-[TODO:
-Scott replies on 21 December https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E
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-> since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of "lie" REALLY is, in God's dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences
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-I snapped https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7
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-Christmas party
-playing on a different chessboard
-people reading funny GPT-2 quotes
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-A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
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-motivation deflates after Christmas victory
-5 Jan memoir as nuke
-]
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-There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
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-Here I again need to make a digression about privacy norms. Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint, and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message.
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-If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information, but also wants to comply with privacy norms, has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm, that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the info-revealer has an incentive to stay _just_ shy of being that egregious.
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-Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without technically "lying", I should not debase myself by thinking myself innocent for not having "really said it."
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-Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent a number of hours in the first half of 2020 working on a private Document about a hypothesis that had occured to me.
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-Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that the culture of trans ideology was exerting influence the rearing of gender-non-conforming children.
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-claims that children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex—very tomboyish girls and very feminine boys
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-[TODO: pandemic starts]
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-[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
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-[TODO: help from Jessica for "Unnatural Categories"]
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-[TODO: 2 June, I send an email to Cade Metz, who had DMed me on Twitter
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
-]
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-[TODO: "out of patience" email
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-> To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]>
-> Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
-> Date: 13 September 2020 2:24 _a.m._
-> Subject: out of patience
->
->> "I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason: you must say it, because it is true."
->> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
->
-> Dear Eliezer (cc Anna as mediator):
->
-> Sorry, I'm getting _really really_ impatient (maybe you saw my impulsive Tweet-replies today; and I impulsively called Anna today; and I've spent the last few hours drafting an even more impulsive hysterical-and-shouty potential _Less Wrong_ post; but now I'm impulsively deciding to email you in the hopes that I can withhold the hysterical-and-shouty post in favor of a lower-drama option of your choice): **is there _any_ way we can resolve the categories dispute _in public_?! Not** any object-level gender stuff which you don't and shouldn't care about, **_just_ the philosophy-of-language part.**
->
-> My grievance against you is *very* simple. [You are *on the public record* claiming that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
->
->> you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
->
-> I claim that this is _false_. **I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning, when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred usage does a better job of "carving reality at the joints" and the one bringing my usage into question doesn't have such an argument. And in particular, "This word usage makes me sad" doesn't count as a relevant argument.** I [agree that words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution), but precisely _because_ words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings, there's no _reason_ to challenge someone's word usage except _because_ of the hidden probabilistic inference it embodies.
->
-> Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, "Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!" And you replied: "No, I'm not! That's a lie." And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive and piped up, "You are _ontologcially confused_ if you think that's a false assertion. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on words, such _white supremacist_, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." Suppose you emailed Jaynes about it, and he brushed you off with, "But I didn't _say_ you were a white supremacist; I was only targeting a narrow ontology error." In this hypothetical situation, I think you might be pretty upset—perhaps upset enough to form a twenty-one month grudge against someone whom you used to idolize?
->
-> I agree that pronouns don't have the same function as ordinary nouns. However, **in the English language as actually spoken by native speakers, I think that gender pronouns _do_ have effective "truth conditions" _as a matter of cognitive science_.** If someone said, "Come meet me and my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her", and then that friend turned out to look like me, **you would be surprised**.
->
-> I don't see the _substantive_ difference between "You're not standing in defense of truth [...]" and "I can define a word any way I want." [...]
->
-> [...]
->
-> As far as your public output is concerned, it *looks like* you either changed your mind about how the philosophy of language works, or you think gender is somehow an exception. If you didn't change your mind, and you don't think gender is somehow an exception, is there some way we can _get that on the public record **somewhere**?!_