+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
+
+
+
+David Xu writes (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [he] 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 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.
+
+I reply: I'd like to [taboo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) the word "rational"; I think I can do a much better job of explaining what's going on without appealing to what is or is not "rational." (As it is written of a virtue which is nameless, if you speak overmuch of the Way, you will not attain it.)
+
+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 true (for humans). We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it (even when alone) 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?
+
+Thus, bearing in mind that we don't all need to count harms and benefits the same way, and that it is futile to contest what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, on the question of whether the dividing line between my behavior and the Caliphate's is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it", I'm inclined to say—
+
+It's not a "disagreement" at all. It's a _conflict_.
+
+
+
+Telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+
+
+I have a _seflish_ interest in people making and sharing accurate probabilistic inferences about how sex and gender and transgenderedness work in reality, for many reasons, but in part because _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+[TODO:
+"massive psychological damage to some subset of people",
+that's _not my problem_. I _don't give a shit_.
+
+Berkeley people may say that I'm doubling-down on failing to Other-model, but I don't think so; it's more honest to notice the conflict and analyze the conflict, than to pretend that we all want the same thing; I can empathize with "playing on a different chessboard", and I would be more inclined to cooperate with it if it weren't accompanied by sneering about how he and his flunkies are the only sane and good people in the world]
+
+·
+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?
+
+
+[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
+
+> a gradual shift away from STEM nerd norms to fandom geek norms [...] the pathological insistence that you're not allowed to notice bad faith
+https://extropian.net/notice/A7rwtky5x3vPAedXZw
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+"When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+
+https://glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=83
+> A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.
+
+further post timeline—
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
+"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
+"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+"Darkest Timeline" June 2020
+"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" Aug 2020
+"Unnatural Categories" Jan 2021
+"Differential Signal Costs" Mar 2021
+
+
+"Public Heretic" on "Where to Draw the Boundary?"—
+> But reality, in its full buzzing and blooming confusion, contains an infinite numbers of 'joints' along which it could be carved. It is not at all clear how we could say that focusing one some of those joints is "true" while focusing on other joints is "false," since all such choices are based on similarly arbitrary conventions.
+
+> Now, it is certainly true that certain modes of categorization (i.e. the selection of certain joints) have allowed us to make empirical generalizations that would not otherwise have been possible, whereas other modes of categorization have not yielded any substantial predictive power. But why does that mean that one categorization is "wrong" or "untrue"? Better would seem to be to say that the categorization is "unproductive" in a particular empirical domain.
+
+> Let me make my claim more clear (and thus probably easier to attack): categories do not have truth values. They can be neither true nor false. I would challenge Eliezer to give an example of a categorization which is false in and of itself (rather than simply a categorization which someone then used improperly to make a silly empirical inference).
+
+Yudkowsky's reply—
+> PH, my reply is contained in Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2
+> I would have been surprised if she was. Joscelin Verreuil also strikes me as being a projection of some facets of a man that a woman most notices, and not a man as we exist from the inside.
+>
+> I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
+> Could you please [taboo](Could you please taboo these?) these?
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> Okay. I’ve never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime’s work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other’s deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we’re talking about here.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b
+> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is not necessarily something to integrate.
+
+> Duly appreciated.