SSC and the space around it fundamentally disagrees with you that the thing to do about dangerous ideas is block their propagation. It wants to know about them, understand them, turn them inside out, figure out why people believe them, understand what it’s like in their heads, and learn how not to make similar errors.

“Listen to your culture’s leaders and tastemakers, vigorously punish any heretics” is a terrible algorithm for that. It’s exactly why so many bad ideas have such power for so long.

Part of the idea of presenting bad ideas in such a sympathetic light is to then whack the reader with, “Do you realize what you were just nodding at?” To show that you too are capable of believing terrible things under the right circumstances, to encourage humility and skepticism.

> SSC and the space around it fundamentally disagrees with you that the thing to do about dangerous ideas is block their propagation.

I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.

> I mean, they tried that approach with Roko's Basilisk... Let's just say it didn't work very well.

Roko's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager restated for AI.

It falls to the same counterarguments, e.g. what if a superintelligent AI already exists somewhere in the universe and currently doesn't care about you but deigns to punish you for any attempt to create a competitor?

This whole "dangerous ideas" concept is ridiculous. The obvious connotation is that the peons can't be trusted with these ideas, so the intelligentsia needs to shield us from them; I find this to be more abhorrent than most bad ideas.

So not being in a position of social influence and having no friends that propagate dangerous ideas...is a reason to skewer people that do?

I find that idea pretty gross, to be honest with you.

Also, who says what ideas are dangerous? This is a ridiculously pro status-quo stance to take.

What dangerous ideas would you say Scott Alexander has propagated?

> What dangerous ideas would you say Scott Alexander has propagated?

The idea that the "Gray Tribe" is anything but a well-written propaganda effort targeting midwits to keep them supporting the Blue Tribe (and most importantly, to keep the Blue Tribe in power) as the problems mount and the failures become harder and harder to excuse.

Dangerous ideas? Whose clutching pearls now?

Again, you're assuming a lot of cultural context here that isn't universally shared. I truly, honestly don't know what people mean when they say "dangerous ideas". My intuitive interpretation is "ideas which tell people to go be violent", but the term is very frequently used to refer to ideas which don't call for violence, so that can't be right.

"Dangerous ideas" are ideas that are a threat to power; they don't need to be violent per se.