-[^second-half]: In an unfinished slice-of-life short story I started writing _circa_ 2010, my protagonist (a supermarket employee resenting his job while thinking high-minded thoughts about rationality and the universe) speculates about "a threshold of economic efficiency beyond which nothing human could survive" being a tighter bound on future history than physical limits (like the heat death of the universe), and comments that "it imposes a sense of urgency to suddenly be faced with the fabric of your existence coming apart in ninety years rather than 10<sup>90</sup>."
-
- But if ninety years is urgent, what about ... nine? Looking at what deep learning can do in 2023, the idea of Singularity 2032 doesn't seem self-evidently _absurd_ in the way that Singularity 2019 seemed absurd in 2010 (correctly, as it turned out).
-
-My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of [that week in January 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack)). Previous AI milestones, like GANs for a _fixed_ image class, were easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the _details_, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to _combine_ concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of examples of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.[^qualitatively-new]
-
-[^qualitatively-new]: By mid-2022, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were generating much better pictures, but that wasn't surprising. Seeing AI being able to do a thing at all is the model update; AI being able to do the thing much better 18 months later feels "priced in."
-
-[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the great common task. Existing companies working on embryo selection [boringly](https://archive.is/tXNbU) [market](https://archive.is/HwokV) their services as being about promoting health, but [polygenic scores should work as well for maximizing IQ as they do for minimizing cancer risk](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection).[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
-
-[^eugenics-altruism]: If it seems odd to frame _eugenics_ as "altruistic", translate it as a term of art referring to the component of my actions dedicating to optimizing the world at large, as contrasted to "selfishly" optimizing my own experiences.
-
-[^polygenic-score]: Better, actually: [the heritability of IQ is around 0.65](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ), as contrasted to [about 0.33 for cancer risk](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26746459/).
-
-[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos; the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
-
-But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's starting to look unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is [on track to end the world in twenty years](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
-
-[It's ironic that "longtermism" got traction as the word for the cause area of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future, end up working out to extreme _short_-termism. Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a recognizable world of humans in 2123—_would_ care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone _better_ if Galileo had declined to publish for pre-emptive fear of the Inquisition.
-
-But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what large tech companies are doing as they build transformative AI, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have _time_ to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_. If the progressive machine marks you as a transphobic bigot, the machine's functionaries at OpenAI or Meta AI Research are less likely to listen to you when you explain why [their safety plan](https://openai.com/blog/our-approach-to-alignment-research/) won't work, or why they should have a safety plan at all.
-
-(I remarked to "Wilhelm" in mid-2022 that DeepMind [changing its Twitter avatar to a rainbow variant of their logo for Pride month](https://web.archive.org/web/20220607123748/https://twitter.com/DeepMind) was a bad sign.)
-
-So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain, willfully damaging humanity's chances of survival by picking unimportant culture-war fights in the xrisk-reduction social sphere, when _I know_ that the sphere needs to keep its nose clean in the eyes of the progressive egregore? _That's_ why Yudkowsky said the arguably-technically-misleading things he said about my Something to Protect: he _had_ to, to keep our collective nose clean. The people paying attention to contemporary politics don't know what I know, and can't usefully be told. Isn't it better for humanity if my meager talents are allocated to making AI go well? Don't I have a responsibility to fall in line and take one for the team—if the world is at stake?
-
-As usual, the Yudkowsky of 2009 has me covered. In his short story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), our protagonist Hirou wonders why the powerful wizard Dolf lets other party members risk themselves fighting, when Dolf could have protected them:
-
-> _Because Dolf was more important, and if he exposed himself to all the risk every time, he might eventually be injured_, Hirou's logical mind completed the thought. _Lower risk, but higher stakes. Cold but necessary—_
->
-> _But would you_, said another part of his mind, _would you, Hirou, let your friends walk before you and fight, and occasionally die, if you_ knew _that you yourself were stronger and able to protect them? Would you be able to stop yourself from stepping in front?_
->
-> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
->
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-
-That is, there's _no story_ under which misleading people about trans issues is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. _I'd_ prefer him to have free speech, but if _he_ thinks he can't afford to be honest about things he [_already_ got right in 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), he could just—not issue pronouncements on topics where he intends to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds!_
-
-In [a March 2021 Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
-
-> Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at _all_ the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a _lot_ of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
-
-Sure. But if that's your story, I think you need to _actually not comment_. ["[A]t least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) is _not "no comment"._ ["[Y]ou're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) is _not "no comment"_. We [did get a clarification on that one](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)—but then, within a matter of months, he turned around and came back with his "simplest and best proposal" about how the "important things [...] would be all the things [he's] read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", _which is also not "no comment."_
-
-It's a little uncomfortable that I seem to be arguing for a duty to self-censorship here. If he has selected "pro-trans" arguments he feels safe publishing, what's the harm in publishing them? How could I object to the addition of more Speech to the discourse?
