+
+Bostrom's apology for an old email—who is this written for?? Why get ahead, when you could just not comment?
+
+[TODO:
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+]
+
+the rats were supposed to be an alternative to academic orthodoxy (such that we could just jump to the correct decision theory without the political fighting needing to dethrone CDT), but we're still under the authority of the egregore
+
+(from October 2016 email to Scott)
+This is not an advanced rationalist skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! People will quote your "Categories Were Made for the Man" in defense of the idea that someone can be biologically male, think of themselves as a boy, be thought of by others as a boy, and yet still actually have been a girl at the time by virtue of deciding to transition years later. I've been told that "Gender is a floating tag which has one substantial consequence, which is comfort of the people being addressed"!
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937
+> Citizens can't control processes they can't see. For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.
+
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 2:09 AM
+Ziz
+Ziz
+To your memory, am I under any confidentiality agreements with you? Or did we mutually release each other from the only one that one time?
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 9:24 AM
+You sent
+you are not under any confidentiality agreements with me
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946
+> This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.
+
+> It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it. Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you. But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom. There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really. But you must never ever mention it in front of her.
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY
+> I am broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative.
+
+for normal people, when your favorite author gets worse, you just shrug and accept it and enjoy the classics, but when your favorite author is also the Pope of your religion and also in several Discord servers with you, you end up wasting a lot of time scrutinizing their emoji-reacts
+
+I write the space everywhere because that's the dominant usage ([since 2011](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transman%2Ctrans+man%2Ctranswoman%2Ctrans+woman&year_start=2000&year_end=2022), according to Google ngrams). I don't want to turn off potential readers by failing a simple shibboleth test; I want those readers to be turned off by my actual ideas.
+
+(_I_ don't censor my comment sections of people whom it "looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with".)
+
+-----
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+
+-----
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