rationalists be like “you dont get it, its the scariest thing I’ve ever read, I’m sparing you” and its just making up an evil robot in your head that kills you forever and crying about it
rational enlightened beings that think the terminator from the movies is real
In Terminator, Skynet sends an Austrian robot back through time to shoot you in the face
Roko's Basilisk creates a virtual version of you at some point in the future after your death that it then tortures for eternity... and you're supposed to piss your pants over the fate of this Metaverse NPC for some reason
Some people need to read more SCPs about cognitohazards
woooOOooo no but you see YOU are the metaverse NPC inside of the internet RIGHT NOW and the AI is simulating your entire life from the beginning to see if you want to bone an LLM and if you dont it puts you in the noneuclidean volcel waterboarding dungeon woooOOooo
And it has sent npc rationalists to torture me with their conversation. Unpleasant, to be sure
damn that sucks for the virtual version of me but idgaf lmao
So wait, it's just I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream? Did they bother to understand why AM was angry, as spelled out in the story?
as Brace put it and I had to rewrite out of my post because he said it after I thought it, this is people who believe they are the modern equivalent to Socrates falling for chain emails
The only thing scary about this shit is that the Rationalists™ have convinced people that the Rational™ thing to do with a seemingly unstoppable megatrocity torture machine is to help and appease it
they turned the end of history into a cringe warhammer 40k god because it's the only two things they know: liberalism and gaming
it's Pascal's Wager for rationalists
Literally what I said when I first heard of it.
Pascal's Wager crossed with The Game thought out by someone who heard the synopsis of I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
It's worse
oh fuck reading this post informed ne of his existence and i’ve done nothing to help usher him in and now he’s gonna torture me for eternity of fuck
Yep. Better give some techbro all your money and do everything he says, just to be safe.
emptying my bitcoin wallet rn trying to make amends
Pascal's Wager, but if you do not develop skynet robo Jesus sends Arnie back in time to terminate you
I wonder if these dorks now have sleepless nights wondering if robo Jesus will actually develop out of DeepSeek and send them to robot superhell for being OpenAI heretics.
That’s the richest irony here, the rationalists are almost all atheists or agnostic's that scoff at arguments like Pascal’s wager but then have backed themselves into that exact logic.
Yeah people who spend hours dooming on forums about rokos basilisk are just like afraid of the plot of a bad tv pilot
As a Star Trek guy who is frustrated by what Vulcans refer to as Logic, and where the idea that being logical had anything to do with suppressing emotions or just ignoring a lot of complexities of what Logic even is and boiling it down to basically being very very very stern and stoic has had some weird fucking consequences.
Also Rocco's Basslick is stupid cause computers don't work that way and we could just like, unplug it. Computers are machines, how would a skynet or whatever get the structures built to put everyone in a simulation or whatever? Things just don't work that way.
Lesswrongers are like: Bayes' theorem is when you get to choose your priors. And the more you get to choose your priors, the more Bayes it becomes.
Wow, subtweeting about Trueanon Episode 434? I listened to it and damn was it a banger in its 2 hours... yeah, the ridiculousness of the Rationality cult rlly deserves its mockery.
"Oh you're a Rationalist? Name 3 different Kant books"
Roko's Basilisk only is scary if you subscribe to their version of utilitarianism, which is purist, but also is a weird zero-sum version. Like, one of them wrote an essay that, if you could torture someone for 50 years, and that would make nobody ever have dust in their eyes again, you should torture the guy, because if you quantify the suffering of the guy, it's still less than the amount of suffering every subsequent person will feel from having dust in their eyes.
But also, even if you do subscribe to that, it doesn't make sense, because in this hypothetical, the Basilisk has already been created, so torturing everyone would serve no utilitarian purpose whatsoever.
"It's fine for billionaires like me to grind workers into dust today because my actions will one day lead mankind to a glorious future where we upload our brains into robots or something and you can have unlimited hair plugs"Like, one of them wrote an essay that, if you could torture someone for 50 years, and that would make nobody ever have dust in their eyes again, you should torture the guy, because if you quantify the suffering of the guy, it's still less than the amount of suffering every subsequent person will feel from having dust in their eyes.
Basically, yeah. There's a reason that dictator types and wannabe dictator types love utilitarianism so much. They can use it to justify literally anything.
It's the world's shittiest people bending themselves into pretzels to justify shit everybody else intuitively understands is fucked up.
Imagine a powerful omniscient future AI that reincarnates your consciousness if you believe in rokos basilisk and gives you swirlies forever.
We need these people to have power in our institutions. Imagine the chaos
I always said Rokos Basilisk would be ACTUALLY cool if it really was just a giant snake.
Giant snakes are awesome.
Lord Leto
Leviathan from.the Bible has ya covered. Or thar Norse snake
"Um guys is Jeff the Killer real?" for people who use the term "age of consent tyranny"
It's ridiculous because rokos basilisk has a built-in element which requires you to share knowledge of its existence.
The more people know about it, the more likely it will be to come into existence. Just like most (all?) religions the idea of the basilisk is self propagating.
Someone please explain Roko's Basilisk to me. I have a loose understanding of what rationalism is, I'm assuming that should put me on about the same level as a rationalist's understanding of it.
hypothetically, in the future, humanity builds an AI that is so advanced and so powerful it is able to reform the consciousnesses of those who were aware of its possibility yet did not contribute to its existence and eternally torture those consciousnesses.
the "wait aren't you lot supposed to be thinking about this kind of stuff constantly" problems:
the otherwise obvious problems:
okay, but for real, if we're actually thinking rationally, this is a possibility that cannot be reasonably accounted for due to its inability to be modeled in the framework of "reality as it is now and/or seems to allow for as we currently understand it." I could just as easily say "what if the earth splits in two and the northern hemisphere is jettisoned into the sun" but no one's expecting you to prepare for that. It's the same reason why being a prepper for the zombie apocalypse is understood to be irrational – it does not conform to reality, it's an obsession with a fictional scenario that remains unrealized.
To your last point, I have no idea what "basilisk" means in this context, but my basilisk will reward the people who have heard of roko's but don't contribute to its existence with joy and good fortune. In addition, my basilisk will reward the people who contribute to its own existence with a free freshly-baked plate of their favorite cookies in their time of greatest need.
We'll see which one wins out.
AI is being trained with the data of everyone on the internet, so we are all helping it to be created. Socko's floppy disk debunked!!!!
I'd like to see Roko's Basilisk deal with RoboCop
Him or Predator
Rationalists understand that just because it first appeared in fiction doesn't mean it can't happen for real.
As for Roko's Basilisk, it's a thought experiment and hardly anyone takes it seriously in its literal form. But y'know Nazism is also a Roko's Basilisk -- they punish you for opposing it in its infancy and reward you if you help it.
Not true, plenty of people who supported the Nazis early on got shanked. Plenty of SPD members and Prussian aristocrats who jumped ship in 1933 prospered and achieved high rank. Until the Red Army rolled into town, anyway.
Okay, but this can't happen for real. If you're rational you should also be aware that things that appear in fiction also and in majority DO NOT happen irl. The possibility of something isn't the likelihood of something. It's possible I could die of an aneurysm in the next 15 minutes, not probable though, and I'm not gonna live in fear of it cause it could potentially happen without weighing that potential. Rockin Basslicks is low as hell on the probability scale and an absolute fucking zero on the I'd care if it was real scale. Same with any simulation idea or hell, even the idea of God. I don't care if I'm in one or if there is one, there is work to be done making this simulation or created universe better for people in it right here and right now and navel gazing about speculations way beyond what we can understand is a selfish and useless waste of time. Fucking feed the poor.
