After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). I cc'ed the posse, who chimed in afterwards.
-Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
+<a id="ex-cathedra-statement-ask"></a>Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not have occurred, I can say that we did not get either of those _ex cathedra_ statements at this time.
But it's only "obvious" if you take as a given that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year.
-Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of validity in defense of meaning" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.
+Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.
Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, maybe there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it probably just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff