Just checked the basilisk subreddit (r/rokosbasilisk) and it’s honestly depressing to see. It is filled with people (mainly young) asking for help because this thing has destroyed their mental health. So when Lesswrongers claim that no one takes it seriously they aren’t telling the truth. A lot of people take it very seriously, to the point of experiencing severe mental health issues, all because of some post made by a guy 10 years ago on LW.
This seems like a creepy-pasta for tech nerds.
The extent to which the lesswrong grift is really designed to appeal to naive but intellectually curious young people can’t be understated. Happened with a few of my classmates in high school. Nothing bad ended up happening with most of them but at least one felt like he had to unlearn a lot of the implicit biases/thought patterns that lesswrong-ism encourages, since they were becoming default reactions.
It’s a really creepy attempt to recruit people before they have enough life experience to understand what’s wrong with this, and then those recruited grow up to enter areas like academia and tech, providing a significant boost to the organization’s influence and reach.
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wtf
So is it not only being visited by people freaked out over this, but also lurked by users there to fuck with them?
Like… the basilisk can go back in time right? And I’m not currently being tortured so… Either it can’t touch me, I help it come into being, or it never happens. That or I am being tortured and this is serious the best it can do.
Hi, obviously I know nothing.
Wtf is the basilisk? Other than being a snake with medusa vision.
How absolutely depressing. The less publicity roko gets, the better.
it’s actually really sad to see all these people being hurt by such absolute bullshit
I still don’t quite get why so many people fall into distress over what is essentially pretty lukewarm “I have no mouth and I must scream” alternate universe fanfiction. Like, I see this, and it’s barely even a funny little thought experiment.
It’s incredible how much trouble some people would save themselves from if they simply didn’t adopt the belief that minds are computational on pure faith and with no hard evidence whatsoever. They wouldn’t even need to deal with all the actually crazy shit you need to buy into to have the rest of it make sense.
To be fair it’s been thousands of years since the Abrahamic religions and they’re still destroying people’s mental health.
ohgoddamnit