That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.
Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.
I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.
The Basilisk story fits in with various themes of the book, such as “red pill” ideas that drive one to madness and or reveal the hidden horror at the heart of things, plus the end of humanity and various attempts to hasten or avoid it.
For the Basilisk to be an issue in the first place requires accepting a whole bunch of propositions about the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and future recoverability of information. But although this particular formulation is highly specific to the LessWrong community, as a literary phenomenon it crops up elsewhere in a variety of other guises, which is interesting.
Finally, please remember that Eliezer proposed giving lectures in a clown suit to avoid building up a cult of unnecessary formality and respect for appearances. People are awfully sensitive about the merest hint of sneer culture, and it is actually possible to have mild teasing that doesn’t result in pogroms.
Because “haha human popsicles lol” has never [possibly] resulted in gross misallocation of humanity’s resources and massive amounts of [possibly] unnecessary deaths, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha insect rights lol” has never resulted in people dismissing the [possible] horrible utilitarian catastrophe that might be going on, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that ag-gag laws are also coercively trying to ban animal rights work)
Because “haha dudes in dresses lol” has never resulted in people trying to morally and violently mandate vulnerable populations out of existence, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha adults watching cartoons lol” has never resulted in genuinely non-conforming people suffering unnecessarily, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that some laws are also coercively banning parts of it)
Because we live in a libertarian utopia where the vox populi can’t eradicate unpopular ideas by scorning dem and voting the scorn into violent enforcement
Because insiders being self-decrepating and outsiders being mocking is the exact same thing
Because none of us have ever had experience from living at the bottom of the status ladder
Because such a ladder definitely doesn’t exist and any attempts to claim that there are positions of informal power which dramatically influence the actual material effects of teasing are cultural marxism and sjw propaganda
I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #cissexism cw #transmisogyny cw #neckbeards are my ingroup #death cw #status games cw · 122 notes · source: argumate · .permalink