-
-But I don't think it's the mere addition of the arguments to the discourse that I'm objecting to. (If some garden-variety trans ally had made the same dumb arguments, I would make the same counterarguments, but I wouldn't feel betrayed.)
-
-It's the _false advertising_—the pretense that Yudkowsky is still the unchallengable world master of rationality, if he's going to behave like a garden-variety trans ally and reserve the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (!!) when his incentives point that way.
-
-In _Planecrash_, when Keltham decides he needs to destroy Golarion's universe on negative-leaning utilitarian grounds, he takes care to only deal with Evil people from then on, and not form close ties with the Lawful Neutral nation of Osirion, in order to not betray anyone who would have had thereby a reasonable expectation that their friend wouldn't try to destroy their universe: ["the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1882395#reply-1882395).
-
-Similarly, I think Yudkowsky should stop pretending to be our rationality teacher after he stopped being our rationality teacher and decided to be a politician instead.
-
-I think it's significant that you don't see me picking fights with—say, Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't repeatedly take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano _isn't trying to be a religious leader_ (in this world where religious entrepreneurs can't afford to contradict the state religion). If Paul Christiano has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them. If we knew about them and they were correct, I would upvote them, and if we knew about them and they were incorrect, I would criticize them, but in either case, Christiano would not try to cultivate the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is insane. That's not his bag.
-
-------
-
-Yudkowsky's political cowardice is arguably puzzling in light of his timeless decision theory's recommendations against giving in to extortion.
-
-The "arguably" is important, because randos on the internet are notoriously bad at drawing out the consequences of the theory, to the extent that Yudkowsky has said that he wishes he hadn't published—and though I think I'm smarter than the average rando, I don't expect anyone to _take my word for it_. So let me disclaim that this is _my_ explanation of how Yudkowsky's decision theory _could be interpreted_ to recommend that he behave the way I want him to, without any pretense that I'm any sort of neutral expert witness on decision theory.
-
-The idea of timeless decision theory is that you should choose the action that has the best consequences _given_ that your decision is mirrored at all the places your decision algorithm is embedded in the universe.
-
-The reason this is any different from the "causal decision theory" of just choosing the action with the best consequences (locally, without any regard to this "multiple embeddings in the universe" nonsense) is because it's possible for other parts of the universe to depend on your choices. For example, in the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" scenario, someone might give you a ride out of the desert if they _predict_ you'll pay them back later. After you've already received the ride, you might think that you can get away with stiffing them—but if they'd predicted you would do that, they wouldn't have given you the ride in the first place. Your decision is mirrored _inside the world-model every other agent with a sufficiently good knowledge of you_.
-
-In particular, if you're the kind of agent that gives in to extortion—if you respond to threats of the form "Do what I want, or I'll hurt you" by doing what the threatener wants—that gives other agents an incentive to spend resources trying to extort you. On the other hand, if any would-be extortionist knows you'll never give in, they have no reason to bother trying. This is where the standard ["Don't negotiate with terrorists"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) advice comes from.
-
-So, naïvely, doesn't Yudkowsky's "personally prudent to post your agreement with Stalin"[^gambit] gambit constitute giving in to an extortion threat of the form, "support the progressive position, or we'll hurt you", which Yudkowsky's own decision theory says not to do?
-
-[^gambit]: In _ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles_, natch.
