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.
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?