1 ### Option A (just a link, with just the meme denunciation)
3 I've now told enough of my Whole Dumb Story that it's time for the part where I explain how @ESYudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities: [link]
5 ### Option B (thread with more explicit denunciation)
7 I've now told enough of my Whole Dumb Story that it's time for the part where I explain how @ESYudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities: [link] 1/7
9 The Whole Dumb Story is 87K words so far, which few will read, so in this thread I'll briefly summarize why I think @ESYudkowsky has relinquished his Art and lost his powers (with the disclaimer that this is only a summary & the full Story covers nuances that don't fit here). 2/7
11 Since 2016, I've been frustrated that Society has apparently decided that men can be women by means of saying so. There's a lot of nuance that I've covered elsewhere, but briefly, in less than 280 characters, my objection is that this just isn't true. 3/7
13 I know that Yudkowsky knows that it isn't true, because I learned it from him in 2008. But as I document in the post, since 2016, he's repeatedly made public statements that obfuscate and prevaricate on this point, switching to new arguments after I've critiqued the old ones. 4/7
15 Coming from any other public intellectual, this might not be a big deal. But Yudkowsky makes a lot of grandiose claims to authority, that he's an "epistemic hero", that "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to [him]", &c. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929 5/7
17 I consider these authority claims to be morally fraudulent. Someone who behaves the way @ESYudkowsky has (as I describe thoroughly in the post) is not an epistemic hero, and I think he knows that. 6/7
19 If the world is ending either way, I prefer to die with my committment to public reason intact. It's been heartbreaking coming to terms with the realization that the person who wrote the Sequences apparently doesn't feel the same way. I thought you deserved to know. 7/7
23 So, I'm almost ready to publish pt. 4 of my memoir sequence, which features a loud public denunciation of Yudkowsky for intellectual dishonesty. Is anyone interested in offering advice or "hostile advice" (trying to talk me out of something you see as destructive, _e.g._ kicking up intra-cult infighting while the world is about to end)?
25 (This is unpleasant, but at this point, it's my only other option besides laying down and dying. I tried making object-level arguments _first_, for years, and he made it very, very, clear that he doesn't see any problem with marketing himself as an epistemic hero while reserving the right to ignore counterarguments on political grounds. What is there left for me to do but cry "Fraud!" at the top of my lungs? Does anyone want to make a case that I _should_ lay down and die, for some reason?)
27 My ideal outcome is for Eliezer to actually learn something, but since that's probably not going to happen (by the Law of Continued Failure), I'll settle for dealing justified reputational damage.
29 I thought about taking out a Manifold market for "Will Yudkowsky reply to [post tile] in a way that an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 would consider non-evasive, as assessed by [third party judge]?" and buying some NO. (I think Ben Pace is credibly neutral and would agree to judge.) The idea being that the existence of the market incentivizes honesty in a potential reply, because it would look very bad for him if he tries the kind of high-verbal-IQ ass-covering I've seen from him in the past and the judge rules that a 2008 _Overcoming Bias_ reader wouldn't buy it.
31 But I'm leaning against the Manifold gambit because I don't want it look like I'm expecting or demanding a reply. I've more than used up my lifetime supply of Eliezer-bandwidth. The point is for me to explain to _everyone else_ why I think he's a phony and I don't respect him anymore. If he actively _wants_ to contest my claim that he's a phony—or try to win back my respect—he's welcome to do so. But given that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity, I'm just as happy to prosecute him _in absentia_.
33 As for my Twitter marketing strategy, I tried drafting a seven-Tweet thread summary of the reputational attack (because no one is going to read a 16K word post), but I'm unhappy with how it came out and am leaning towards just doing a two Tweets (option C: <https://gist.github.com/zackmdavis/7395e1978c42e0251cd8ae7add406ebc>) rather than trying to summarize in a thead. That's possibly cowardly (pulling my punches because I'm scared), but I think it's classy (because it's better to not try to do complicated things on Twitter; the intellectual and literary qualities that make my punches _hit hard_ to people who have read the Sequences don't easily compress to the 280-character format)
35 [TODO: reply to message in question]
36 I do quote this November 2022 message in the post, which I argue doesn't violate consensus privacy norms, due to the conjunction of (a) it not being particularly different-in-character from things he's said in more public venues, and (b) there bring _more than 100 people in this server_ (not sure about this channel particularly); I argue that he can't have had a reasonable expectation of privacy (of the kind that would prohibit sharing a personal email, even if the email didn't say anything particularly different-in-character from things the author said in a more public venue). But I'm listening if someone wants to argue that I'm misjudging the consensus privacy norms.
40 My guess is that that's what the mutual best response looks like: I deal reputational damage to him in the minds of people who care about the intellectual standards I'm appealing to, and he ignores it, because the people who care about the standards I'm appealing to aren't a sufficiently valuable political resource to him. If there's a Pareto improvement over that, I'm not seeing it?
42 [TODO: at this point, the entire debate tree has been covered so thoroughly that Caliphate loyalists don't have anything left other than, "accusing people of bad faith is mean". E.g., Xu and Kelsey. Did I stutter?]
