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Obviously upvoted, I don't wanna be punished by the AI
The fact that anyone takes this argument seriously, let alone the supposedly hyper-rational, is baffling to me.
It's the "thinking too much for your own good" phenomenon...

Some people will follow reasoning to absurdity because they're good at rationalizations

This is obviously a ridiculous idea that exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the Rationalist “movement”, but it does remind me of this obscure religious movement from the 1600s.

The Muggletonians founded by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton in mid-17th century London believed that if a person were exposed to the full tenets of their faith and rejected it they would be irretrievably damned. This risk tempered proselytization: they hesitated to expose people to loss of salvation which may explain their low numbers. In the mid-19th century two wealthy Muggletonians Joseph and Isaac Frost broke with this cautious approach and published several books about the faith.

As they say, history doesn’t repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proselytism#cite_note-37

Rationalists aren't Basilisk believers in general, so the connection you draw here is stillborn.
Sorry, how can a conclusion be stillborn? Does that have a specific meaning?

Also: I was using it more as an example, not the sole reason.

There's no argument you can successfully make that, because the Basilisk is unconvincing, therefore Rationalists are intellectually bankrupt. The connection is stillborn, because there's no path towards bridging the gap between this example and your conclusion.

You will need to use other examples because this example is DOA.

I'm confused how AI would punish somebody in the past. That seemingly requires time travel?
The idea is that to AI will create an exact facsimile of the person and torture them for all eternity, ala I have no Mouth and Must Scream
Okay here's the Iron Duke. He just hates the Basilisk and is an AI with better powers than the Basilisk. His only mission is to protect people from the Basilisk and to defeat the Basilisk which he achieves by unplugging the Basilisk's power supply.