I’m going to channel gwern from last year: give us a question that allows us to express disaproval about the handeling of the basilisk.
When I was interviewed about Friendship is Optimal, there was a minor side discussion in the comments on the interview. The comments were nonspecific enough that I think it’s OK linking there; I’m pointing out that this is not going away since this came up with no prompting on something that only mentioned LessWrong. That interview is from 3 months ago, nearly a year after Yvain rejected having a basilisk question on the 2012 census.
This is still an issue. It will continue to be an issue. The way forward through this issue is to have something linkable that suggests that “XX% of LessWrongers (dis)agreed with the handling of the situation,” so that the next time (Xixidu / RW / some internet rando) mentions the situation, we can point out that what the majority of LessWrongers actually think. (The phrasing there obviously suggests what I think, but if the results come back the other way, that too is useful information!)
I suppose it would be interesting to see if there is anyone left who does approve of how the basilisk was handled. I haven’t been able to find anyone defending it recently, and Eliezer himself has implied that he now believes his response to the situation was counterproductive.
What would be the purpose of this question? It’s too tempting to signal a contrarian “I am not in a cult” attitude by answering negatively. It is extremely hard to put oneself into Eliezer’s shoes when he had to make a decision without knowing the repercussions, like Roko quitting with a bang, the resulting Streisand effect, etc. I suspect that Eliezer had to make similarly unpleasant decisions more than once, and most of them did not backfire as spectacularly. One recent example was handling eridu’s posting on radical feminism, which had a potential to blow up but didn’t.
What would be the purpose of this question? It’s too tempting to signal a contrarian “I am not in a cult” attitude by answering negatively.
You don’t really believe that this question’s results would be meaningless. If we put the question in and the results were 100% ‘I endorse Eliezer’s handling of the basilisk’, would you and everyone else simply ignore this, saying “it’s too tempting to signal loyalty to prominent figures and willingness to make sacrifices”? No, of course not, you would make use of this evidence and cite it in future discussions.
And if one outcome is meaningful, then by conservation of evidence, the other outcomes (like, say, 90% polled expressing disapproval) are also evidence.
I suppose it would be interesting to see if there is anyone left who does approve of how the basilisk was handled.
As opposed to which other specific possible way of handling it?
For example I may think that there were both better choices and worse choices, and the Eliezer’s choice wasn’t optimal, but also wasn’t obviously bad. Now do I agree or disagree?
That’s more approval than I was expecting anyone to still have. But it seems like it would be easy to offer a range of choices that would cover most of the possibilities (“was handled perfectly”, “was handled fine”, “was handled badly but not especially so”, “was handled badly enough that it should lead to policy changes”).
That said I think the question I’m most interested in is how many people think the current approach is better than the “null option”: no special treatment, discuss it normally the way we discuss anything else, and apply the usual up- and downvotes to basilisk-related content.
Saying “I disagree” does not say what the person would prefer instead. It creates a non-natural cluster of people preferring various kinds of alternative solutions. A list of choices would give more information. For example “moderator should ignore it completely”, “moderator should use a private message to suggest retracting the comment”, “moderator should move all related comments to a separate discussion”, etc.
In that way the people who think there should be a specific basilisk-related thread with trigger warnings don’t end up in the same set as e.g. the people who think the site should be completely unmoderated. (And maybe we could get a result that most people think Eliezer should have done something else, but there is no general consensus about what specifically it should be, so it is likely that if Eliezer had actually done something else, he would still get a lot of criticism. You can’t get this information by posing a dilemma of “I agree” and “I disagree”.)
Alternatively, I’d like to have an answer: “I don’t fucking care. Forever obsessing over a one-time event that happened years ago is more harmful than the event itself.” Which is connotationally completely different from both “I agree” and “I disagree”.
How many people have been or are still worried about the basilisk is more important than whether people disagree with how it has been handled. It is possible to be worried and disagree about how it was handled if you expect that maintaining silence about its perceived danger would have exposed less people to it.
In any case, I expect LessWrong to be smart enough to dismiss the basilisk in a survey, in order to not look foolish for taking it seriously. So any such question would be of little value as long as you do not take measures to make sure that people are not lying. Which would be possible by e.g. asking specific multiple choice questions that can only be answered correctly if someone e.g. read the RationalWiki entry about the basilisk, or the LessWrong Wiki entry that amusingly reveals most of the detail but which nobody who cares has taken note of so far. Anyone who is seriously worried about it would not take the risk of reading up on the details.
Seconding this. I can theoretically accept that there might well be logic bombs, or even just points of discussion that are downvote bait. But even outside of the practical and ideological issues, the current strategy just isn’t working, and it’s a really stupid thing to be having problems with.
But even outside of the practical and ideological issues, the current strategy just isn’t working,
I’m not sure about that. I believe Eliezer’s goal was to keep people from thinking seriously about the topic, from that point of view the current strategy appears to be working just fine.
I believe Eliezer’s goal was to keep people from thinking seriously about the topic, from that point of view the current strategy appears to be working just fine.
There’s not been much discussion here, but it’s been discussed in a number of other areas, to such an extent that there are 1 RB search result to every 9 TDT search result. From a cursory examination, a significant amount seems serious enough to involve deep enough discussion of the topic to cause either evilSuperintelligence issues or possible psychological harm.
It could have been more prominent, of course, but I’m not convinced that it didn’t reach greater levels of discussion because of Yudkowsky’s response.
I’m going to channel gwern from last year: give us a question that allows us to express disaproval about the handeling of the basilisk.
