+
+> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
+> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
+> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
+> This is not an advanced rationality skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! I realize that explaining this in clear language has the potential to hurt some people's feelings! Unfortunately, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist (epistemic rationality is the only kind of rationality; "instrumental rationality" is a phrase someone made up in order to make themselves feel better about lying), I have a GODDAMNED MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to hurt that person's feelings!
+> People should get what they want. We should have social norms that are carefully designed to help people get what they want. Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important to have a meta-norm of not socially punishing people for clearly describing a hypothesis about the nature of the problem people are trying to solve, even if the hypothesis hurts someone's feelings, and even if there would probably be genuinely bad consequences if the hypothesis were to be believed by the masses of ordinary dumb people who hate our guts anyway.
+> I'm proud of my history of fantasizing about having the property, and I'm proud of my rationalist community, and I don't want either of them taken over by CRAZY PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY CAN EDIT THE PAST.
+(170 comments)
+
+
+> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+(180 comments)
+
+the other week, "Chaya" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+
+matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
+
+
+Sat Feb 11 12:49:33 PST 2017
+just like it's possible to identify as a woman despite not having unusually many female-typical traits, it's also possible to identify as a liberal despite not having unusually many liberal-typical beliefs
+
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601286979,
+ "content": "and am continually haunted by the suspicion that the conjunction of my biological
+sex and my highly refined taste for bullet-biting, may not be a coincidence",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601211347,
+ "content": "I always want to fantasize that if I were a woman, I would have the strength to bi
+te the bullet, \"Yes, we masculine-of-center women are forming the coalition to petition for better
+treatment by Society, while acknowleding that there are systematic evolutionary reasons why Society
+is this way currently\"",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601116141,
+ "content": "there was a NRx whose take [...] was so disagreeable that he got downvoted into oblivion on /r/slatestarcodex (and remember, /r/slatestarcodex is already pretty right-wing by San Francisco standards) who also had a post on the \"feminism appeals to masculine-of-center women\" hypothesis http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861 which deserves more credit than it gets (it acknowledges within-group variation!)",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+
+----
+
+He doesn't want to talk about pivotal acts because because anything he says in public might be misinterpreted—but, how does the disutility of being misinterpreted plausibly outweigh the utility of someone having something useful to say?? I feel like his modern answer is some variation of "Everyone but me is retarded", but—that's not what he thought about decision theory back in 2010, when he validated/honored Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's contributions! (find cite) And now, he says he wish he hadn't talked about decision theory ... https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633637250146922497
+
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+
+If I had done more marketing, I could have been a name in the GC community, and made Nina Paley's playing card list: https://www.heterodorx.com/gender-wars-cards/
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1940992#reply-1940992
+> (The children's-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they're just there in your bedroom, when you grow up. And if you ask your parents they'll truthfully tell you that they didn't put the books there. And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children's-book; for those are children's books, and only children speak of them to each other.
+>
+> As the saying goes in dath ilan, trying to raise a child on only true books is like trying to train a statistical classifier on only positive examples!
+>
+> And furthermore - as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb - having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)
+
+(I remarked to "Wilhelm": I'd rather not get into fights on _Less Wrong_, but at least I'm 2–0–1.)
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