> Which - keeping in mind that at the time I had absolutely no idea this would all blow up the way it did - caused me to yell quite loudly at Roko for violating ethics given his own premises, I mean really, WTF? You're going to get everyone who reads your article tortured so that you can argue against an AI proposal? In the twisted alternate reality of RationalWiki, this became proof that I believed in Roko's Basilisk, since I yelled at the person who invented it without including twenty lines of disclaimers about what I didn't necessarily believe.

I don't understand what Yudkwosky's trying to argue there. "Even though I don't actually believe in it, I yelled at him for invoking the wrath of the nonexistent basilisk that I don't believe in"?

Does changing some of the variables help?

I believe there is a secret government agency with the purpose of controlling the entire world will come about.

I believe that this agency will control everything, and will punish all people it determines learned about it's possibility and did not either work to make it a reality, or immediately turn themselves in to the authorities.

In light of this, it's important to keep knowledge of this future event from people so they aren't targeted.

Whoops, I just posted this to a public forum.

Regardless of whether the belief is true, if the poster believes it, then they are acting in a reprehensible manner. If you incorrectly believe you have a button that sets off a nuclear warhead in a heavily populated area and choose to press it, you still shoulder some responsibility for your intended actions.

If you think you've discovered a serious info-hazard and your first action is to post it publicly, you are not someone I want frequenting the same online spaces I frequent. Whether that particular info-hazard is, upon examination, remotely hazardous is aside from the point.

(If you discover something that scares the crap out of you and you need someone to talk you down/point out why you're wrong/help you sleep at night, you find one very smart, very stable friend and you ask permission and then you talk through it, you do not just publish)

More like, "he believed that he'd accidentally invented an eternal torture machine and then he tried to turn it on, and I yelled at him even though the eternal torture machine didn't work."

Or maybe -- he posted something that the fact of his posting it revealed he actually intuitively knew it was bunk.

See "Belief in belief", which is right near the beginning of the first sequence....

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/

It should have been obvious to Roko that either it was a worthless idea (in which case he was safe to post it... but shouldn't, because it's worthless); the other case was that it was a serious, valid idea, in which case he obviously should not post it.

Well, yes? If Roko's basilisk was true, it'd be unethical to spread. It turned out to not be true, but if Roko was reasoning from the premise of it being true, or even possibly-true, then the action was still unethical.

> caused me to yell quite loudly at Roko for violating ethics given his own premises

As far as I understand this part of the sentence, Eliezer got angry at Roko because he did something that in the same thread he stated is unethical.

It seems like he deeply believes in it. I don't think he realizes it's just a modern version of Pascal's wager

In attempting to debunk this sort of statement, he has literally written the following: "In the hands of RationalWiki generally, and RationalWiki leader David Gerard particularly ..., [the fictional version of the Roko's Basilisk event] somehow metamorphosed into a Singularity cult that tried to get people to believe a Pascal's Wager argument to donate to their AI god on pain of torture. This cult that has literally never existed anywhere except in the imagination of David Gerard."[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibo...

"This sentence is a lie." He doesn't seem to actually debunk the idea, just yells about David Gerard for a bit. Can you explain how it's different from Pascal's Wager?

At least the part where it's implied that "Someone from organization X used the basilisk to convince innocent bystanders to donate to X" is false, for any value of X that I know of. Pascal's Wager is/was (I imagine?) used to get people to subscribe to various churches and give them money.

People tend to ignore that for a logical trail to work every stated and unstated assumption needs to be 100% true or it's pointless. Roko's Basilisk is great example where even the slightest weakness in any part of the argument makes the whole idea pointless. (And there are a lot of unstated assumptions.)

EX: What's the maximum computational power of the universe?

Eliezer agrees with you! Roko's Basilisk in particular is wrong. As a matter of policy though, you do not just publicly publish information hazards that might be real; that was why it was a big deal.

You don't what? What policy? Information hazards? What?!

I feel like I just stumbled into a Scientology auditing session or something reading your comment.

It's a concept coined by Nick Bostrom. Basically, some information can be harmful. As a simple, non-controvertial information hazard, imagine you learned an identity of a covert assasin of a foreign government, and you start telling about it to people around you. Don't be surprised if not only you drop dead, but the people you interact with as well.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Information_hazard

"Information hazard" is just a term for "things you or others learn and then are worse off because of". Examples of information hazards:

- Instructions on how to make a gigaton bomb with processes and materials anyone can acquire and assemble privately.

- A reachable-by-a-country mechanism for blowing up the sun.

- An image designed to temporarily or permanently mess with your vision. Sharing [1] on reddit as a "cool optical illusion" would be mean.

- Probably whatever a computer spits out if you give it a scan of your brain and set it on the task of finding a paragraph/image/movie/whatever that maximizes dopamine production.

- Some people would consider a devastating argument against free will to be an information hazard, predicting that people would then do whatever they wanted because they "couldn't be blamed".

- If you're a hardcore atheist: religions. If you're a hardcore theist who thinks the devil is out to trick you: convincing arguments against belief.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect

You should familiarize yourself with that feeling so you can recognize it later; it's the feeling of falling into an inferential gap. (The thing might be worthless, true, like Scientology. I usually find that resolving confusion is worth my time, though.)

> you do not just publicly publish information hazards that might be real

But... for "might be real" to be valid at all, you have to buy into the Roko's basilisk concept in the first place.

If you don't, there's nothing to get upset about.

That's like saying you shouldn't be mad at someone who attempted to murder you because they failed. There's a reason we have a crime called "attempted murder". You may find the wikipedia article on "Inchoate offense" interesting, specifically the section on Impossibility[1].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchoate_offense#Impossibility

If I learned that a co-worker believed that nuts were invariably fatal to me and gone on to hide some in my food, the nuts would do me no harm but I would still take the whole incident seriously.

I meant "might be real" according to generic-you in that statement. Someone being wrong doesn't make information hazards in general disappear.

The visible universe? Some back-of-the-napkin estimates are that no more than 2^500 bits will be flipped in the region of space we can see, but there's a crucial assumption about minimum temperature you need to make to make that that estimate finite.

On the other hand, there's some pretty compelling reasoning that the entire universe is actually infinite in extent, so ... infinite computational power?

What an absurd thing to consider. There is no possibility of building a computer the size of the universe. This website is full of crazy people talking about crazy things!

Because? How do you know? Show us the reasoning.

Also, there is this concept of "thought experiments". Building a universe-sized computer may sound as likely as sitting on the light wave and looking around, and yet the second one brought us Relativity.