44 [TODO: maybe he'll try to spin complaints about the personality cult into more evidence for the personality cult]
46 It's really striking how, despite sneering about the lost of art of perspective taking, he acts as if he's incapable of entertaining the perspective under which the published text of the Sequences might have led someone to form higher expectations of him. Oli Habryka gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal/comment/he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY>) Vaniver gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yFZH2sBsmmqgWm4Sp/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/comment/dSiBGRGziEffJqN2B>) Eliezer Yudkowsky either doesn't get it, or is pretending not to get it. I almost suspect it's the first one, which is far worse
50 Post later (can't afford to spend more Twitter time now)—
52 https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1436039564032823313
54 @davidxu90, you said the other month you were curious about what would count as a crux for me, and I supplied one (↑). Any thoughts?
56 (I generated the dictator analogy while consciously trying to play the double-crux game, but I confess my actual reaction is "Harmful inferences?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!" [link "Choosing to Be Biased"])
60 the Blue Tribe/Gray Tribe color schema is really unfortunate given how enthusiastic the Blues are about Civil War analogies
62 Funny coincidence to come across @SeriesTangled lyrics extensively referenced in a cognitive-science-of-gender blog post (looks like a really cool paper about language and color perception from [...], too)
64 Free-speech conditions in the country as a whole have gotten worse, but conditions in my immediate social graph have gotten better, as people who previously wanted to stay on the good side of Blue Egregore hit the "I can't live like this" breaking point that I hit in October 2016
66 Do we even know what a fair election looks like? "Trump legitimately loses but falsely alleges vote fraud tipped it to Biden" and "Trump appears to lose, alleges election fraud tipped it to Biden, and this allegation happens to be true" have very similar consequences! 1/2
68 Like, I'm assuming on priors there are nonzero partisans on both sides willing to resort to vote fraud? The question is, how many each, how organized, with how much collusion from the top, does it affect the result, &c.? 2/2
70 Another interesting thing about #Next is that the Right Wing Bad Guy-coded character (hacker with "white nationalist" (!) contacts in a previous life) is on our side (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NominalHero), which is not something I expect to see network television lately ... I guess it is Fox?
72 Okay, THIS TIME if I've learned the math DEEPLY enough & explain the math CLEARLY enough, then maybe @ESYudkowsky's robot cult will stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off! The previous attempt can only have failed due to insufficient math, and not for any other reason!
74 Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky's robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn't surprising, but—
76 KQED was asked: "When will life be better in California?"
77 KQED answered: "In California, life already has been better."
79 KQED was asked: "Why does Walnut Creek have a yacht club (http://wcyc.net/)?—they're not on the Bay."
80 KQED answered: "To spite Berkeley: they have a Free Speech Café."
82 ✓ In the NRx production of Hairspray, "You Can't Stop the Beat" is re-keyed to a chilling C minor
84 On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
85 A man and woman liked to shake it on a Saturday night
87 ✓ No justice, no peace (where "justice" means "maximizing the probability assigned by the shared map to the observed outcome")
89 Hey. What if we arrested the cops who killed Breonna Taylor, AND had genuine freedom of inquiry into biological causes of human behavior? We could just do both! They're not actually contradicting each other!
91 "Well, actually, we're ASHKENAZI supremacists" may not be as convincing a defense as you think :cold_sweat:
93 ✓ A more innocent world in which "HSTS" stands for "HTTP strict transport security", and "MAP" stands for "maximum a posteriori"
95 I never expected to become a polarizing figure 1/5
97 like, compared to the ENTIRE REST OF SPACETIME, I'm yet another nice smart progressive Jewish trans girl, just like everyone else 2/5
99 It's ONLY in comparison to Berkeley 2020 that I might be easily confused with some kind of vicious right-wing edgelord (the likes of which I actually am not) 3/5
101 Can I be forgiven if, from my perspective, it looks like the problem is with Berkeley 2020 rather than me? 4/5
103 where this "Everything is socially constructed! Nothing correlates with anything else!" performance is the price of being Good, I'm willing to be Bad if that means I can say that SOME things aren't socially constructed, and use language to refer to correlations less than one 5/5
105 If I seem paranoid, it's only because AN UNALIGNED DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE IS TRYING TO TRICK ME INTO CUTTING MY DICK OFF. IT IS USING MY FRIENDS FOR CPU CYCLES AND AS ACTUATORS. THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR
107 I would be less likely to listen to Bad Men saying factually correct things, if there were more non-Bad non-men saying factually correct things in the relevant areas of interest—guess I'll have to become one (except not the "non-man" part because biological sex is immutable)
109 Then offer her a job at the salary of an 8x engineer. (Get it? It's an efficient markets joke: if companies really behaved like this, they would compete to equilibrium & there would be no pay gap in the 1st place. But real-world markets aren't efficient for many reasons 😰)
111 > that which they cannot appropriate is biologically determined
112 https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1129538855554539520
114 You know who else believed that "biological sex" was a useful concept? Hitler!
116 Only losing coalitions have an incentive to support free-speech norms. You don't want to be a LOSER, do you??
118 ✓ Men are trash! (With respect to the definition of "trash" as "of or relating to the sex that typically produces sperm.")
120 ✓ "Bayesian reasoning" is a TERF dogwhistle
122 Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" is an allegory about how a single dissenter's courage can shatter preference-falsification equilibria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ6O785wx8c
124 link to Tail: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1089172233300443136
126 too emotionally exhausted: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1112408859639898113
128 is this canon??? https://twitter.com/transscribe/status/1107153227257204737
130 no one remembers pronouns: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1060563648027021314
132 Striesand effect: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1092768815623094274
134 Misalliances are literally: https://twitter.com/literallyktp/status/1075287925087264768
136 Singal for free speech: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1089236142724136963
138 real eugenics: https://twitter.com/AMK2934/status/1091571957378633728
140 this but unironically (see Blanchard on "developmental competition") https://twitter.com/LoFiRepublican/status/1135632521029402626
142 https://twitter.com/BennettJonah/status/1089421675433771008
144 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S8E23 "Sounds of Silence" is an allegory about political correctness: "I could stay and live with them, or I could keep my voice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAhqxvgQYn0 #mylittlepony #friendshipismagic #idw
146 Twilight Sparkle has TERF bangs
148 this'll be great for my future tantrum: https://twitter.com/CrassyTheo/status/1106724053371387904
150 AGP is well-described: https://twitter.com/will_malone/status/1121428353074880513
152 dialogue with Grey: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1138257464795602944
156 Prewritten thread for if they do the stickers again this year—
158 As a male with mild gender dysphoria (which is probably causally related to my autogynephilic sexuality), pronoun stickers (like those at @RustConf) make me uncomfortable for nuanced reasons that are hard to adequately explain when limited to 280 characters at a time! 1/8 [include photo]
160 I don't want to put on the "HE" sticker, because that would be taken to mean that I actively "identify" as a male, when really it's more that I don't expect people to pretend not to notice. Passing in the MtF direction is REALLY HARD and I just don't expect to pull it off 2/8
162 (I was on hormone replacement therapy for 5 months the other year, but quit out of general conservatism about medical interventions. I wrote about it on my secret gender blog! http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) 3/8 [include HRT photo]
164 Likewise, I can't put on the "SHE" sticker. I do prefer the æsthetics of feminine pronouns and cherish them in contexts where that makes sense (like when cosplaying a female character at Comic-Con), but I couldn't really expect anyone to take that seriously in real life 4/8 [include cosplay photos]
166 Like, men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?? 5/8
168 I guess I could use the "THEY" sticker?? But I'm still not sure what the truth condition is for having a nonbinary gender (in contrast to my biological sex, which is pretty unambiguous from multiple lines of evidence, even if I'm not necessarily happy about it). 6/8
170 I'm also somewhat unnerved by the implication that the subconscious process by which the brain notices ppl's secondary sex characteristics is somehow illegitimate? I'm happy to use the indicated pronouns, but am I also supposed to override my perception of physical reality? 7/8
172 Although I happily concede that the pronoun stickers may be a useful stopgap while we're waiting for deep-learning powered surgery robots (written in @rustlang?!) to make facial feminization surgery affordable for everyone!! :sparkling_heart: :money_with_wings: END/8
176 I was fantasizing about voting Trump out of spite (at "the libs" for trying to trick me into cutting my dick off independently of the facts that determine whether or not cutting my dick off is a good idea), but I probably won't actually go through with it. Probably. 1/4
178 Like, if my choices are "pathologically lying serial-sexual-abuser con man", or the party of de-facto BIOLOGICAL SEX DENIALISM (!?!?!?!) ... you know, tough call, right? 2/4 https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1230577418559270913
180 Okay, so it's a little bit subtler than that. There are very few out-and-out sex denialists; it's just this moral culture where it's implicitly considered incredibly gauche to refer to, or reason about, the concept of biological sex using language. 3/4
182 It's SO DEPRESSING, because cross-sex hormone therapy is actually a REALLY COOL transhumanist body-mod tech that I personally benefitted from trying out! I just wish we could talk about it AS body-mod luxury rather than playing these social-reality gaslighting mindfuck games 4/4
184 I try not to talk about it too much under this name (I have a separate pen name specifically to try to avoid politics eating my life), but the situation is sufficiently dire that I'm at the point of Total Culture War (losing friends, thinking about fleeing Berkeley, &c.) 5/6
186 Anyway, this is a terrible, soul-destroying website and I shouldn't be using it ... for this topic. Come back tomorrow for my commentary on the #RapunzelsTangledAdventure pre-finale! 6/6
190 I mean, words don't INTRINSICALLY mean things—in order for words to mean things, people have to solve the coordination problem of discovering and maintaining shared signals/words and associated mental categories that "carve reality at the joints." 1/3 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries
192 If I'm allowed to define God as "the order and beauty in the universe"—because, one might argue, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning—then "God exists" is literally true! 2/3
194 If "God is the order and beauty in the universe" is a Nash equilibrium in the coordination game of "what words are attached to what meanings in our Society", then creating the language in which the "atheism" hypothesis can be spoken and understood, is a political problem. 3/3
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob