Either the forbidden post is false, in which case it does not deserve protection because it’s false, or it’s true, in which case it should be censored because no informed person should want to see it.
Excluded middle, of course: incorrect criterion. (Was this intended as a test?) It would not deserve protection if it were useless (like spam), not “if it were false.”
The reason I consider sufficient to keep it off LessWrong is that it actually hurt actual people. That’s pretty convincing to me. I wouldn’t expunge it from the Internet (though I might put a warning label on it), but from LW? Appropriate. Reposting it here? Rude.
Unfortunately, that’s also an argument as to why it needs serious thought applied to it, because if the results of decompartmentalised thinking can lead there, humans need to be able to handle them. As Vaniver pointed out, there are previous historical texts that have had similar effects. Rationalists need to be able to cope with such things, as they have learnt to cope with previous conceptual basilisks. So it’s legitimate LessWrong material at the same time as being inappropriate for here. Tricky one.
(To the ends of that “compartmentalisation” link, by the way, I’m interested in past examples of basilisks and other motifs of harmful sensation in idea form. Yes, I have the deleted Wikipedia article.)
Note that I personally found the idea itself silly at best.
Excluded middle, of course: incorrect criterion. (Was this intended as a test?) It would not deserve protection if it were useless (like spam), not “if it were false.”
The reason I consider sufficient to keep it off LessWrong is that it actually hurt actual people. That’s pretty convincing to me. I wouldn’t expunge it from the Internet (though I might put a warning label on it), but from LW? Appropriate. Reposting it here? Rude.
Unfortunately, that’s also an argument as to why it needs serious thought applied to it, because if the results of decompartmentalised thinking can lead there, humans need to be able to handle them. As Vaniver pointed out, there are previous historical texts that have had similar effects. Rationalists need to be able to cope with such things, as they have learnt to cope with previous conceptual basilisks. So it’s legitimate LessWrong material at the same time as being inappropriate for here. Tricky one.
(To the ends of that “compartmentalisation” link, by the way, I’m interested in past examples of basilisks and other motifs of harmful sensation in idea form. Yes, I have the deleted Wikipedia article.)
Note that I personally found the idea itself silly at best.