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”.
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.