21 November 2014 08:26AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (229)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Sysice 21 November 2014 08:36:40AM *  19 points [-]

It might be useful to feature a page containing what we, you know, actually think about the basilisk idea. Although the rationalwiki page seems to be pretty solidly on top of google search, we might catch a couple people looking for the source.

If any XKCD readers are here: Welcome! I assume you've already googled what "Roko's Basilisk" is. For a better idea of what's going on with this idea, see Eliezer's comment on the xkcd thread (linked in Emile's comment), or his earlier response here.

Comment author: JoshuaFox 22 November 2014 04:42:22PM 2 points [-]

That explanation by Eliezer cleared things up for me. He really should have explained himself earlier. I actually had some vague understanding of what Eliezer was doing with his deletion and refusal to discuss the topic, but as usual, Eliezer's explanation make things that I thought I sort-of-knew seem obvious in retrospect.

And as Eliezer realizes, the attempt to hush things up was a mistake. Roko's post should have been taken as a teaching moment.