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-Something else Ben had said while chiming in on the second attempt to reach out to Yudkowsky hadn't sat quite right with me.
+<a id="physical-injuries"></a>Something else Ben had said while chiming in on the second attempt to reach out to Yudkowsky hadn't sat quite right with me.
> I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the ***physical injuries*** sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott started up again. I expressed regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like [psych hospitals](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), or—something else) and wanted something from him, treating him as a means rather than an end—and then, despite that regret, I continued prosecuting the argument.
-One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): those who (for example) crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into assigning attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" to what are very noncentral members of those categories.
+<a id="noncentral-fallacy"></a>One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): those who (for example) crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into assigning attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" to what are very noncentral members of those categories.
Even if you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Fiona a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations on the basis of what the typical "murder" is like—expectations about Fiona's moral character, about the suffering of a victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Fiona's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you reveal that the murder victim was an embryo.
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-That week, former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had [her own break in late 2017](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards), but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.
+<a id="jessica-joins"></a>That week, former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had [her own break in late 2017](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards), but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.
Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what _she_ wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff