If the basilisk sees its reflection within 30 ft. of it in bright light, it mistakes itself for a rival and targets itself with its gaze.
Mike Hoye wrote a charming takedown of the implications of and actual use cases for “effective altruism,” soi-so-very-disingenuously-disant, and I call it to your attention for that, but also for his description of the more abstruse theology behind the ideology:
It’s what you’d end up with if you started with Scientology and replaced “thetans” with “dollars.”
I expect you all to be doing your part to immortalize it.
As to that theology: it’s as grubby and grasping as you’d expect, a premillennialism that dispenses with any need to give an inconvenient shit about the here and now in favor of the serenely happy could-be maybes of literally trillions of one-day someday others—an imaginary euphoria so massively vast that a billionth of a percentage point of the chance that it might come to pass outweighs whatever petty sun-dried raisins might float in the head of whomever’s life is spent in the grindingly horrible labor necessary to build the device that calculates it. The whole affair’s suffused with an overwhelming, overweening aroma of three-in-the-morning dorm-room debate, and it took me a moment to realize the déjà I kept vuing as I read along:
Effective altruism is nothing more than Roko’s basilisk.
Oh, some of the rough edges have been smoothed away, some of the bullshit wiped off: we’ve lost the time-travel and the tortured clones and the games of Prisoner’s Dilemma you’re supposedly playing with yourself; we’ve traded a bizarrely psychotic omnipotent future-AI supremely concerned with what we are doing here and now to bring it someday about for a future of trillions of happy intelligences happily skipping about endless holodecks of fun and adventure that can only someday be brought about by what we’re doing here and now—but that’s just the sort of renovation you’d do to weaponize the notion into a nostrum you could sell to tech-addled billionaires. One can’t help but be (disgusted, but) impressed.
I mean, Jiminy flippin’ Cricket: the post in which Roko first introduced the damned thing is titled Solutions to the Altruist’s Burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.
—It’s a cold comfort (most of our comforts are chilly, these days), but it’s worth noting that the basilisk is one of the dumber monsters in the D&D bestiary, with an Intelligence of 2. It helps to explain why Zuckerberg’s burning Facebook to the ground for a metaverse nobody wants, here and now: someday, maybe, trillions of legless avatars might blissfully revere his name.
Every billionaire is a policy failure. Every billionaire is a weapon of mass destruction. Every billionaire is history’s greatest monster. Every billionaire is an injury to the world. Every billionaire is an affront to God. Every billionaire must be taxed out of existence.
