-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.
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-(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
-
- * 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), but still seemed to think his shitposting was based
-
- * I got frustrated and lashed out; "open to arguments that he was making a mistake" felt fake to me; rats are good at paying lip service to humility, but I'd lost faith in getting them to change their behavior, like not sending PageRank to "... Not Man for the Categories"
-
- * Nate wrote a longer reply on Less Wrong the next morning
-
- * I pointed out that his followup thread lamented that people hadn't read "A Human's Guide to Words", but that Sequence _specifically_ used the example of dolphins. What changed?!?
-
- * [Summarize Nate's account of his story], phylogeny not having the courage of its convictions
-
- * Twitter exchange where he said he wasn't sure I would count his self-report as evidnece, I said it totally counts
-
- * I overheated. This was an objectively dumb play. (If I had cooled down and just written up my reply, I might have gotten real engagement and a resolution, but I blew it.) I apologized a few days later.
-
- * Nate's reaction to me blowing up said it looked like I was expecting deference. I deny this; I wouldn't expect people to defer to me—what I did expect was a fair hearing, and at this point, I had lost faith that I would get one. (Could you blame me, when Yudkowsky says a fair hearing is less important than agreeing with Stalin?)
-
- * My theory of what's going on: I totally believe Nate's self report that he wasn't thinking about gender. (As Nate pointed out, you could give the thread an anti-trans interpretation, too.) Nevertheless, it remains the case that Nate's thinking is causally downstream of Scott's arguments in "... Not Man for the Categories." Where did Scott get it from? I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient.
-
- * This is like radiocontrast dye for dark side epistemology: we can see Scott sneezing his bad epistemology onto everyone else because he's such a popular writer. No one can think fast enough to think their own thoughts, but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes.
-
- * I look up the relevant phylogenetics definitions, and write "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
-
-]
-
-
-[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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) these days, with the way he sneers as Earthlings and post-rats)
-
- * "I may as well do it on Earth"
-
- * a specific example that made me very angry in 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 Yudkowsky and Alexander 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_.
-
- * 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. (The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. Motte: someone who's critical of central rationalists; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason.)
-
-sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
-
-> 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
-
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
-> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
-
-I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
-
-But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a suspect idea; I think _something of value has been lost_ when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
-
-At Valinor's 2022 [Smallpox Eradication Day](https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1391248651167494146) party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
-
-[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
-
-I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
-
-My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
-
-If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
-
-The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
-
-(The authors of the [HEXACO personality model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure) may have gotten something importantly right in [grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality).)
-
-I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
-
-From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I _know some things_ about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in _a world that makes sense_.
-
-]
-
-
-[David Xu writes](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (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).
-
-Better? Perhaps, to some 2022-era rats and EAs, this formulation makes my position look obviously in the wrong: I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_ (!). Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
-
-One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased).
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 starts by quoting a passage from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record). Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 continues—it's again worth quoting at length—
-
-> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
->
-> Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
->
-> [...]
->
-> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
->
-> You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
->
-> The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
->
-> [...]
->
-> One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know _what_ you don't know, you don't know how _much_ you don't know, and you don't know how much you _needed_ to know.
->
-> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
-
-Looking back on this from 2022, the only criticism I have is that Yudkowsky was too optimistic to "doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen." In some ways, people's actual behavior is _worse_ than what Orwell depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph _before_ denying memory of it, because it would be _too_ absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
-
-In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year _doesn't even bother covering its tracks_. Turns out, it doesn't need to! People just don't remember things!
-
-The [flexibility of natural language is a _huge_ help here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). If the caliph were to _directly_ contradict himself in simple, unambiguous language—to go from "Oceania is not at war with Eastasia" to "Oceania is at war with Eastasia" without any acknowledgement that anything had changed—_then_ too many people might notice that those two sentences are the same except that one has the word _not_ in it. What's a caliph to do, if he wants to declare war on Eastasia without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the decision to do so?
-
-The solution is simple: just—use more words! Then if someone tries to argue that you've _effectively_ contradicted yourself, accuse them of being uncharitable and failing to model the Other. You can't lose! Anything can be consistent with anything if you apply a sufficiently charitable reading; whether Oceania is at war with Eastasia depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of "at war."
-
-Thus, O'Brien should envy Yudkowsky: burning the photograph turns out to be unnecessary! ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say. I claim that these posts _effectively_ contradict each other. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are _not only_ out of luck given forseeable technology, but _also_ that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, _already_ be women in some unspecified psychological sense.
-
-_Technically_, these don't _strictly_ contradict each other: I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one includes the word _not_. (And even if there were such sentences, I wouldn't be able to prove that the other words were being used in the same sense in both sentences.) One _could_ try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing.
