That is interesting! I think some of Gwern’s upvotes are coming from people who agree with his “Basilisk” comment / found it because of the discussion it generated
It didn’t seem self-evident to me that his mention of the basilisk would help his comment’s score overall. I don’t personally believe in the basilisk and I do think it would make an interesting survey question, but I thought many LWers considered it a dangerous idea to discuss? They may think that even if they don’t believe in it either. Or maybe Eliezer was just weird in his reaction to it. Judging based on Gwern’s comment’s 99% positive rating, that’s certainly what it looks like.
I think there’s also a factor of people not loading all the comments- otherwise we wouldn’t expect the oldest comment to be lower than the early bulk of comments.
It’s not so far off that I feel the difference can simply be attributed to people not loading all the comments. At the time of my writing this, the oldest comment has the same score as the third and fourth comments.
It didn’t seem self-evident to me that his mention of the basilisk would help his comment’s score overall. I don’t personally believe in the basilisk and I do think it would make an interesting survey question, but I thought many LWers considered it a dangerous idea to discuss? They may think that even if they don’t believe in it either. Or maybe Eliezer was just weird in his reaction to it. Judging based on Gwern’s comment’s 99% positive rating, that’s certainly what it looks like.
It’s not so far off that I feel the difference can simply be attributed to people not loading all the comments. At the time of my writing this, the oldest comment has the same score as the third and fourth comments.