-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.
-
-[TODO—
- * Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader.
-
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-> 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.
-
- * If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
-
-]
-
-[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
- * 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
-]
-
-> [_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._
-
-[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
-]
-
-
-I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
-
-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)),
-
-
-[TODO cap off chess analogy—
-
-The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio!
-]
-
-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]
-
-[^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.
-
-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.
-
-I 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 Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legtimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories" 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.
-
-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_, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use, and _that_ was wrong. 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.
-
-(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.)
-
-[TODO: dolphin war con'td]
-
-
-[TODO:
- * depressed after talking to him at Independence Day party 2021 (I can mention that, because it was outdoors and probably lots of other people saw us, even if I can't talk about content)
- * It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't trying to sell himself as a religious leader, and profiting from the conflation of rationalist-someone-who-cares-about-reasoning, and rationalist-member-of-robot-cult
- * But he does, in fact, seem to actively encourage this conflation (contrast to how the Sequences had a litany against gurus)
- * a specific example that made me very angry in September 2021
- * the fact that David Xu interpreted criticism of the robot cult as me going "full post-rat" suggests that Yudkowsky's framing had spilled onto others
-
-sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-
-Or as Yudkowsky put it—
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
-
-> 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 [to] 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.
-
-After everything I've been through over the past six years, I'm inclined to think 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_ (for example, because they cause more harm than benefit).