-
-_Realistically_ ... no. These two posts _can't_ both be right. In itself, this isn't a problem: people change their minds sometimes, which is great! But when people _actually_ change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even _acknowledge the change_, that's pretty Orwellian, like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
-
-And if a little bit of Orwellianism on specific, narrow, highly-charged topics might be forgiven—because everyone else in your Society is doing it, and you would be punished for not playing along, an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) that no one actor has the power to defy—might we not expect the father of the "rationalists" to stand his ground on the core theses of his ideology, like whether telling the truth is good?
-
-I guess not! ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "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" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
-
-I don't doubt Yudkowsky could come up with some clever casuistry why, _technically_, the text he wrote in 2007 and the text he endorsed in 2021 don't contradict each other. But _realistically_ ... again, no.
-
-[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
-
-I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's _clearly labeled as such_ would be fine. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
-
-What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_.
-
-------
-
-[TODO: Boston–New York visit
-
- * worked on "Challenges" and my Charles Murray review from Boston
-
- * saw an escort, who I found in the "ebony" section of eros.com
- * who I'll call ... (which wasn't the name she used, and the name she used was surely not her real name)
- * she finally got back to me just in time for me to go to the bank and get cash, there not being Wells Fargo branches on the east coast (speaking of decisions my father made for me when I was four years old)
- * she was very late; we went to an Indian restaurant and then to my hotel
- * an opportunity to talk to someone who I wouldn't ordinarily otherwise (messaging someone like her on match.com would have felt fake, paying for her time felt more "honest")
- * I explained AGP to her
- * I didn't let her/have her touch my penis (that seemed "unethical" according to my own sense of ethics, though I'm not super-confident that my "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her); I just wanted to touch
- * I wasn't coming; she said that for $2K, I definitely deserved to get off
- * she said I could have her breasts, they were heavy
- * my comment about how I wished I could have a photograph, but that it would be rude to ask; she said "No", and I wanted to clarify that I didn't ask, I said I wished I _could_ ask—but, you see, her culture didn't support that level of indirection; the claim that I wasn't asking, would seem dishonest
- * I didn't tell her about the Charles Murray book review I was writing
-
- * met my NRx Twitter mutual, wore my Quillette shirt
- * he had been banned from Slate Star Codex "for no reason"
- * he offered to buy me a drink, I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that being drunk was the ritual for how men establish trust, so I had a glass and a half of wine
- * it was so refreshing—not being constrained
- * I explained the AI risk case; he mentioned black people having larger wingspan
-
- * met Ben and his new girlfriend; Jessica wasn't around; he said the psych disaster was a betrayal, but a finite one; Ben's suggestion that if CfAR were serious, they'd hire me
-
-]
-
-------
-
-In October 2021, Jessica [published a post about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of her time at Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
-
-Scott Alexander posted a comment claiming to add important context, essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!). Alexander accused Vassar of trying "jailbreak" people from normal social reality, which "involve[d] making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs". Yudkowsky posted [a comment that uncritically validated Scott's reliability as a narrator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8).
-
-To me, this looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders moved in to discredit her by association. (Quite effectively, as it turned out: the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma.)
-
-I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy) (and [offered textual evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=yKo2uuCcwJxbwwyBw) against the silly claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy).
-
-Scott [disagreed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] wasn't harmful to me. He revealed that during my March 2019 problems, he had emailed my posse:
-
-> accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
-
-[^vassarite-scare-quotes]: Scare quotes because "Vassarite" seems to be Alexander's coinage; we didn't call ourselves that.
-
-But I will _absolutely_ bite the bullet on it being correct to freak out about learning your entire Society is corrupt and gaslighting (as I explained to Scott on Discord a few days later).
-
-Imagine living in the Society of Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (which I keep linking) in the brief period when the lightening taboo is being established, trying to make sense of everyone you know, suddenly deciding, seemingly in lockstep, that thunder comes before lightning. (When you try to point out that this isn't true and no one believed it five years ago, they point out that it depends on what you mean by the word 'before'.)
-
-Eventually, you would get used to it, but at first, I think this would be legitimately pretty upsetting! If you were already an emotionally fragile person, it might even escalate to a psychiatric emergency through the specific mechanism "everyone I trust is inexplicably lying about lightning → stress → sleep deprivation → temporary psychosis". (That is, it's not that Society being corrupt directly causes mental ilness—that would be silly—but confronting a corrupt Society is very stressful, and that can [snowball into](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/11/11/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-dynamic-systems/) things like lost sleep, and sleep is [really](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short) [biologically important](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/).)
-
-This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am _I_ crazy, or is _everyone else_ crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just _an_ ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious.
-
-But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, honestly, is probably some kind of _major asshole_. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
-
-From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
-
-I had my answer. But I wasn't sure that Scott would understand.
