+
+And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"),
+
+when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
+
+me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
+
+If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts
+
+-----
+
+Why does this matter?
+
+[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+
+https://www.readthesequences.com/
+> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
+
+> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
+https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1769064#reply-1769064
+> "Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly. None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."
+It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly
+
+congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
+> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
+
+the "It is sometimes personally prudent to be seen to agree with Stalin" attitude behaves like a conspiracy, even if
+
+I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/
+
+
+Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
+> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
+
+> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is—aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences—committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
+
+> The people who aren't doing that mostly aren't participating in the LessWrong identity, but while factions like that are hostile to the confused people who behave as though they're part of a community trying to become less wrong, such factions are also parasitic on such people, claiming credit for their intellectual contributions. When such participation is fully extinguished, the group begins to decay, having nothing distinctive to offer, unless it has become too big to fail, in which case it's just another component of one political faction or another.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
+
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+
+contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard, you don't take it lying down
+
+Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
+
+maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
+
+Feb. 2016 happy price schedule https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228
+
+one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
+
+When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
+
+OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
+
+http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
+
+A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
+> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
+[...]
+> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
+> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
+[...]
+> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
+in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
+
+Rubices—
+> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
+gonna mostlky bite the bullet on this one
+
+
+https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
+> You all remember the thing I predicted correctly 12 years ago, therefore you should heed my word on this completely unrelated topic
+
+The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels telling—you could say it's circumstantial nitpicking, but I think it's revealing, like the "reducing negativity"
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz
+
+"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
+
+https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
+> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
+
+> One nice thing about intellectuals is that when they turn, they frequently leave behind a detailed, mostly coherent record of what a person turning into a rhinoceros thinks is going on.
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1477733825702936581
+
+Rationality was supposed to be important!!
+
+Paul says so—
+> My current sense is that cooperation has a better tradeoff than some forms of enhancement (e.g. giving humans bigger brains) and worse than others (e.g. improving the accuracy of people's and institution's beliefs about the world).
+
+Rob says so, too—
+> Help ourselves think more clearly. (I imagine this including a lot of trying-to-become-more-rational, developing and following relatively open/honest communication norms, and trying to build better mental models of crucial parts of the world.)
+
+> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228
+
+dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
+> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140
+
+> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374
+
+I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)
+
+The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
+
+jbeshir
+> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
+—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing
+
+
+[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
+[internet pharmacy]
+
+
+> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
+response—
+> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do
+
+In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]
+
+https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma
+
+postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
+
+if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
+
+Gell-Mann amnesia
+
+EY's commenting guidelines
+
+> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
+https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409
+
+flu virus that cures Borderer culture
+https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement
+
+> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps
+
+> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
+> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
+
+Standard excuses—
+"i just don't think that gender is less of a politeness mind-control regime when it doesn't allow people to switch categories"
+biosex actually exists
+also no one cares about that fact of the matter, unless they want to have sex with someone or are doing a weird ideological thing
+I think you're the ones doing a weird ideological thing
+
+brain: wow, eiko has a deep understanding of straight men for a lesbian! she must be so empathetic
+me: ...
+
+... why validated and not offended??
+Eiko — Today at 8:37 PM
+?_?
+what... would i be... offended by...
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 8:38 PM
+The "brain: / me:" thing seems like it should be offensive for the same reason that the phrase-I-said-I-wasn't-going-to-say is offensive
+the language is subtler, but it's gesturing at the same thing
+
+(explanation: I read this as ozy saying they parsed Eiko as a girl so much that they didn't remember she used to be a straight guy)
+
+... I, just, really have trouble emphasizing with this culture where people are allowed to make jokes about the similarities between trans lesbians and straight guys, and as long as you talk in terms of "I thought I was a straight guy", it's all cool, but as soon as someone bites the bullet and says, "Yes, because trans lesbians are straight males, etiologically; you thought correctly", then they're ... marking themselves as not part of the coalition? From my perspective, it just looks like your culture is pro-lying
+
+like if i look at a person and my brain's intuitive instinctive bucketing function goes "girl" and they tell me "i'm a boy actually" does whether that's mind control depend on what genitals the person has??
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 10:02 PM
+Yes?
+Omega ω — Today at 10:02 PM
+?????
+
+... people just don't see the ideological bubble they live in! People tell me, "frankly you seem to be deeply unhappy about [being gendered male]", because they're relying on their prior of what trans women need. And having been born in 1987, I just don't share that prior! If you actually listen to the thing I'm been yelling for the last six years, I'm much more unhappy about the culture of mind-control than I am about being male, but people put more weight on their prior than my verbal self-report! I guess I can't blame them on the meta level (I also put more weight on priors that people's self-reports a lot of the time), but it's just—so shocking, that people don't see the thing
+
+I don't actually want to return to the past permanently; I want to first rewind to 2007 or so, and then re-do the trans rights thing but with less 🐛 lying this time, "lying" being my heat-of-the-moment angry word for the thing where the born-in-the-wrong-body story that gets sold to the public is very different from the picture you get when you read what people write about their feelings when the general public isn't looking, and people know it's different, and they go on talking in terms of the standard story anyway, and when you challenge them on none of this stuff being true, they say, "Oh, well, those are just lies to cis people; that doesn't count" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/) as if lies to cis people weren't still lies
+
+And, just—I think if an alien or an AI or really any normal person outside of this very specific Berkeley 2016– ideological subculture were to try to objectively describe what's actually happening there in the real physical universe, I don't think they would want to talk about a woman born in the wrong body, coping with her tragic dysphoria; I think the alien or AI would talk about a male primate with some kind of brain malfunction in its sexual targeting system causing it to get confused about a self-other distinction, and I think the normal person would talk about a man with a gross, weird fetish who they don't want sharing a locker room with their daughter.
+
+And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the right ontology here? The Berkeley 2016– denizen can come up with a lot of replies ("But cis women also enjoy being women", "But I don't care about someone's private thoughts; I only care about whether they'll come vintage dress shopping with me"), but they all just seem fundamentally unserious to me?
+
+----
+
+Habryka's PalmCone memo mentions there being people whose top priority is to influence you—that's totally what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
+
+https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
+https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/
+
+The LW community is a bubble/machine that made me who I am (it doesn't infringe on my independence more than school, but it's still shaping force in the way that going to University or Google shapes people)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
+> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving them—well, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?
+
+the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
+> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
+
+------
+
+If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
+
+> "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me" I wish I had never written about LDT and just told people to vote for reasons they understand when they're older [TODO full direct quote]
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929
+
+Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I calim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
+
+To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once [TODO: linky] wrote to Judea Pearl to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
+
+[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
+
+If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he should remember the only reason he has _any_ people who defer to him _at all_ is _because_ he used to be such a good explainer who actually argued for things.
+
+[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
+
+[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq ]
+
+------
+
+Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter
+
+https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/686455476984119296/eliezer-yudkowsky-seems-really-depressed-these
+
+> So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do. In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes. The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy. It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1614129#reply-1614129
+
+I was pleading to him in his capacity as rationality leader, not AGI alignment leader; I know I have no business talking about the latter
+
+(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
+
+[TODO: misrepresentation of the Light: Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.]
+
+"You're allowed to talk to me," he said at the Independence Day party
+
+MIRI made a point of prosecuting Tyler Altman rather than participating (even if it was embarrassing to be embezzled from) because of game theory, but it sees folding to social-justice bullies as inevitable
+
+re Yudkowsky not understanding the "That's So Gender" sense, I suspect this is better modeled as a nearest-unblocked-strategy alignment problem, rather than a capabilities problem ("doesn't comprehend"). Author has a Vision of a Reality; that Reality conflicts with the ideology of the readership, who complain; Author issues a patch that addresses the surface of the complaint without acknowledging the conflict of Visions, because describing the conflict in too much detail would be construed as aggression
+
+------
+
+[TODO:
+Email to Scott at 0330 a.m.
+> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: "The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories." That thing is a fucking Absolute Denial Macro!
+]
+
+------
+
+So, because
+
+[TODO: the rats not getting AGP was excusable, the rats not getting the category boundary thing was extremely disappointing but not a causis belli; Eliezer Yudkowsky not getting the category boundary thing was an emergency]
+
+-----
+
+Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
+
+------
+
+comments to "Wilhelm", January 2019—
+
+I got concessions on all the important parts (categories should make predictions, trans women differ from cis women in a masc direction), and these people just don't fucking CARE ... like, if I'm trying to be agreeable, I could agree that trans women resemble women if you restrict your vision to the subspace spanned by the "preferred pronouns" and "self-identified gender identity" dimensions ... but, but, WTF, be serious, guys
+
+Scott or Eliezer know better and could put an end to this bullshit (or at least put a dent in it), and I begged and I pleaded, and they just don't CARE
+
+even Ozy knows better
+
+I said: I probably do put too much rhetorical emphasis on passing; like, I agree that that's not the only criterion that one can use. I like drawing attention to that particular distinction because it at least has the benefit of not requiring people to override their perceptual system they way that self-identity does?
+
+and Ozy (correctly!) chimed in: "in fact it is the only criterion that doesn't involve people overriding their perceptual system!"
+
+as if she's objectively pro-gaslighting
+
+more charitably: people care a lot about this very thin layer of socual constructions (if you mindfuck ppl into believing that AGPs are women, that really does make it easier to transition) and are being instrumentally rational about that, whereas I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist and want to study the deep structure if which social constructions are feasible, how we can be more reflective about them, &c.
+
+Ppl with less power than Scott or Eliezer can afford to be more honest with me that they see but don't care enough to pay the cost of fighting
+
+the rationalist lore here is that status makes you stupid; maybe the NRx twist is that status plus rivals/insecurity makes you stupid
+
+You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you _can't_ optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
+no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
+https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208
+
+Keltham and Carissa's attitude towards Pharima mirrors my attitude towards Yudkowsky (I'm grateful for him having created me, but he can't be allowed to get away with this shit)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1834769#reply-1834769
+
+sometimes I get a cite, too—
+https://putanumonit.com/2022/05/02/genders-discrimination/
+https://axrp.net/episode/2022/05/23/episode-15-natural-abstractions-john-wentworth.html
+
+People learn a lot from Godel Escher Bach, too, but they don't form an identity around Douglas Hofstadter being the most important person in the world
+
+and Keltham tells Carissa (null action pg 39) to keep the Light alive as long as possible, not do throw away your deontology too quickly.
+
+> It, it—the fe—it, flame—flames. Flames—on the side of my face. Breathing—breathl—heaving breaths, heaving—
+
+like a crazy ex-girlfriend (I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed)
+
+But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732
+
+https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4361.html
+> Half the time I regard myself as "an AI wannabee trapped in a male human body"
+
+Nate's "missing the hard part" post is all strawmen—I'm not looking down on it because it's a blog post and not an "official" arXiv paper; I'm looking down because it's visibly low-effort
+
+"What do you say to the Republican?" !!!
+
+subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"
+
+4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
+> Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)
+
+Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
+
+The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor
+
+(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequences—that's what words like _good_ do—but that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)
+
+—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
+
+... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal. But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+
+At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's
+
+
+Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
+
+[TODO: relevance of multivariate—
+
+(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
+
+]
+
+[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+]
+
+[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler] https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's —cite South Park)
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
+https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
+https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
+
+]
+
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance, really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
+
+Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
+
+
+> People probably change their mind more often than they explicitly concede arguments, which is fine because intellectual progress is more important than people who were wrong performing submission.
+> If your interlocutor is making progress arguing against your claim X, just say, "Oh, X is a strawman, no one actually believes X; therefore I'm not wrong and you haven't won" (and then don't argue for X in the future now that you know you can't get away with it).
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429
+
+My 28 November 2018 text to Michael—
+> I just sent an email to Eliezer ccing you and Anna; if you think it might help inject sanity in into the world, maybe your endorsement would help insofar as Eliezer Aumman-updates [_sic_] with you?
+> hope all is well
+> just a thread reply to Eliezer that says "I trust Zack's rationality and think you should pay attention to what he has to say" (if and only if you actually believe that to be true, obviously)?
+
+
+(don't know how to summarize the part with Ian—)
+I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democrat—not just about the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole _thing_ of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was sympathetic.
+
+
+[TODO: paraphrase remaining interaction with Scott, or not worth the space?
+
+> I don't have a simple, mistake-theoretic characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I can do is try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of conflicts over possible conventions.
+
+helping Norton live in the real world
+
+Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus."; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious
+]
+
+[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
+
+What do think submitting to social pressure looks like, if it's not exactly this thing (carefully choosing your public statements to make sure no one confuses you with the Designated Ideological Bad Guy)?!? The credible threat of being labeled an Ideological Bad Guy is _the mechanism_ the "Good" Guys use to retard potentially-ideologically-inconvenient areas of inquiry.
+
+Kerry Vaughan on deferral
+https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1552308109535858689
+
+It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average (in which case, you might just shrug and accept unequal outcomes, the way we shrug and accept it that some athletes have better genes). Different traits have different relevance to different sports: women do better in ultraswimming _because_ that competition is sampling a
+
+where body fat is an advantage.
+
+It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight".
+
+For example, the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to _protect females from males_, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
+
+all I actually want out of a post-Singularity utopia is the year 2007 except that I personally have shapeshifting powers
+
+The McGongall turning into a cat parody may actually be worth fitting in—McCongall turning into a cat broke Harry's entire worldview. Similarly, the "pretend to turn into a cat, and everyone just buys it" maneuver broke my religion
+
+ * https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position
+
+Michael on EA suppressing credible criticism https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1559534045914177538
+
+"epistemic hero"
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+
+zinger from 93—
+> who present "this empirical claim is inconsistent with the basic tenets of my philosophy" as an argument against the _claim_
+
+reply to my flipping out at Jeff Ladish
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493440041684993
+
+We don't believe in privacy
+> Privacy-related social norms are optimized for obscuring behavior that could be punished if widely known [...] an example of a paradoxical norm that is opposed to enforcement of norms-in-general").
+https://unstableontology.com/2021/04/12/on-commitments-to-anti-normativity/
+
+Sucking up the the Blue Egregore would make sense if you _knew_ that was the critical resource
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
+
+I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizing
+
+This should be common sense, though
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3szWd8HwWccJb9z5L/the-ea-community-might-be-neglecting-the-value-of
+
+she thought "I'm trans" was an explanation, but then found a better theory that explains the same data—that's what "rationalism" should be—including "That wasn't entirely true!!!!"
+https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole
+
+sorrow at putting on a bad performance with respect to the discourse norms of the people I'm trying to rescue/convert; I think my hostile shorthand (saying that censorship costs nothing implies some combination "speech isn't useful" and "other people aren't real" is pointing at real patterns, but people who aren't already on my side are not going to be sympathetic)
+
+
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
+> You could argue that a wise policy is that we should all be called by terms and pronouns we don't like, now and then, and that to do otherwise is coddling. You could argue that Twitter shouldn't try to enforce courtesy. You could accuse, that's not what Twitter is really doing.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880
+> But Twitter is at least not *ontologically confused* if they say that using preferred pronouns is courtesy, and claim that they're enforcing a courtesy standard. Replying "That's a lie! I will never lie!" is confused. It'd be sad if the #IDW died on that hill of all hills.
+
+> Acts aren't sentences, pronouns aren't lies, bathrooms aren't fundamental physical constants, and if you know what a motte-and-bailey is you're supposed to know that.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067287459589906432
+
+> I don't care whose point it is on this planet, the point I'm making would stand in any galaxy: You are not standing in noble defense of Truth when you ask who gets to use which bathroom. This is true across all possible worlds, including those with no sociologists in them.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067187363544059905
+
+------
+
+https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896
+
+I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that *do*, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences...
+
+...should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is the proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them--and if *not*, whether proscribing the use of a category in *public communication* constitutes...
+
+..."proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
+
+That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether". I 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.
+
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Crux: "If you say that Stalin is a dictator, you'll be shot, therefore Stalin is not a dictator" has the same structure as "If you say that trans women are male, they'll take massive psych damage, therefore trans women are not male"; both arguments should get the same response.
+Zack M. Davis
+@zackmdavis
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Thoughts on your proposed cruxes: 1 (harmful inferences) is an unworkable AI design: you need correct beliefs first, in order to correctly tell which beliefs are harmful. 4 (non-public concepts) is unworkable for humans: how do you think about things you're not allowed words for?
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827
+> Well, Zack hopefully shouldn't see this, but I do happen to endorse everything you just said, for your own personal information.
+
+
+[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
+I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
+
+"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
+
+I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
+]
+
+> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745