Thanks for your excellent input! It’s not really the potential accuracy of such dark philosophies that I’m worried about here (though that is also an area of some concern, of course, since I am human and do have those anxieties on occasion), but rather how easy it seems to be to fall prey to and subsequently act on those infohazards for a certain subclass of extremely intelligent people. We’ve sadly had multiple cases in this community of smart people succumbing to thought-patterns which arguably (probably?) led to real-world deaths, but as far as I can tell, the damage has mostly been contained to individuals or small groups of people so far. The same cannot be said of some religious groups and cults, who have a history of falling prey to such ideologies (“everyone in outgroup x deserves death,” is a popular one). How concerned should we be about, say, philosophical infohazards leading to x-risk level conclusions [example removed]? I suspect natural human satnav/moral intuition leads to very few people being convinced by such arguments, but due to the tendency of people in rationalist (and religious!) spaces to deliberately rethink their intuition, there seems to be a higher risk in those subgroups for perverse eschatological ideologies. Is that risk high enough that active preventative measures should be taken, or is this concern itself of the 1+1=3, wrong-side-of-the-abyss type?
Thanks for your excellent input! It’s not really the potential accuracy of such dark philosophies that I’m worried about here (though that is also an area of some concern, of course, since I am human and do have those anxieties on occasion), but rather how easy it seems to be to fall prey to and subsequently act on those infohazards for a certain subclass of extremely intelligent people. We’ve sadly had multiple cases in this community of smart people succumbing to thought-patterns which arguably (probably?) led to real-world deaths, but as far as I can tell, the damage has mostly been contained to individuals or small groups of people so far. The same cannot be said of some religious groups and cults, who have a history of falling prey to such ideologies (“everyone in outgroup x deserves death,” is a popular one). How concerned should we be about, say, philosophical infohazards leading to x-risk level conclusions [example removed]? I suspect natural human satnav/moral intuition leads to very few people being convinced by such arguments, but due to the tendency of people in rationalist (and religious!) spaces to deliberately rethink their intuition, there seems to be a higher risk in those subgroups for perverse eschatological ideologies. Is that risk high enough that active preventative measures should be taken, or is this concern itself of the 1+1=3, wrong-side-of-the-abyss type?