-
-To assess whether joining the "Vassarites" was harmful to me, one would need to answer: as compared to what? In the counterfactual where Michael vanished from the world in 2016, I think I would have been just as upset about the same things for the same reasons, but with fewer allies and fewer ideas to make sense of what was going on in my social environment.
-
-Additionally, it's really obnoxious when people have tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, don't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself isn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
-
-Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with the November 2018–April 2019 thing (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an _enormous_ favor for _me_ and _my_ agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That's _absurd_. Had he no shame?
-
-I _did_, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was silly. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
-
-[TODO—
-
-"what you think is support" is actually a different thing
-
-(In December, Jessica published [a followup post explaining the circumstances of her psychotic episode in more detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards).
-
-Scott concedes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=RGKkmyvyoeWe2LB7d
-
-]
-
-------
-
-[TODO:
-Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
-
-> The Kiritsugu shrugged. "When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
-
- * Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
-]
-
-At the end of the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I [said that I was upgrading my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block"](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435468183268331525). Better to just leave, rather than continue to hang around in his mentions trying (consciously or otherwise) to pick fights, like a crazy ex-girlfriend. (["I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8) ...)
-
-I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time (valuable time, _limited_ time); I owed him that much.
-
-Leaving a personality cult is hard. As I struggled to write, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of cycles worrying about what he'd think of me, rather than saying the things I needed to say. I knew it was pathetic that my religion was so bottlenecked on _one guy_—particularly since the holy texts themselves (written by that one guy) [explicitly said not to do that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus)—but unwinding those psychological patterns was still a challenge.
-
-An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an EA forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative."
-
-I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does _not_ make sense to be reassured that _Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it_. That's just being a personality-cultist.
-
-[TODO last email and not bothering him—
- * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles worrying about what he'd think of me
- * January 2022, I wrote to him asking if he cared if I said negative things about him, that it would be easier if he wouldn't hold it against me, and explained my understanding of the privacy norm (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
- * in retrospect, I was wrong to ask that. I _do_ hold it against him. And if I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
- * what is the exact scope of not bothering him? I actually had left a Facebook comment shortly after blocking him on Twitter, and his reply seemed to imply that I did have commenting privileges (yudkowsky-twitter_is_worse_for_you.png)
-]
-
-In February 2022, I finally managed to finish a draft of ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (A year after the post it replies to! I did other things that year, probably.) It's long (12,000 words), because I wanted to be thorough and cover all the angles. (To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at Eliezer Yudkowsky, _you must kill him._)
-
-If I had to compress it by a factor of 200 (down to 60 words), I'd say my main point was that, given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's no "right answer", but we can at least be objective in _describing what the conflict is about_, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that; his "simplest and best proposal" favored the interests of some parties to the dispute (as was seemingly inevitable), _without admitting he was doing so_ (which was not inevitable).[^describing-the-conflict]
-
-[^describing-the-conflict]: I had been making this point for four years. [As I wrote in February 2018's "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#describing-the-conflict), "If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word [...] rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_."
-
-In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or save it for the memoir, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
-
-I asked secret posse member for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
-
-Secret posse member said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) They said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
-
-"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded secret posse member. "I don't know what you're afraid of."
-
-I was afraid of taking irrevocable war actions against the person who taught me everything I know. (And his apparent conviction that the world was ending _soon_, made it worse. Wouldn't it feel petty, if the last thing you ever said to your grandfather was calling him a liar in front of the whole family, even if he had in fact lied?)
-
-I wanted to believe that if I wrote all the words dotting every possible _i_ and crossing every possible _t_ at all three levels of meta, then that would make it [a description and not an attack](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/)—that I could have it both ways if I explained the lower level of organization beneath the high-level abstractions of "betraying his principles and being dishonest." If that didn't work because [I only had five words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words), then—I didn't know what I'd do. I'd think about it.
-
-After a month of dawdling, I eventually decided to pull the trigger on publishing "Challenges", without the extended political coda.[^coda] The post was a little bit mean to Yudkowsky, but not so mean that I was scared of the social consequences of pulling the trigger. (Yudkowsky had been mean to Christiano and Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah in [the recent MIRI dialogues](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oDueqtq); I didn't think this was worse than that.)
-
-[^coda]: The text from the draft coda would later be incorporated into the present post.
-
-I cut the words "in this domain" from the go-for-the-throat concluding sentence that I had been worried about. "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth," full stop.
-
-The post was a _critical success_ by my accounting, due to eliciting a [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror. Habryka wrote:
-
-> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
->
-> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
->
-> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
-
-Brutal! Recall that Yudkowsky's justification for his behavior had been that "it is sometimes personally prudent and _not community-harmful_ to post your agreement with Stalin" (emphasis mine), and here we had the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!).
