>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
-Recapping our story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) [how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences [given that](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric jail once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
+Recapping our Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) [how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences [given that](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric jail once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
-That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously [_directionally_ correct](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
+That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views quite a bit](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously [_directionally_ correct](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a November 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while accusing people who oppose the policy of being ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being less honest than the theocrat or the activist: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" faction already know that, and the dumber people in the faction wouldn't change their alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" faction, while [putting on a show of being politically "neutral."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise)
-It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at [what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people). (Despite my misgivings—and the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—this blog _is_ still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
+It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at [what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_rights). (Despite my misgivings—and the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—this blog _is_ still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!
The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, and not _quid quo pro_ advertising, and that if he didn't trust his brain circuitry not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.
-Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
+Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
It seems particularly important to lay out these principles of adherence to privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone _else_ can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the Dumb Story that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander in the same way. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have _expected_ Scott to perform well in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
-In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor ([again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint)) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
+In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor (again) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
-----
-On 5 January, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora Quinn-Elmore in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with [Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/) and [Gwen](https://everythingtosaveit.how/), who were considering suing CfAR for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because Michael approved of CfAR's behavior, but because involving lawyers makes everything worse.
+On 5 January, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora Quinn-Elmore in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with [Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/) and [Gwen](https://everythingtosaveit.how/), who were considering suing CfAR for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because Michael approved of CfAR's behavior, but because lawyers make everything worse.
Ziz recounted [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) story [of Anna's discrimination](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative), how she engaged in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to falsely portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. ([I remember that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1081952880649596928) at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect how Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
Ben thought I was wrong to think of this kind of behavior as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/), or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
-I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just ... never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute [what the Tortise said to Achilles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles)—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just ... never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute [what the Tortoise said to Achilles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles)—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")
One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days). I had been skeptical of him, then: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions by the standards of ordinary social reality, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists that he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Institute—the "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's anti-social mad scientist personality—which inclined me to take his "crazy"-sounding assertions more charitably than I otherwise would have.
-Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter and more open-minded than the surrounding Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, Piper, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community—just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no grounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
+Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter and more open-minded than the surrounding Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, Piper, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community—just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no grounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how I would have held up intact if I were just facing it alone; it's hard to imagine what I would have done in that case. I _definitely_ wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Alexander and Yudkowsky the way I did—especially Yudkowsky—if it was just me alone against everyone else.
This is the part where I began to ... overheat. I tried ("tried") to focus on my dayjob, but I was just _so angry_. Did Scott _really_ not understand the rationality-relevant distinction between "value-dependent categories as a result of caring about predicting different variables" (as explained by the _dagim_/water-dwellers _vs._ fish example) and "value-dependent categories _in order to not make my friends sad_"? I thought I was pretty explicit about this? Was Scott _really_ that dumb?? Or is it that he was only verbal-smart and this is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you've ever been good at linear algebra?? (Such that the language of "only running your clustering algorithm on the subspace of the configuration space spanned by the variables that are relevant to your decisions" would come naturally.) Did I need to write a post explaining just that one point in mathematical detail? (With executable code and a worked example with entropy calculations.)
-My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I resigned myself to stay at the office late to finish that.
+My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could successfully accomplish that by staying at the office late.
-But I was just in so much (psychological) pain. Or at least—as I noted in one of a series of emails to my posse that night—I felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to intepret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, _&c_.), I think I'm still noticeably _incentivizable_: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be either rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated. (Kevin Simler: [tears are a discount on friendship](https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/).)
+(Maybe I could have caught up, if it was just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren't psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person _can't do my job_.)
+
+I was in so much (psychological) pain. Or at least—as I noted in one of a series of emails to my posse that night—I felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to intepret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, _&c_.), I think I'm still noticeably _incentivizable_: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be either rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated. (Kevin Simler: [tears are a discount on friendship](https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/).)
I [tweeted a Sequences quote](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089) (the mention of @ESYudkowsky being to attribute credit, I told myself; I figured Yudkowsky had enough followers that he probably wouldn't see a notification):
Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness was having me making crazy decisions.
-Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was that if we didn't, the beacon of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others, but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group; we couldn't afford to accept a _status quo_ of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments _in general_. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for literally doing the rationality thing anymore.
+<a id="alter-the-beacon"></a>Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was that if we didn't, the beacon of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others, but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group; we couldn't afford to accept a _status quo_ of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments _in general_. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for literally doing the rationality thing anymore.
As it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman on her work on rapid onset gender dysphoria:
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.[^any-other-public-intellectual]
-[^any-other-public-intellectual]: And really, that's the _charitable_ interpretation. The extent to which I still have trouble entertaining the idea that Yudkowsky _acutally_ drunk the gender ideology Kool-Aid, rather than merely having pretended to, is a testament to the thoroughness of my indoctrination.
+[^any-other-public-intellectual]: And really, that's the _charitable_ interpretation. The extent to which I still have trouble entertaining the idea that Yudkowsky _actually_ drunk the gender ideology Kool-Aid, rather than merely having pretended to, is a testament to the thoroughness of my indoctrination.
-Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult? Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of validity in defense of meaning" thread—I have respected it 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. It took some _very large_ likelihood ratios to beat it into my head the thing that was obviously happenening, was actually happening.
+Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult? Coming 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. It took some _very large_ likelihood ratios to beat it into my head the thing that was obviously happenening, was actually happening.
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 must have just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff