This is a tangent, but I’m a bit caught up on the following turn of phrase:
At this point I consider the drowning child argument a Basilisk, and wish it was treated accordingly: as something memetically hazardous that everyone needs to overcome and defeat as part of their coming-of-age rituals.
I have not before heard “Basilisk” to refer to “memetic hazard that should be overcome in coming-of-age”; instead, I have always heard it refer to “memetic hazard that should not even be mentioned”. I was wondering if anyone has more examples of the usage in this article, and/or more examples of basilisks in the sense of this usage.
So… Longtime lurker, made an account to comment, etc.
I have a few questions.
First two, about innate status sense:
* I’m not convinced this it exists; is there a particular experiment (thought or otherwise) that could clearly demonstrate the existence of innate status sense among people? Presuming I don’t have it, and I have several willing, honest, introspective, non-rationalist, average adults, what could I ask them?
* Is there a particular thought experiment I could perform that discriminates cleanly between worlds in which I have it and worlds in which I don’t?
Next, about increasing probability estimates of unlikely events based on the outside view:
* This post argues against “Probing the Improbable” and for “Pascal’s Muggle: Infinitesimal …”; having skimmed the former and read the latter, I’m not clearly seeing the difference. Both seem to suggest that after using a model, implicitly or explicitly, to assign a low probability to an event, it is important to note the possibility that the model is catastrophically wrong and factor that into your instrumental probability.