-
-Is that ... _not_ evidence of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
-
-... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker", is what I fantasized about being able to say to Yudkowsky, if I hadn't already expressed an intention not to bother him anymore.
-
-[TODO: the Death With Dignity era April 2022
-
-"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability but that FAI was "impossible", and now he says the probability is ~0
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
-
- * swimming to shore analogy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg
-
-> your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
-
- * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
-
- * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier; Asimov wrote about robots and psychohistory, but he still portrayed a future galaxy populated by humans, which seems so silly now
-
-/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
-]
-
-Meanwhile, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth in which the ideas Yudkowsky presented to this world as his own, were commonplace.
-
-The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the worldbuilding of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope, the [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.
-
-[^planecrash-title]: The title is a pun, referring to both the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond).
-
-[^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly _more_ hypervolume in the space around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too.
-
-(I asked Anna how Yudkowsky could stand the Glowfic people. She said she thought Eliezer could barely stand anyone. That makes sense, I said.)
-
-Everyone in dath ilan receives rationality training from childhood, but knowledge and training deemed psychologically hazardous to the general population is safeguarded by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). AGI research takes place in a secret underground city; the culture of the masses is carefully steered away from ordinary people thinking about AI.
-
-Something that annoyed me about the portrayal of dath ilan was their incredibly casual attitude towards hiding information for some alleged greater good, seemingly without considering that [there are benefits and not just costs to the public knowing things](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
-
-You can, of course, make up any number of sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationales for this. (For example, a world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to hold Society together.)
-
-I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to Speech and Information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from. ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to."
-
-Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics):
-
-> Daria, once Green, tried to breathe amid the ashes of her world. _I will not flinch_, Daria told herself, _I will not look away_. She had been Green all her life, and now she must be Blue. Her friends, her family, would turn from her. _Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles_, her father had told her; but her father was dead now, and her mother would never understand. Daria stared down the calm blue gaze of the sky, trying to accept it, and finally her breathing quietened. _I was wrong_, she said to herself mournfully; _it's not so complicated, after all_. She would find new friends, and perhaps her family would forgive her ... or, she wondered with a tinge of hope, rise to this same test, standing underneath this same sky? "The sky is blue," Daria said experimentally, and nothing dire happened to her; but she couldn't bring herself to smile. Daria the Blue exhaled sadly, and went back into the world, wondering what she would say.
-
-Daria takes it as a given that she needs to be open about her new blue-sky belief, even though it's socially costly to herself and to her loved ones; the rationalist wisdom from her late father did _not_ say to go consult a Keeper to check whether telling everyone about the blue sky is a good idea.[^other-endings] I think this reflects the culture of the _Overcoming Bias_ in 2006 valuing the existence of a shared social reality that reflects actual reality: the conviction that it's both possible and desirable for people to rise to the same test, standing underneath the same sky.
-
-[^other-endings]: Even Eddin's ending, which portrays Eddin as more concerned with consequences than honesty, has him "trying to think of a way to prevent this information from blowing up the world", rather than trying to think of a way to suppress the information, in contrast to how Charles, in his ending, immediately comes up with the idea to block off the passageway. Daria and Eddin are clearly written as "rationalists"; the deceptive strategy only comes naturally to the non-rationalist Charles.
-
-In contrast, the culture of dath ilan does not seem to particularly value people _standing underneath the same sky_.
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-For example, we are told of an Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, centered around a famous medical technician with a psychological need to feel unimportant, of whom ["everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946) that her achievements are nothing special, which is deemed to be kindness to her. It's like a reverse [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) situation. (Norton was ordinary, but everyone around him colluded to make him think he was special; Merrin is special, but everyone around her colludes to make her think she's ordinary.)
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-And _as_ a rationalist, I condemn the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy as _morally wrong_, for the same [reasons I condemn the Emperor Norton Conspiracy](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). As [it was taught to me on _Overcoming Bias_ back in the 'aughts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality): what's true is already so. Denying it won't make it better. Acknowledging it won't make it worse. And _because_ it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, _because they are already doing so_.
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-In [the story about how Merrin came to the attention of Exception Handling](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), we see the thoughts of a Keeper, Rittaen, who talks to Merrin. We're told that the discipline of modeling people mechanistically rather than through sympathy is restricted to Keepers because it runs the risk of ["turning into an exceptionally dangerous psychopath"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862201#reply-1862201). Rittaen [uses his person-as-machine Sight](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862204#reply-1862204) to infer that Merrin was biologically predisposed to learn to be afraid of having too much status.
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-Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neurology skills that the author Doylistically doesn't know how to write, I am entirely unimpressed by the assertion that this idea is somehow _dangerous_, a secret that only Keepers can bear, rather than something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. We're told that "[i]t's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does"—reflecting an attitude that revealing information is _meddling_, rather than talking being a free action.
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-As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad_.