Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Roko's basilisk (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect to LessWrong. Barkeep49 (talk) 02:49, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Roko's basilisk
AfDs for this article:


 * – ( View AfD View log )

Not sure this is all that notable, way too many primary sources or youtube videos. Slatersteven (talk) 15:19, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The Roko's basilisk article is little more than a stub at the moment. However, it is frequently referenced among the less wrong crowd and even in popular culture. Given this, it would make more sense to expand this near stub article into a more comprehensive one. My 2¢… sbelknap (talk) 17:16, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It needs to be referenced by RS.Slatersteven (talk) 17:24, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Exactly. It should be expanded, and more sources cited. The sub-section on the LessWrong page doesn't go into depth on the topic. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 17:55, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Yea, I was going to find other sources for it. Though I don't think that it needs to be deleted. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 17:52, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to LessWrong. The available WP:RS do not justify our saying much more than is already said there. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 19:25, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to LessWrong. Not really separately notable from LessWrong. Hemiauchenia (talk) 19:36, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect, agreeing with above. A full breakdown in an article doesn't seem necessary (or possible with RS). — Wingedserif (talk) 19:40, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep, It is sometimes mentioned in popular culture and outside of LessWrong.ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 20:04, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect as per the landslide above. It has no notability outside of LessWrong. jps (talk) 20:42, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * While it might have no notability outside of LessWrong, the subsection on the LessWrong article does not cover the thought expiriment in sufficient detail, and you can't really cover something in detail in a subsection.   ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 00:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Without reliable, independent sources that establish that further details are important, we can't expand the section in the LessWrong article, let alone create a whole new one. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 00:43, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Would keep. have heard of the thought experiment, but literally never heard of LessWrong. meaning I heard of thought experiment in some other source. Hyperbolick (talk) 02:45, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * A WP:BEFORE brings these up. Unsure if this demonstrates sufficient notability or not; I lean to no.
 * --- perhaps the greatest claim to notability, rather in-depth on the subject
 * -- not in depth
 * Some articles: (in article),,  -- cross reference with WP:RSP, seem trivial to me
 * Thanks, Urve  (talk) 05:55, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The Zygon item is apparently part of a conference proceedings collection (see the intro), which in some fields would suggest a lower standard of peer review than a typical journal article. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 20:52, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Makes sense, thanks, will keep in mind for future reference. Think it's still the greatest claim to notability but not enough, redirection is best outcome here Urve  (talk) 06:11, 30 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Redirect to LessWrong. It's perfectly well taken care of as a a section in Less Wrong. The sources above deal with it in the context of the rationalist community, and that's what we should do as well. Tercer (talk) 07:27, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to LessWrong. Notability exists largely in the context LW and it's sister forums, and it's already covered adequately over at Less Wrong. &#8209;&#8209;Volteer1 (talk) 08:25, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to LessWrong per . I note 's references and also that Liz Sandifer's book Neoreaction: A Basilisk uses this device as a framing metaphor and covers a wider territory than just LessWrong, so it is possible that someday the topic will deserve coverage that does not fit into the current LW article, but I think we are not at that point yet. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 13:55, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep just needs to be expanded. Important concept which is only going to become more relevant in the near future.Nweil (talk) 17:46, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * See wp:crystal, we do not create articles on things that might be imortant in the future, when (and if) it becomes notable we can allways write a decent article about it.Slatersteven (talk) 17:48, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * This is already notable AND it will become more relevant. All the more reason to expand it. Nweil (talk) 18:15, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree that yes, its (somewhat) notable, but the problem is that there aren't enough reliable sources for it. User-generated sources, like videos on youtube, aren't reliable sources and need to be cited alongside other, more reliable sources. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 18:20, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not our job to speculate about what might become important one day. Nor can we declare things to be important without documentation to that effect. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:47, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Look at the increase in page views since this article was created if you are disputing the increase in relevance. In addition, speculation on a talk page or in a deletion discussion is quite different than speculation in an article. But I'm sure an experienced editor such as yourself knows this. Nweil (talk) 19:33, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Page view counts do not imply notability (nor would their absence imply a lack of it). Notability is about what has happened, not what might happen. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 20:46, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not contending the page stats imply notability. The notability comes from appearances in a wide range of publications and in popular culture. Nweil (talk) 21:35, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