When I was interviewed about Friendship is Optimal, there was a minor side discussion in the comments on the interview. The comments were nonspecific enough that I think it’s OK linking there; I’m pointing out that this is not going away since this came up with no prompting on something that only mentioned LessWrong. That interview is from 3 months ago, nearly a year after Yvain rejected having a basilisk question on the 2012 census.
This is still an issue. It will continue to be an issue. The way forward through this issue is to have something linkable that suggests that “XX% of LessWrongers (dis)agreed with the handling of the situation,” so that the next time (Xixidu / RW / some internet rando) mentions the situation, we can point out that what the majority of LessWrongers actually think. (The phrasing there obviously suggests what I think, but if the results come back the other way, that too is useful information!)
I suppose it would be interesting to see if there is anyone left who does approve of how the basilisk was handled. I haven’t been able to find anyone defending it recently, and Eliezer himself has implied that he now believes his response to the situation was counterproductive.
What would be the purpose of this question? It’s too tempting to signal a contrarian “I am not in a cult” attitude by answering negatively. It is extremely hard to put oneself into Eliezer’s shoes when he had to make a decision without knowing the repercussions, like Roko quitting with a bang, the resulting Streisand effect, etc. I suspect that Eliezer had to make similarly unpleasant decisions more than once, and most of them did not backfire as spectacularly. One recent example was handling eridu’s posting on radical feminism, which had a potential to blow up but didn’t.
You don’t really believe that this question’s results would be meaningless. If we put the question in and the results were 100% ‘I endorse Eliezer’s handling of the basilisk’, would you and everyone else simply ignore this, saying “it’s too tempting to signal loyalty to prominent figures and willingness to make sacrifices”? No, of course not, you would make use of this evidence and cite it in future discussions.
And if one outcome is meaningful, then by conservation of evidence, the other outcomes (like, say, 90% polled expressing disapproval) are also evidence.
What was the story there? I assumed that eridu simply decided to delete their account.
Edited: I assumed that all of eridu’s comments were stricken out, but it may have just been on the gender threads.
It won’t be very contrarian if everyone answers the same (negative) way.
Not everyone would, but probably enough people to drown the signal in noise.
What do you think would have happened if EY had never bothered dealing with eridu and had let the karma system take care of it as usual?
As opposed to which other specific possible way of handling it?
For example I may think that there were both better choices and worse choices, and the Eliezer’s choice wasn’t optimal, but also wasn’t obviously bad. Now do I agree or disagree?
That’s more approval than I was expecting anyone to still have. But it seems like it would be easy to offer a range of choices that would cover most of the possibilities (“was handled perfectly”, “was handled fine”, “was handled badly but not especially so”, “was handled badly enough that it should lead to policy changes”).
That said I think the question I’m most interested in is how many people think the current approach is better than the “null option”: no special treatment, discuss it normally the way we discuss anything else, and apply the usual up- and downvotes to basilisk-related content.
Saying “I disagree” does not say what the person would prefer instead. It creates a non-natural cluster of people preferring various kinds of alternative solutions. A list of choices would give more information. For example “moderator should ignore it completely”, “moderator should use a private message to suggest retracting the comment”, “moderator should move all related comments to a separate discussion”, etc.
In that way the people who think there should be a specific basilisk-related thread with trigger warnings don’t end up in the same set as e.g. the people who think the site should be completely unmoderated. (And maybe we could get a result that most people think Eliezer should have done something else, but there is no general consensus about what specifically it should be, so it is likely that if Eliezer had actually done something else, he would still get a lot of criticism. You can’t get this information by posing a dilemma of “I agree” and “I disagree”.)
Alternatively, I’d like to have an answer: “I don’t fucking care. Forever obsessing over a one-time event that happened years ago is more harmful than the event itself.” Which is connotationally completely different from both “I agree” and “I disagree”.
Yup, this is a very good comment,
Given the linked comment from Eliezer, I would support a policy of trying to give the damn topic a rest as much as possible.
How many people have been or are still worried about the basilisk is more important than whether people disagree with how it has been handled. It is possible to be worried and disagree about how it was handled if you expect that maintaining silence about its perceived danger would have exposed less people to it.
In any case, I expect LessWrong to be smart enough to dismiss the basilisk in a survey, in order to not look foolish for taking it seriously. So any such question would be of little value as long as you do not take measures to make sure that people are not lying. Which would be possible by e.g. asking specific multiple choice questions that can only be answered correctly if someone e.g. read the RationalWiki entry about the basilisk, or the LessWrong Wiki entry that amusingly reveals most of the detail but which nobody who cares has taken note of so far. Anyone who is seriously worried about it would not take the risk of reading up on the details.
Seconding this. I can theoretically accept that there might well be logic bombs, or even just points of discussion that are downvote bait. But even outside of the practical and ideological issues, the current strategy just isn’t working, and it’s a really stupid thing to be having problems with.
I’m not sure about that. I believe Eliezer’s goal was to keep people from thinking seriously about the topic, from that point of view the current strategy appears to be working just fine.
There’s not been much discussion here, but it’s been discussed in a number of other areas, to such an extent that there are 1 RB search result to every 9 TDT search result. From a cursory examination, a significant amount seems serious enough to involve deep enough discussion of the topic to cause either evilSuperintelligence issues or possible psychological harm.
It could have been more prominent, of course, but I’m not convinced that it didn’t reach greater levels of discussion because of Yudkowsky’s response.