= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobbBB comments on A few misconceptions surrounding Roko's basilisk - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (125)
I'm new to the subject, so I'm sorry if the following is obvious or completely wrong, but the comment left by Eliezer doesn't seem like something that would be written by a smart person who is trying to suppress information. I seriously doubt that EY didn't know about Streisand effect.
However the comment does seem like something that would be written by a smart person who is trying to create a meme or promote his blog.
In HPMOR characters give each other advice "to understand a plot, assume that what happened was the intended result, and look at who benefits." The idea of Roko's basilisk went viral and lesswrong.com got a lot of traffic from popular news sites(I'm assuming).
I also don't think that there's anything wrong with it, I'm just sayin'.
The line goes "to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited". But in the real world strange secret complicated Machiavellian plots are pretty rare, and successful strange secret complicated Machiavellian plots are even rarer. So I'd be wary of applying this rule to explain big once-off events outside of fiction. (Even to HPMoR's author!)
I agree Eliezer didn't seem to be trying very hard to suppress information. I think that's probably just because he's a human, and humans get angry when they see other humans defecting from a (perceived) social norm, and anger plus time pressure causes hasty dumb decisions. I don't think this is super complicated. Though I hope he'd have acted differently if he thought the infohazard risk was really severe, as opposed to just not-vanishingly-small.