... if THE CLAIM is true then it brings to mind some potentially unkind questions about the psychological heath of a seemingly significant portion of the 'rationality community'.
So I think we have much stronger evidence of psychological health issues with the rationality community (which I assume is the same thing as the 'rationality community' though I'm uncertain) via things like the LW and SSC surveys. Perhaps you do not trust surveys because of self-report issues? But in that case I'd probably look at proxies like common correlates of mental health issues, or maybe suicide rates within the community and see if it's above baseline.
I'm personally pretty convinced that psychological issues in the rationalist community is substantially above baseline[1], but I would not want to trust a fairly complex causal assignment ascribed to a specific cause, that likely has politically motivated reporting, above more mundane instruments like surveys and other observational data.
[1] The main source of hesitation for me is uncertainty about the baseline; it's plausible but unlikely to me that "normal people" are very crazy in the clinical sense but for some reason this is mostly unreported.
Agreed. On priors I would expect above-baseline rates of mental health issues in the community even in the total absence of any causal arrow from the community to mental health issues (and in fact even in the presence of fairly strong mental health benefits from participation in the community), simply through selection effects. Which people are going to get super interested in how minds work and how to get theirs to work better? Who's going to want to spend large amounts of time interacting with internet strangers instead of the people around them? Who's g... (read more)
I recently came upon the story of "Roko's basilisk". Heretofore I'd not seen the topic. Reading about it in Wikipedia[1] I saw "Discussion of Roko's basilisk was banned on LessWrong for several years because Yudkowsky had stated that it caused some readers to have nervous breakdowns".[1]
That Yudkowsky censored mention of Roko's basilisk because it "caused some readers to have nervous breakdowns" (henceforth THE CLAIM) seemed very strange to me. So I asked in a Berkeley CA 'rationalist community' forum — "This story of censorship of Roko's basilisk and it causing "nervous breakdowns" strikes me me a bizarre; Is this some sort of joke?".
The answers to this question, some of which were angry and emotional, amounted to:
1) THE CLAIM is false.
2) No one could provide evidence that THE CLAIM is false sufficient to meet Wikipedia's evidentiary standards so as to rebut or remove the THE CLAIM in Wikipedia..
3) No one could provide a citation to a specific denial from Yudkowsky that THE CLAIM did not figure into the decision to censor mention of Roko's basilisk.
In the interest of truth-seeking ...
... if the THE CLAIM is false then I'd like to obtain evidence to that effect and correct Wikipedia.
... if THE CLAIM is true then it brings to mind some potentially unkind questions about the psychological heath of a seemingly significant portion of the 'rationality community'.
Please note that my questions here bears only on THE CLAIM (ie. "caused some readers to have nervous breakdowns") and not any of the issues associated with Roko's basilisk, eg. claims of infohazard.
Even if the "caused some readers to have nervous breakdowns" is a hyperbolic description, with no actual "nervous breakdowns" occurring, the notion that censorship needed to be employed to protect emotionally brittle persons in the 'rationality community' from a thought experiment reflects poorly on the community.
Ref.
{1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong#Roko's_basilisk