[closeparen]

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.

[zozbot234]

> 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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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?