-
-I can think of two reasons why the naïve objection might fail. (And who can say but that a neutral expert witness on decision theory wouldn't think of more?)
-
-First, the true decision theory is subtler than "defy anything that you can commonsensically pattern-match as looking like 'extortion'"; the case for resisting extortion specifically rests on there existing a subjunctive dependence between your decision and the extortionist's decision: they threaten _because_ you'll give in, or don't bother _because_ you won't.
-
-Okay, but then how do I compute this "subjunctive dependence" thing? Presumably it has something to do with the extortionist's decisionmaking process incuding a model of the target. How good does that model have to be for it to "count"?
-
-I don't know—and if I don't know, I can't say that the relevant subjunctive dependence obviously pertains in the real-life science intellectual _vs._ social justice mob match-up. If the mob has been trained from past experience to predict that their targets will give in, should you defy them now in order to somehow make your current predicament "less real"? Depending on the correct theory of logical counterfactuals, the correct stance might be "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but [we do appease bears](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) and avoid avalanches" (because neither the bear's nor the avalanche's behavior is calculated based on our response), and the forces of political orthodoxy might be relevantly bear- or avalanche-like.
-
-On the other hand, the relevant subjunctive dependence doesn't obviously _not_ pertain, either! Yudkowsky does seem to endorse commonsense pattern-matching to "extortion" in contexts [like nuclear diplomacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256). Or I remember back in 'aught-nine, Tyler Emerson was caught embezzling funds from the Singularity Institute, and SingInst made it a point of pride to prosecute on decision-theoretic grounds, when a lot of other nonprofits would have quietly and causal-decision-theoretically covered it up to spare themselves the embarrassment. Parsing social justice as an agentic "threat" rather than a non-agentic obstacle like an avalanche, does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics (who dissent from an ideological group) more than infidels (who were never part of the group to begin with), _because_ heretics are more extortable—more vulnerable to social punishment from the original group.
-
-Which brings me to the second reason the naïve anti-extortion argument might fail: [what counts as "extortion" depends on the relevant "property rights", what the "default" action is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qjaaux3XnLBwomuNK/countess-and-baron-attempt-to-define-blackmail-fail). If having free speech is the default, being excluded from the dominant coalition for defying the orthodoxy could be construed as extortion. But if _being excluded from the coalition_ is the default, maybe toeing the line of orthodoxy is the price you need to pay in order to be included.
-
-Yudkowsky has [a proposal for how bargaining should work between agents with different notions of "fairness"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2YwmzuT7nWx62Kfh/cooperating-with-agents-with-different-ideas-of-fairness).
-
-Suppose Edgar and Fiona are splitting a pie, and if they can't initially agree on how to split it, they have to fight over it until they do, destroying some of the pie in the process. Edgar thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Fiona claims that she contributed more ingredients to the baking process and that it's therefore fair that she gets 75% of the pie, pledging to fight if offered anything less.
-
-If Edgar were a causal decision theorist, he might agree to the 75/25 split, reasoning that 25% of the pie is better than fighting until the pie is destroyed. Yudkowsky argues that this is irrational: if Edgar is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Fiona has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Fiona's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
-
-Instead, Yudkowsky argues, Edgar should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Fiona _also_ does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split (after 100−(32+48) = 20% of the pie has been destroyed by the costs of fighting) or an 42/18 split (where 40% of the pie has been destroyed). This isn't Pareto-optimal (it would be possible for both Edgar and Fiona to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Edgar to burn some of Fiona's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by her, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
-
-It seemed to me that in the contest over the pie of Society's shared map, the rationalist Caliphate was letting itself get exploited by the progressive Egregore, doing worse than the fair outcome without dealing any damage to the egregore in return. Why?
-
-The logic of "dump stats", presumably. Bargaining to get AI risk on the shared map—not even to get it taken seriously as we would count "taking it seriously", but just acknowledged at all—was hard enough. Trying to challenge the Egregore about an item that it actually cared about would trigger more fighting than we could afford.
-
-I told the illustration about splitting a pie as a symmetrical story: if Edgar and Fiona destroy the pie fighting, than neither of them get any pie. But in more complicated scenarios (including the real world), there was no guarantee that non-Pareto Nash equilibria were equally bad for everyone.
