+But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is _doing_ in Stalin's service, not about how it _feels_; I'm talking about a pattern of _publicly visible behavior_ stretching over years. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but _it does not therefore follow_ that no one ever looks terrible.
+
+I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing`. (People get very invested in their own stories.) But if you have the _receipts_ of the Other repeatedly doing `terrible_thing` in public over a period of years, maybe yelling about it to _everyone else_ might help _them_ stop getting defrauded by the Other's bogus story.
+
+Let's recap.
+
+[TODO: recap—
+* in 2009, "Changing Emotions"
+* in 2016, "20% of the ones with penises"
+* ...
+]
+
+
+Yudkowsky writes:
+
+> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
+
+What does the "tossed into a bucket" metaphor refer to, though? I can think of many different things that might be summarized that way, and my sympathy for the one who does not like to be tossed into a bucket depends on a lot on exactly what real-world situation is being mapped to the bucket.
+
+If we're talking about overt _gender role enforcement attempts_—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband", or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.
+
+(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm betting on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt-out of the default buckets, without causing too much trouble.)
+
+But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.5; your expectation that I toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to tell me, "As a male, you're risk for prostate cancer," it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
+
+While piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not have merit. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
+>
+> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.
+
+So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention.
+
+But _given_ the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be refered to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me! The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer, are going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.
+
+
+
+
+[
+To this one might reply that I'm being uncharitable in my interpretation. The text of the post doesn't _say_ that people have a general right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them.
+
+
+And the text of the post _does_ say, "It's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist."
+
+]
+
+
+[TODO: student dysphoria—I hated being put in the box as student
+
+/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/
+]
+
+
+[TODO section Feelings vs. Truth
+This is a conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politics and Truth.
+
+Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is very explicit about only acting in the capacity of some guy with a blog. You can tell that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is great. I feel bad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that can be unambigously proven false.
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader.
+
+If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
+
+]
+
+
+[TODO section stakes, cooperation
+
+> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good). _If the world were at stake._
+>
+> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
+
+
+
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he" [...]'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)),
+
+
+
+The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio!
+
+]
+
+
+
+[TODO:
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to strategically say positive things about Republican candidates, and make sure to never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+]
+
+
+
+I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
+
+_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
+
+At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
+
+On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+
+In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
+
+Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
+
+It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political-risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out [that's not what's going on](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/), he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of _something_—but at this point, _I have no reason to care_. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a _waste of everyone's time_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
+
+Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
+
+Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level _and_ the meta level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+
+(Obviously, if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
+
+**What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_** My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.)
+
+Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+
+But I don't, think that everybody knows. And I am not, giving up that easily. Not on an entire subculture full of people.
+
+
+
+[TODO: the dolphin war, our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014; this is a sign that we're a cult
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
+> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
+
+I mean, I wouldn't _call_ it a "dark conspiracy" exactly, but if the people with intellectual authority are computing what to say on the principle of "it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post [their] agreement with Stalin", and Stalin cares a lot about doing damage on issues legible and important to me, then, pragmatically, I think that has _similar effects_ on the state of our collective knowledge as a dark conspiracy, even if the mechanism of coordination is each individual being separately terrified of Stalin, rather than them meeting with dark robes to plot under a full moon.
+
+]
+
+[TODO: sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?!
+
+> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
+
+https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+]
+
+
+David Xu writes (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
+
+> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is the proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
+>
+> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
+
+I reply: on the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
+
+On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
+
+On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is mostly true for humans. We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
+
+Xu continues:
+
+> I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
+>
+> My sense is that you have (thus far, in the parts of the public discussion I've had the opportunity to witness) been behaving as though the _one and only crux in play_—that is, the True Source of Disagreement—has been the fifth crux, the thing I refused to include with the others of its kind. Your accusations against the caliphate _only make sense_ if you believe the dividing line between your behavior and theirs is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it"; as opposed to, say, what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, and which (if any) of those prescriptions are violated by using a notion of gender (in public, where you do not know in advance who will receive your communications) that does not cause massive psychological damage to some subset of people.
+>
+> Perhaps it is your argument that all four of the initial cruxes I listed are false; but even if you believe that, it should be within your set of ponderable hypotheses that people might disagree with you about that, and that they might perceive the disagreement to be _about_ that, rather than (say) about whether subscribing to the Blue Tribe view of gender makes them a Bad Rationalist, but That's Okay because it's Politically Convenient.
+>
+> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
+
+At this point, I'm inclined to say it's not a "disagreement" at all. It's a _conflict_. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want people to tell the truth, and the Caliphate wants people to not tell the truth. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+
+At this point, I imagine defenders of the Caliphate are shaking their heads in disappointment at how I'm doubling down on refusing to Other-model. But—_am_ I? Isn't this just a re-statement of Xu's first proposed crux, except reframed as a "values difference" rather than a "disagreement"?
+
+Is the problem that my use of the phrase "tell the truth", which has positive valence in our culture, functions to sneak in normative connotations favoring my side?
+
+Fine. Objection sustained. I'm happy to use to Xu's language. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop), and the Caliphate wants to _not_ facilitate people making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because facilitating inferences _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to make inferences_.
+
+
+[TODO:
+"massive psychological damage to some subset of people",
+that's _not my problem_. I _don't give a shit_.]
+
+[TODO: if he's reading this, win back respect— reply, motherfucker]