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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / pages / ancillary / dolphin-war.md

Title: Dolphin War!! 🐬 (draft reply to Nate Soares, 16 June 2021)
Status: Hidden

> I noticed my own discomfort as the lines around "fruit" and "berry" started wavering

"Started" wavering? How often does this come up for you? I'm somehwat (not hugely) surprised at your self-report, because I can't actually recall _ever_ having been in a dispute over the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of "fruit" or "berry" before!

Furthermore, when I try to imagine how I would have reacted if it _did_ happen, I don't imagine myself feeling any discomfort at wavering lines! I'm imagining mentioning to a friend that I'd been ordering frozen fruit (which keeps longer) in grocery deliveries while avoiding going to supermarkets in person during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that I liked the [Cascadian Farm Cherry Berry Blend (of cherries, strawberries, and blueberries)](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078HM7V5R/) better than the [Wyman's of Maine mixed berry bag (of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries)](https://www.amazon.com/Wymans-Mixed-Berries-15-Frozen/dp/B000YG4I62).

If the friend were to reply, "Well, _actually_, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries aren't berries", I think my reaction would be to [look at the _Wikipedia_ page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry) and say, "Oh, it looks like that's true with respect to the botanical definition of the word _berry_, but the fruit companies were clearly using the colloquial definition. It's possible for the same word to have multiple meanings that can usually be distinguished from context, or explicitly clarified by the speaker if the context alone is insufficient to disambiguate!"

_Wikipedia_ is _very clear_ about the multiple definitions: "In common usage, the term "berry" differs from the scientific or botanical definition [...] The botanical definition includes many fruits that are not commonly known or referred to as berries". They even have a _separate page_ for ["Berry (botany)"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_(botany))!

_Wiktionary_ [also lists both definitions](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berry), with the botanical usage clearly marked as such with a [context label](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Entry_layout#Context_labels), and with a usage note explaining further:

> **Noun**  
> **berry** (plural **berries**)  
>
> 1. A small succulent fruit, of any one of many varieties.  
> 2. (_botany_) A soft fruit which develops from a single ovary and contains seeds not encased in pits.  
> [...]  
> **Usage Notes**  
> Many fruits commonly regarded as berries, such as strawberries and raspberries, are not berries in the botanical sense, while many fruits which are berries in the botanical sense are not regarded as berries in common parlance, such as bananas and pumpkins.

The same situation pertains with _fruit_: both _Wikipedia_ (["In common language usage [...] In botanical usage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit)) and _Wiktionary_ ([senses 2 _vs._ 3](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit)) are _very clear_ about the two meanings coexisting!

I don't see any wavering lines here at all: I see two _different_ category boundaries that happen to share the same label (requiring disambiguation in cases of doubt), with all authoritative sources explicitly flagging the label collision!

Based on this evidence, I find your claim that ["they're coming for 'fruit'"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670803326787588) hard to believe. _Who_ is doing that, in the social spaces you inhabit? Is anyone with equal or greater influence than the executive director of MIRI doing this? If you cannot provide evidence of people using their social power to deprecate the common meaning in favor of the botanical one, then your attempt to use _your_ power to deprecate the botanical meaning reeks of pure [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO). When you sneer "Invent a new word for your thing" in reference to a usage that already has already been established (_e.g._, the first definition of _fish_, or berry/fruit among botanists in particular), then _you_ are the one trying to steal concepts!

It's _really weird_ that your epistemic-status thread laments that not enough people read "A Human's Guide to Words", but you're acting as if you _not only_ haven't read ["Where to Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary), but that you _also_ haven't read ["Disputing Definitions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions) and ["Variable Question Fallacies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/shoMpaoZypfkXv84Y/variable-question-fallacies). Are strawberries berries? Well, "berry" has two senses—strawberries are a _berry(1)_ but not a _berry(2)_. This is _not a difficult concept_. Your _low quality_ shitposting makes me think less of MIRI as an institution—and therefore think less of humanity's hopes for a future. If you _clowns_ can't get _your own_ philosophy of language right, why should we trust you to save the world? [_You betrayed your uniform!_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-apnLvSq-gQ)

> I don't actually believe phylogenetics is generally a good way to carve up the life forms around me

Do you still feel this way after considering the "genetics are at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism" argument offered in this post? This seems like the kind of deep structural insight that you'd think so-called "rationalists" would be interested in! The variable you use as your category definition being at the root of the causal graph _guarantees_ [the conditional independence structure that makes naïve-Bayes-like categories _work_, as an AI algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes)!!

If you live in human civilization and don't really _need_ to carve up the life forms around you in much detail—if your use-case for thinking about acquatic animals is _watching a nature documentary_ (for entertainment??) rather than living and working with them every day, then you might think the deeper causal structure isn't buying you anything, but I think you would change your mind if you were a veternarian or a zoologist who actually had skin in the game in describing this part of the world.

When people have skin in the game, they care about the underlying mechanisms and want short codewords for them. If you hurt your ankle while running, you would probably be interested to _know_ whether it was a [sprain or a stress fracture](https://ercare24.com/difference-sprain-vs-fracture/) because that affects your decisions about how to recover. You wouldn't say, "Well, all I know is that my ankle hurts—that's all a child would know—so I'm going to call it a _hurtankle_; I don't care about anatomy."

Phylogenetics is also a lot more _objective_: it's easier to [stabilize a _shared_ map](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) on the facts of evolutionary history (which we can all agree on in the limit of good science) then the vagaries of what I personally think tastes good on pizza.

And this subjectivity also applies to animal classification. Some might be inclined to argue "bats are birds" (flappy flying animals) on the same grounds as "dolphins are fish" (flappy swimmy animals). But did you know the German word for bat is [_Fledermaus_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fledermaus) ("flutter mouse"), which dates back to _fledarmūs_ in [Old High German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German)? Apparently, people way back in the tenth century or so (long before evolution was understood) already thought bats were like a mammal-that-happened-to-fly rather than a bird-that-happened-to-be-furry.

> the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) "phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms"

Why to Blue Tribe members in their youth, particularly? Yesterday, I mentioned to my mother (born 1951, old enough that the forces shaping her worldview long predate the polarization leading to the [local coinage of "Blue Tribe"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) that the reason I had a terrible week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.

"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.

"They're not fish, right?" I asked.

"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."

>> Why? What changed?
>
> On the object level question?  
> [...]  
> Scott's post is I think the source of the first two in me  

As for my cynical theorizing of what changed, I'm _most_ interested as to what conversations we would be having in the counterfactual where trans rights didn't become a popular political issue. (Imagine a world where the dice of previous elections and judicial appointments landed such that the gay-marriage fight would have taken much longer to win, such that the LGBT activism machine was still focused on that even through the current year, and didn't have the resources to mount [the psychological warfare campaign](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) to replace the public concept of sex with "gender identity" that we're experiencing in this timeline.)

I would be surprised if Scott genuinely, _honestly_ thought dolphins should be fish _if you asked him in 2012_ (or in my alternate timeline where we still didn't have gay marriage yet). I think it's much more likely that he _first_ felt psychological pressure to come up with a clever casuistry for [the bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) of "trans women are women / trans men are men" [(sections IV.–VI.)](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), and _then_ came up with the "whales are fish" thing for the intro section.

I know, I know: [caution on bias arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), [we have a terrible track record in guessing Scott's motives](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-have-a-terrible-track-record). I agree that [psychologizing](https://arbital.com/p/psychologizing/) about your interlocutor's political incentives is a fraught endeavor and most people get it wrong! We're probably _designed_ to get it wrong, if there were payoffs in [the environment of evolutionary adaptedness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epZLSoNvjW53tqNj9/evolutionary-psychology) to think badly of enemies—either because of asymmetric payoffs (less expensive to fear a nonexistent murder plot than fail to notice a real one), or to search for clever arguments to recruit allies to oppose the enemy.

Nevertheless, think about it: can you imagine Scott making the "whales are fish" case, if he _weren't_ leading to that politically convenient bottom line? Imagine the same post with _just_ the whales-are-fish and categories-are-like-national-borders parts, no parts IV.–VI.? Do you think that post would be popular?

It's notable that the ["algorithmic"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) lie (far too _optimized_ to call a mere "mistake", even if Scott wasn't _consciously_ lying) that makes sections IV.–VI. of "... Not Man for the Categories" mind-poison—the idea that we can legitimately choose categories _in order to make people happy_ (!?!?!), rather than to reflect the territory—isn't something that Scott does _anywhere else_ during that period of his work. For example, ["Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do comas?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/), published three months earlier, gets the categories issue _right_: "there is a common-sense concept of being-in-a-coma which is valuable in predicting various things we want to predict, like whether someone is able to talk and able to walk and able to solve math problems and so on"—the "coma" concept should be optimized to _reflect the territory_, not to _make someone feel better_.

(It's all so _pointless_, too—that people think they have to support these Orwellian _mind games_ in order to support trans people. I'm not against trans _people_, who I'm arguably one of—depending on where you draw the boundary. I'm grateful [that I got to try hormone replacement therapy for five months](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) with medical supervision, instead of it being illegal. Body modding to more closely resemble the opposite sex (in the [sad absence of the technology to do it for real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) is probably a reasonable thing for some people to do in some circumstances, and _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women! But one would have hoped that social support for this could have been won on principled morphological freedom grounds (the same reason people should be free to get a tattoo or a piercing) rather than this culture of _mind games_ bent on destroying the language that _I, as a transgender person_, need to [_tell the truth_ about what I _want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).)

Anyway, in the world where the gay marriage fight took longer, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or ["Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically) would have become _memes_. But since Scott won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster and better than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else_ who trusts Scott to do his homework even when he obviously hasn't. (Would section I. of "... Not Man for the Categories" have concluded with "(also, bats)" if Scott knew about _die Fledermäuse_?)

This is the mechanism that Yudkowsky called [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology): _fake_ epistemology lessons that people only have an incentive to invent in order to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits. I don't question your self-report of _your_ motives! I believe that _you_ weren't trying to play political games with me! But your _information environment_ is supersaturated with the toxic waste of everyone else's disinformation, that you don't have the cognitive resources to distangle yourself: if "dolphins are fish, Actually" is suddenly a trendy meme after 2014, and you don't _notice_ that the meme is causally downstream of dark side epistemology, then you won't see anything wrong with running with that thought.

In this specific case—a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who _have_ read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their _conversations_ with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that _completely forgot_ the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill! People only remember the specific _subset_ of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the [conditional independence structure in the environment required for "categories" to be a useful AI trick](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception?commentId=FqjsM2AkEkaBgf2wD).

As a result of your _shitposting_, "... Not Man for the Categories" was [cited](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185) [three](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [times](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) by other Twitter users, driving _yet more_ traffic to a post that claims (redacting the specific object-level example)—

> I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.

Those sentences are a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. I think you, Nate Soares, need to _condemn_ those sentences, out loud, in public, as a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. And if you can't do it, then you're a fraud. If the leaders of the so-called "rationalist" community can't condemn it (either because of the politics, or because you're somehow _actually that retarded_), then the so-called "rationalist" community needs to _rebrand_, or _disband_, or _be destroyed_.