Description: Self development, productivity, rationality, epistemics and instrumental strategies for making life more wonderful.
So you just read something about the basilisk and it freaked you out. There’s some emotional argument around being simulated, tortured and extorted by a future AI. You read it, feel quite scared, concerned or uncomfortable about it and now don’t know what to do about the phenomena.
This won’t be the last time you heard of a monster that scared you, although maybe previous monsters somehow didn’t seem real or like they applied to you. For example zombies. Seem rather slow and stupid. Unless they are fast zombies, in which case you can still see them and make plans with the other humans. Humans always outsmart the monsters right? And zombies are super improbable anyway.
Back to the Basilisk. So problem, you now know of an idea that seems scary. You have two problems really. The first is that there’s a class of information that now seems dangerous. You could in the future find out a new alpha basilisk that is also scary and more urgent to address than the current information hazard. The second problem is “there’s a scary thing”.