-In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him). You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class, is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him). And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female _with respect to_ a female/male "sex" concept that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).
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-If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.
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-Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is [very explicit about only speaking in the capacity of some guy with a blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). You can tell from his writings 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 sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
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-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 he knows to be unambiguously false.
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-But Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself as a master of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition, who ["aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608).
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-In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't _claim_ to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.
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-If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, _and_ refuses to acknowledge corrections _and_ keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising. His marketing bluster was optimized to trick people like me, even if it's my fault for being _dumb enough to believe him_.
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-Because, I did, actually, trust him. Back in 'aught-nine when _Less Wrong_ was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic ["Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) (in the style of [Chuck Norris facts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts)). And of course, it was a joke, but the hero-worship that make the joke funny was real. (You wouldn't make those jokes for your community college physics teacher, even if he was a decent teacher.)
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-["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
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-[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
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-> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
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-I notice that this advice leaves out a possibility: that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show, rather than a misperception on your part. I am left in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) shaking my head sadly about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and shaking my head in disgust at his craven duplicity. If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
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--------
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-[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation
- * so far, I've been writing this from the perspective of caring about _rationality_ and wanting there to be a rationality movement, the common interest of many causes
- * Singularity stuff scares me
- * e.g., as recently as 2020 I was daydreaming about working for an embryo selection company as part of the "altruistic" (about optimizing the future, rather than about my own experiences) component of my actions
- * if you have short timelines, and want to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, self-censoring about contradicting the state religion makes sense
- * you could tell a story in which I'm the villain for undermining Team Singularity with my petty temporal concerns
-]
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-/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time
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-> [_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._
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-[TODO: social justice and defying threats
- * There's _no story_ in which misleading people about this is on Yudkowsky's critical path!! I can cooperate with censorship that doesn't actively interfere with my battle, but Yudkowsky was interfering
- * I don't pick fights with Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't take a shit on my Something to Protect
- * back in 'aught-nine, SingInst had made a point of prosecuting Tyler Emerson, citing decision theory
- * there's a lot of naive misinterpretations of timeless decision theory out there that don't understand the counterfactual dependence thing, but the parsing of social justice as an agentic "threat" to be avoided rather than a rock to be dodged does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics more than infidels
- * But it matters where you draw the zero point: is being excluded from the coalition a "punishment" to threaten you out of bad behavior, or is being included a "reward" for good behavior?
- * at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
-]
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-I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
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-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.
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-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)),
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-[TODO cap off chess analogy—
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-The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio!
-]
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-In June 2021, MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares [wrote a Twitter thread aruging that](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) "[t]he definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering", which [Yudkowsky retweeted](https://archive.is/Ecsca).[^not-endorsements]
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-[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
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-Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), which post I had just dedicated _more than three years of my life_ to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), _specifically using dolphins as my central example_—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky (who retweeted Soares) definitely did. (Soares's [specific reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander.) [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
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-The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't _immediately_ see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which was _hostile to my interests_. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed _implausible_ that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
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-After a little more thought, I decided the thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"!), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar _in general_. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
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-(Somehow, it felt appropriate to use a quote from Arthur Jensen's ["How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F) as an epigraph.)
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-[TODO: dolphin war con'td
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- * Nate conceded all of my points (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433), said the thread was in jest ("shitposting"), and said he was open to arguments that he was making a mistake (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402889976438611968)
- *
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