 * And what if a future AI punishes us for deleting the page? ;) Hyperbolick (talk) 04:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * The chance of a SAI/CEV actually going through with its threat to punish those who did not create it is extremely low. It's been debunked on RationalWiki. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 04:24, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Now you're convincing me that we should delete this article on the grounds that it is an infohazard. Not Wikipedia policy, but we're going to have a real problem if the idea catches on and hordes of deluded people start coming here to spread the idea of the basilisk as far as they can. Tercer (talk) 07:32, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Certain we have pages on worse ideas than this. Hyperbolick (talk) 07:47, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * * It is not Wikipedia policy to remove a page based on the fact that it can be psychologically distressing to others. Should we remove the school shootings article because it visiting the page triggers a flashback in a PTSD sufferer who survived a school shooting? No. Read WP:CENSOR ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 15:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete - Since there appears to only be one independent textual source used, indicating a lack of notability. RationalWiki could potentially be another but can only be used as an external link and its entry is an argument that it's fringe so not an indication of notability.  Maybe Tercer is right but assuming that it becomes notable enough and considering that it's not illegal material, there would ultimately be an article, but also enough material to present it without promoting it as realistic...  — Paleo  Neonate  – 13:27, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * "illegal" Not illegal to spread Roko's basilisk. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 15:12, 30 April 2021 (UTC)


 * If you are suggesting that we should delete/keep this article because of the fact that it is an infohazard, just know that an ASI/CEV would have an extremely low incentive to actually go through with its promise to punish people. No one except deluded lunatics actually takes this seriously. You shouldn't either. ThetaRokosBasilisk (talk) 15:31, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * No one but deluded lunatics take QAnon seriously also, but nevertheless they manage to cause a lot of trouble. That's the thing with infohazards, talking about them even to debunk them spreads the poison to more vulnerable people and causes more problems. That's not my reason for defending a redirect, though, the reason is simply that the basilisk does not have notability independent of Less Wrong. As infohazards go the basilisk is very low on the list of dangerous ones. Tercer (talk) 17:27, 30 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep What I got from the above discussion is either you all are bad at looking up sources or you all purposefully didn't bother because it would counteract your claims on there not being sources. Whichever one it is, i'm disappointed in all of you as Wikipedia editors that made such a statement. At the very least address the sources that exist, even if you're going to vote Redirect. Don't lie about there not being sources. Anyways, here's the sources I found in a very quick and easy Google search that took less than a minute of my time (more time spent here formatting them):


 * I also went a bit into the first two pages of Google Scholar there at the end, with many more things to look at. I didn't even use my Wikipedia Library access to search through there, so there's probably a lot more to find. Also, it's pretty cool there was some sort of theatre art/presentation entirely on the subject. Silver  seren C 18:16, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * ,, , , please see above for available reliable sources. Silver  seren C 18:21, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * These look to be either sources that are already mentioned in the LessWrong section, ones I found in my own WP:BEFORE search and ultimately didn't think much of, or already mentioned above (e.g., the "Journal of Religion & Science" item is the Zygon article discussed earlier). For example, the Herald item is marked as an opinion piece and moreover discusses it in the context of LessWrong, suggesting that it is not sufficiently separate from its origins to merit a stand-alone article. Likewise for the Orbiter item, and I'm doubtful on the editorial standards of that publication (glossy website, but it seems to have more people doing marketing, "strategy" and social media than editing nearly everyone involved). Document Journal, which appears mostly to be a fashion magazine with a little "culture" coverage, skims past the basilisk in its opening paragraphs on the way to discussing AI risk and its perception in Silicon Valley more generally. Nowadays, the Basilisk is a joke even to such people. Again, this could potentially be used to augment the section in LessWrong, but I'm not seeing how it adds to the case for a dedicated article. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:39, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * There are a total of 5 of the references above used in that other article. And there are far more than 5 sources above. You seem to have purposefully picked out only the weakest sources to argue against and ignored the rest. Such as the books and journal articles outside of that one you mentioned. Silver  seren C 18:42, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I haven't ignored them. It's just that I've long since grown accustomed to flash-in-the-pan sensationalism and clickbait on the margins of science, so I personally have rather high standards for such topics to meet, and all the more so to get articles devoted to them. In this case, I've noticed a few general patterns. The first is that there's been a drop-off in even the marginal sources since 2018 or so. The jokes have been made, and the world has moved on. If the subject has not seen sustained interest (in a verifiable way), then it's probably best for us to write about it in its historical context. LessWrong, maybe with a little expansion, does that. The second general trend is that the sources do not indicate there is all that much more to write than we already have; repeated explanations of what the basilisk is do not amount to a reason to make our explanation longer. Third, the sources tie it firmly into LessWrong. Indeed, what they find interesting about it is what it says about the psychology of the LessWrong crowd. The review of Sandifer's book is a good example of that. The sources justify our writing more about LessWrong, not more about the basilisk independently. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:55, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * This just seems like an acknowledgement by you that you stopped looking at the list halfway through and didn't bother looking at the sources in 2019 and 2020 from books and journals at the end. You know, the ones directly dealing with the subject matter in a scientific focus. Silver  seren C 19:42, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I'd call their focus scientific, but what am I neglecting? The book from 2021 starts by saying, In 2010 on LessWrong forum, a user named Roko posited. I didn't say that sources stopped existing, just that from what I could tell, what ones there were seem to have petered off. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:32, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * With such a list of sources, this is time for WP:THREE, I think: can you name three of those sources that best support keep over redirect to LW? The list of sources you found is a bit longer than I expected, but your accompanying text does not really argue that the LW article would be not be a good home for Wikipedia's content about RB. I'm generally a bit concerned about the potential for biased editing with respect to LW/Scott Alexander/etc articles, and the fewer of these I have on my watchlist, the happier I am. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 13:43, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't really have an opinion on LW, since I didn't even know about them prior to this AfD. As for sourcing, sure. I would probably go with the entire prologue of this upcoming book from Springer Nature, probably the Russian scholarly article that is entirely on the subject, so is more of a discussion than the other sources, and for the third you could take any of the news sources, but i'm rather partial to the art/theatre piece that was made on the subject. Silver  seren C 16:45, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't know if it's like this for all subjects, but for physics and mathematics, the peer-review standards for Springer monographs are in practice lower than they are for journal articles. Reviewers have to approve a book proposal before the book can happen, but the content of the book doesn't get careful attention. My guess is that something similar holds true for their publications on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Reading through that preface (we may apprehend the möbius structure of the relationship between AI and psychoanalysis, etc.) I don't see how it detaches the topic from LessWrong. Sure, it says (without evidence) the Basilisk was influential in a wider community, but we can write about the influence of LessWrong in the article about LessWrong. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:15, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * You could just openly admit that no amount of sourcing would be good enough for you. You'd try to find technicalities on every source and if it even mentions LW (which is the background and would obviously be at least mentioned by any source discussing this further), you're going to claim that means no independent notability. Despite that not being how notability works. You're essentially arguing, as a hyperbolic example, that we can't have an article on natural selection because every source discussing the subject is likely to mention or refer to Charles Darwin, therefore we should just put everything on his page. Silver  seren C 18:24, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not going to "openly admit" something that isn't true. And I don't think your hyperbolic example is really a parallel situation. There's plenty to say about natural selection that doesn't fit into a biography of Darwin (just like there's plenty to say about inertia or gravity or differential calculus that wouldn't fit into a biography of Newton). The concept had a history before him and continued to develop long after. Here, we have something that started on LessWrong and is typically discussed as something that happened in their community. It's treated as something that illustrates the psychology of the people who hang out there. For example, among a certain set of mostly white, young, tech-savvy men, this simple thought experiment sired nightmares . Or, the Basilisk had already wreaked havoc among the forum’s readers many of whom had started to experience psychological difficulties . Or, the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment is particularly revealing regarding the nature of the neoreactionary community that has so many roots in LessWrong’s culture and norms . What isn't just restating the original idea or saying what it means for LessWrongers tends to collapse down to a single line, e.g., "A community theatre group staged a play inspired by the Basilisk at the Christ United Methodist Church in Washington, DC". As WP:N says, even if a topic meets a notability guideline, that is not a guarantee that [it] will necessarily be handled as a separate, stand-alone page. Editors may use their discretion to merge or group two or more related topics into a single article. The LessWrong section could probably be expanded a bit, and the sources you enumerated could help with that. Seriously, genuinely, thanks for listing them and filling in all those citation templates! If the text of this article had been in better shape, I might have suggested a merge, but it read pretty much like a redux of what was already there with some WP:OR on top, so I !voted for a redirect. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 18:49, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Even within the subject of the LW article, you're actually making an argument for keeping this one, as the amount of information to be added to that section would be far longer than should be in that article. This meaning that it should then be WP:SPLIT into a separate article with a linkback from the LW article. So even under the argument that the material should be there, it should still be an independent article. Silver  seren C 19:32, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * The section LessWrong plus two sentences would still be the section LessWrong, not something heavy enough to need its own page. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 15:56, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Think just about everyone at this point agrees that the basilisk article needs to be spiffed up. Thank to the sources from Silver seren it is eminently possible to do that now. Your claim that this is firmly tied to LessWrong does not hold up. None of the headlines of those sources say "message board phenomenon Roko's Basilisk" or something to that effect. It's not even mentioned except in the body of the article to provide insight and context into the provenance of it all. Nweil (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * The one person who has !voted since the list of sources was posted above suggested a redirect, so I'm not seeing a strong level of agreement forming that the basilisk article needs to be spiffed up. And headlines, even of reliable sources, aren't reliable sources themselves: Headlines are written to grab readers' attention quickly and briefly; they may be overstated or lack context, and sometimes contain exaggerations or sensationalized claims with the intention of attracting readers to an otherwise reliable article. They are often written by copy editors instead of the researchers and journalists who wrote the articles. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:34, 3 May 2021 (UTC)


 * Comment Found another one, here's the relevant part.
 * "We will offer one final example, due to the noteworthiness of its driving force, of a fictional scenario contingently impacting not only public perceptions of AI, but the attitudes and behaviors of the researchers themselves: the notion of Roko’s Basilisk. Although purely speculative and up until this point nothing more than an imaginary entity, Roko’s Basilisk is having an effect on part of the community of friendly AI researchers, particularly the rationalists working on existential risk, to the extent that it has been deemed a dangerous idea and the mere mention of it has been strongly discouraged. What could make a purely fictional creature so terrifying and so worthy of these cautionary measures?


 * Roko’s Basilisk is a hypothetical future artificial superintelligence, that, if it came into existence, would retroactively institute, through coercion, the set of policies that would have hastened its coming into existence. More concretely put, it is presumed to be so powerful as to be able to torture all those who knew of the possibility of its eventual existence, but did no invest a significant amount of their efforts and resources to actualizing its potential. Not even death would be a safeguard against this nightmarish scenario, as the Basilisk is presumed to be so advanced as to be able to create perfect simulations of the transgressing researchers which it would eternally punish. Far-fetched? Most certainly, and yet there’s no denying that this egregore, this collective mental entity, has a certain psychological pull, and that many who have learned of the concept dearly wish they’d never heard of it."
 * Silver seren C 19:54, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Right and no "firm tie" to LessWrong there. It's become detached from LessWrong and deserves a separate article. Nweil (talk) 19:59, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * And it uses very direct terminology toward it's notability, such as "noteworthiness of its driving force" and describes the impact the subject has had on both AI researchers and the general public. Silver  seren C 20:07, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It uses rather grandiose language, but it doesn't actually contain significant coverage, not being more substantial than the passage we already devote to the topic in LessWrong. (It also seems to be sloppy in its scholarship, not actually citing a source itself for what the basilisk is. That's not a killing flaw; it just contributes to the general air of superficiality.) For that matter, an article that contains no less than seven citations to Yudkowsky and spends a paragraph praising Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is not exactly outside the LessWrong sphere. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:36, 30 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Redirect to LessWrong - where it's covered in enough detail, not enough in-depth coverage from independent, reliable sources to show enough notability for a standalone article.  Onel 5969  TT me 19:13, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
 * FWIW, both The Herald and Slate are reliable sources per WP:RSPSOURCES. Vice/Motherboard is no consensus although the discussions have had nice things to say about motherboard vis a vis tech issues. Nweil (talk) 15:50, 3 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.