I’m not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford’s original story was about an image that crashes onlookers’ brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the “Funniest Joke in the World” Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren’t mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Upvoted for bringing the Langford story to my attention; I was not aware of it.
I continue to believe my explanation accurately describes the approach of a significant proportion of highly educated individuals expressing anti-racial differences views, whether or not those individuals are even aware of the general concept of mindkilling.
There’s a similar plotline in one of the Star Trek episodes with the Borg, where (IIRC) they discuss the morality of crashing all the Borg’s minds with some bug they’ve found in their information processing, decide not to, and then discover they already sort of did that by accident....
I’m not sure the conventional kind of basilisk qualifies as knowledge, as such: Langford’s original story was about an image that crashes onlookers’ brains through a defect in image processing, not through anything to do with verbal or logical parsing. Most other treatments of the concept have done the same, more or less, although there are some ambiguous ones (like the “Funniest Joke in the World” Python sketch).
There are various presentations of knowledge which clearly aren’t mind-safe (and presentation and context usually matter more than the content), but their danger generally comes in the form of bias and related issues like priming effects, which of course is rather well-traveled ground on this site. I think we can explain the effects of bringing up racial IQ differences and other politically sensitive ideas perfectly well within that framework, without having to invoke any more fundamental problems; in fact, we do.
Upvoted for bringing the Langford story to my attention; I was not aware of it.
I continue to believe my explanation accurately describes the approach of a significant proportion of highly educated individuals expressing anti-racial differences views, whether or not those individuals are even aware of the general concept of mindkilling.
This story: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm ?
There’s a similar plotline in one of the Star Trek episodes with the Borg, where (IIRC) they discuss the morality of crashing all the Borg’s minds with some bug they’ve found in their information processing, decide not to, and then discover they already sort of did that by accident....
That’s the one I had in mind, yes.