-
-I'd had a Twitter exchange with Yudkowsky in January 2020 that revealed some of his current-year thinking about Nash equilibria. I [had Tweeted](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1206718983115698176):
-
-> 1940s war criminal defense: "I was only following orders!"
-> 2020s war criminal defense: "I was only participating in a bad Nash equilibrium that no single actor can defy unilaterally!"
-
-(The language of the latter being [a reference to Yudkowsky's _Inadequate Equilibria_](https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/).)
-
-Yudkowsky [quote-Tweet dunked on me](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392):
-
-> Well, YES. Paying taxes to the organization that runs ICE, or voting for whichever politician runs against Trump, or trading with a doctor benefiting from an occupational licensing regime; these acts would all be great evils if you weren't trapped.
-
-I pointed out the voting case as one where he seemed to be disagreeing with his past self, linking to 2008's ["Stop Voting for Nincompoops"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k5qPoHFgjyxtvYsm7/stop-voting-for-nincompoops). What changed his mind?
-
-"Improved model of the social climate where revolutions are much less startable or controllable by good actors," he said. "Having spent more time chewing on Nash equilibria, and realizing that the trap is _real_ and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant."
-
-In response to Sarah Constantin mentioning that there was no personal cost to voting third-party, Yudkowsky [pointed out that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216809977144168448) the problem was the [third-party spoiler effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting), not personal cost: "People who refused to vote for Hillary didn't pay the price, kids in cages did, but that still makes the action nonbest."
-
-(The "cages" in question—technically, chain-link fence enclosures—were [actually](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/26/fact-check-obama-administration-built-migrant-cages-meme-true/3413683001/) [built](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-democratic-national-convention-ap-fact-check-immigration-politics-2663c84832a13cdd7a8233becfc7a5f3) during the Obama administration, but that doesn't seem important.)
-
-I asked what was wrong with the disjunction from "Stop Voting for Nincompoops", where the earlier Yudkowsky had written that it's hard to see who should accept the argument to vote for the lesser of two evils, but refuse to accept the argument against voting because it won't make a difference. Unilaterally voting for Clinton doesn't save the kids!
-
-"Vote when you're part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things, or when you're worried about your reputation and want to be honest about whether you voted," Yudkowsky replied.
-
-"How do I compute whether I'm in a large enough decision-theoretic cohort?" I asked. Did we know that, or was that still on the open problems list?
-
-Yudkowsky said that he [traded his vote for a Clinton swing state vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_pairing_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election), partially hoping that that would scale, "but maybe to a larger degree because [he] anticipated being asked in the future if [he'd] acted against Trump".
-
-The reputational argument seems in line with Yudkowsky's [pathological obsession with not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). People asking if you acted against Trump are looking for a signal of coalitional loyalty. By telling them he traded his vote, Yudkowsky can pass their test without lying.
-
-I guess that explains everything. He doesn't think he's part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things. He's not anticipating being asked in the future if he's acted against gender ideology. He's not worried about his reputation with people like me.
-
-Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to [Sabbatai Zevi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam), the 17th-century Jewish religious leader who purported to be the Messiah, who later converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans. "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
-
-I don't think this is as much of a burn as Yarvin does. Zevi was facing some very harsh coercion: a choice to convert to Islam, "prove" his divinity via deadly trial by ordeal, or just be impaled outright. Extortion-resistant decision theories aside, it's hard not to be sympathetic to someone facing this trilemma who chose to convert.
-
-So to me, the more damning question is this—
-
-If in the same position as Yudkowsky, would Sabbatai Zevi declare that 30% of the ones with penises are actually women?
-
------
-
-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 (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
-
------
-
-I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit Valinor again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
-
-I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
-
-The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to Valinor. There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the Valinor edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
-
-The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
-
-At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
-
-It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the pervue of my double-dog promise.
-
-There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
-
------
-
-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.
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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), but still seemed to think his shitposting was based
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- * 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"
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- * Nate wrote a longer reply on Less Wrong the next morning