+
+For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "trans" is an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+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!_
+
+-----
+
+> 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.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392
+
+https://twitter.com/jd_pressman/status/1617257360933945344
+> And that the current discourse of "don't advance capabilities, don't think about SOTA, stop thinking, pursue orthogonal directions" is basically about maximizing confusion, minimizing the probability you have any chance of pulling alignment out of the distribution of AI ideas.
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1897710#reply-1897710
+> a dath ilani tragedy isn't about the triumph of Evil over Good. It's about the triumph of erroneous reasoning and ill-coordination over everyone
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044
+> my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.
+
+https://www.truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-boomer-map
+> The lower class _wants_ an upper class it can genuinely look up to. The feeling that Harvard has gone insane is like realizing that Mom and Dad are both on heroin.
+
+25 January 2022: I hesitated for a long time before leaving a comment about Cicero on the Alexander/Yudkowsky dialogue, shows I'm still culty (calculating whether I'm allowed to speak on a post he coauthored; I linked "EA should blurt")
+
+J.D.P. on rationalism's failure
+https://extropian.net/notice/ARvZ3pimn8JQIe4yGG
+
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Three—
+> It's like admiring a society that solves crime by having secret police shoot all bad people in the head. What the fuck!? I suddenly have empathy for the experience of seeing your cult defiled. If I got Isekaied onto dath ilan I would _become a terrorist_.
+
+(Terrorism wouldn't work)
+
+Sep 27 text to "Chaya"—
+In theory, the bad influence could go both ways: first, successful playdate, then I mention to A. afterwards (not before) that C. is actually a boy and I think it's crazy everyone is pretending otherwise (which remark is out of their censorship jurisdiction); then if C. wants a repeat with new friend (far from guaranteed, but plausible), it's not your fault if A. leaks information of her own will ...
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nDR23ksSQJ98WNDm/developmental-stages-of-gpts?commentId=wqaCY4hQQTuqqJ7Ma 28 July 2020
+> I'd love to know of a non-zero integer number of plans that could possibly, possibly, possibly work for not dying to a GPT-style near-term AGI.
+
+calculating whether I was "net positive"—I don't know what can be said about the relationship between quantum randomness and macroscopic outcomes, but it seems plausible that there are Everett branches where I died from that salivary stone in 2008
+
+From "My Way"—
+
+> far enough that the art she learned from others fails her, so that she must remake her shattered art in her own image and in the image of her own task. And then tell the rest of us about it.
+
+> But what I'm finding is not just _the_ Way, the thing that lies at the center of the labyrinth; it is also _my_ Way, the path that I would take to come closer to the center, from whatever place I started out.
+
+> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
+
+
+depression-based forecasting in conversation with Carl
+> seems more ... optimistic, Kurzweilian?... to suppose that the tech gets used correctly the way a sane person would hope it would be used
+
+I like this sentence (from "The Matrix Is a System")—
+> If someone is a force on your epistemics towards the false, robustly to initial conditions and not as a fluke, that person is hostile.
+
+An analogy between my grievance against Yudkowsky and Duncan's grievance against me: I think Yudkowsky is obligated to search for and present "anti-trans" arguments in conjunction with searching for and presenting "pro-trans" arguments. Duncan (I'm wildly guessing??) thinks I'm obligated to search for and present "pro-Duncan" and addition to "anti-Duncan" arguments?? A key disanalogy: Yudkowsky is _afraid_ to post "anti-trans" content; I'm not afraid to post pro-Duncan content; I just think agreements are less interesting than disagreements. To prove the disanalogy, maybe I should write a "Things I Liked About 'Basics of Rationalist Discourse'" post as a peace offering??
+
+"Let's not talk to Eliezer." "He's sad and confusing" Commentary reference??
+
+https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/
+
+> All of her fellow employees are vigorously maintaining to anybody outside the hospital itself, should the question arise, that Merrin has always cosplayed as a Sparashki while on duty, in fact nobody's ever seen her out of costume; sure it's a little odd, but lots of people are a little odd.
+>
+> (This is not considered a lie, in that it would be universally understood and expected that no one in this social circumstance would tell the truth.)
+
+I still had Sasha's sleep mask
+
+"Wilhelm" and Steven Kaas aren't Jewish, I think
+
+I agree that Earth is mired in random junk that caught on (like p-values), but ... so are the rats
+
+I'm https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/?commentId=f8Gour23gShoSyg8g at gender and categorization
+
+picking cherries from a cherry tree
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform
+
+https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
+> I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or "expert consensus" is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position.
+
+https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
+
+Michael Vassar has _also_ always been a very complicated person who's changed his emphases in ways Yudkowsky dislikes
+
+
+[TODO:
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
+
+> The Kiritsugu shrugged. "When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+
+ * Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
+]
+
+The old vision was nine men and a brain in a box in a basement. (He didn't say _men_.)
+
+Subject: "I give up, I think" 28 January 2013
+> You know, I'm starting to suspect I should just "assume" (choose actions conditional on the hypothesis that) that our species is "already" dead, and we're "mostly" just here because Friendly AI is humanly impossible and we're living in an unFriendly AI's ancestor simulation and/or some form of the anthropic doomsday argument goes through. This, because the only other alternatives I can think of right now are (A) arbitrarily rejecting some part of the "superintelligence is plausible and human values are arbitrary" thesis even though there seem to be extremely strong arguments for it, or (B) embracing a style of thought that caused me an unsustainable amount of emotional distress the other day: specifically, I lost most of a night's sleep being mildly terrified of "near-miss attempted Friendly AIs" that pay attention to humans but aren't actually nice, wondering under what conditions it would be appropriate to commit suicide in advance of being captured by one. Of course, the mere fact that I can't contemplate a hypothesis while remaining emotionally stable shouldn't make it less likely to be true out there in the real world, but in this kind of circumstance, one really must consider the outside view, which insists: "When a human with a history of mental illness invents a seemingly plausible argument in favor of suicide, it is far more likely that they've made a disastrous mistake somewhere, then that committing suicide is actually the right thing to do."
+
+
+[TODO—
+
+The human era wasn't going to last forever. Turing saw it in 1951. ("It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. [...] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control[.]") _George Eliot_ [saw it in _1880_](http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/theophrastus-such/17/). ("Am I already in the shadow of the coming race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and supercede us be steely organisms, giving off the effluvia of the laboratory and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?")
+
+ * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+
+list of lethalities
+
+ * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier;
+
+Isaac Asimov wrote about robots in his fiction, and even the problem of alignment (in the form of his Three Laws of Robotics), and yet he still portrayed a future Galactic Empire populated by humans, which seems very silly.
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+
+]
+
+> Similarly, a rationalist isn't just somebody who respects the Truth.
+> All too many people respect the Truth.
+> [...]
+> A rationalist is somebody who respects the _processes of finding truth_.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms
+
+> Why is school like a boner?
+> It’s long and hard unless you're Asian.
+
+Robert Heinlein
+> “What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
+https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms":
+ "content": "at this point, I actually am just starting to hate trans women by default (the visible kind, not the androphilic early-transitioning kind); the \"indulging a mental illness that makes them want to become women\" model is waaaaay more accurate than the standard story, and the people who actually transition are incentivized/selected for self-delusion, which is really unfair to the people who aren't delusional about it",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ "sender_name":
+ "timestamp_ms": [Sat Jan 21 10:06:17 PST 2017]
+ "content": "I'm afraid to even think that in the privacy of my own head, but I agree with you that is way more reasonable",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+"but the ideological environment is such that a Harvard biologist/psychologist is afraid to notice blatantly obvious things in the privacy of her own thoughts, that's a really scary situation to be in (insofar as we want society's decisionmakers to be able to notice things so that they can make decisions)",
+
+In October 2016, I messaged an alumna of my App Academy class of November 2013 (back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted), effectively asking to consult her expertise on feminism. "Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
+
+if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
+> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information - or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves - the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
+
+Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528
\ No newline at end of file