In an adorable twist, Mike and "Susan"'s two-year-old son was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael _Vassar_.[^mike-pseudonym]
-[^mike-pseudonym]: I'm not giving Mike a pseudonym because his name is needed for this adorable anecdote to make sense.
+[^mike-pseudonym]: I'm not giving Mike a pseudonym because his name is needed for this adorable anecdote to make sense, and this Whole Dumb Story isn't otherwise saying sensitive things about him.
And as it happened, on 7 May 2019, Kelsey wrote [a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my point](/images/piper-spending_social_capital_on_talking_about_trans_issues.png).
Ben said that trying to discuss with the _Less Wrong_ mod team would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; it might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice." The premise should be, "If this is within the Overton window for _Less Wrong_ moderators, there's a serious confusion on the conditions required for discourse", not on scapegoating individuals. He was less optimistic about harm-reduction; participating on the site was implicitly endorsing it by submitting the rule of the karma and curation systems.
-"Trent" expressed sadness about how the discussion on "The Incentives" demonstrated that the community he loved—including dear friends—was in a very bad way. Michael (in a separate private discussion) had said he was glad to hear about the belief-update. "Trent" said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote (in the thread):
+"Riley" expressed sadness about how the discussion on "The Incentives" demonstrated that the community they loved—including dear friends—was in a very bad way. Michael (in a separate private discussion) had said he was glad to hear about the belief-update. "Riley" said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote (in the thread):
> I['m] sorry it made you sad. From my perspective, the question is no[t] "can we still be friends with such people", but "how can we still be friends with such people" and I am pretty certain that understanding their perspective if an important part of the answer. If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship.
"Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings," Ben commented via email.
+(I would later complain to Anna (Subject: "uh, guys???", 20 July 2019) that Ruby's profile said he was one of two people to have volunteered for CfAR on three continents. If this was the level of performance we could expect from _veteran_ CfAR participants, what was CfAR _for_?)
+
[I replied to Ruby that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality?commentId=v3zh3KhKNTdMXWkJH) you could just directly respond to your interlocutor's arguments. Whether or not you respect them as a thinker is _off-topic_. "You said X, but this is wrong because of Y" isn't a personal attack!
Jessica said that there's no point in getting mad at [MOPs](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/). I said I was a _little_ bit mad, because I specialized in discourse strategies that were susceptible to getting trolled like this. I thought it was ironic that this happened on a post that was _explicitly_ about causal _vs._ social reality; it's possible that I wouldn't be inclined to be such a hardass about "whether or not I respect you is off-topic" if it weren't for that prompt.
Michael said that part of the reason this worked was because it represented a clear threat to skapegoat, while also _not_ skapegoating, and not surrendering the option to do so later; it was significant that Jessica's choice of example positioned her on the side of the powerful social-justice coalition.
-"Trent" said that the amount of social-justice talk in the post rose to the level where they wouldn't dare criticize it or even mention it (!) in public, regardless of whether they agreed or disagreed.
-
------
On 4 July 2019, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by Ben's request back in March that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
(!!)[^what-works-now]
-[^what-works-now]: Ray qualifies this in the next paragraph:
+[^what-works-now]: Arnold qualifies this in the next paragraph:
> [in public. In private things are much easier. It's _also_ the case that private channels enable collusion—that was an update [I]'ve made over the course of the conversation. ]
In email, Jessica acknowledged that Ray had a point that it was confusing to use court-inspired language if we didn't intend to blame and punish people. Michael said that court language was our way to communicate, "You don't have the option of non-engagement with the complaints that are being made." (Courts can _summon_ people; you can't ignore a court summons the way you can ignore ordinary critics.)
-Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we were still acting under mistake-theoretic assumptions. "Trent" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
+Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we were still acting under mistake-theoretic assumptions. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
I was pretty horrified by the extent to which _Less Wrong_ moderators (!!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic Something to Protect, as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness; I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I wasn't _seeing_ the Blight as a unified problem. Now ... I was seeing _something_.
Scott (and Yudkowsky and Anna and the rest of the Caliphate) seemed to accept this as an inevitable background fact of existence, like the weather. But I saw a Schelling point off in the distance where us witches stick together for Free Speech, and it was _awfully_ tempting to try to jump there. (Of course, it would be _better_ if there was a way to organize just the good witches, and exclude all the Actually Bad witches, but the [Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) on witch Badness made that hard to organize without falling back to the falling back to the one-heresy-per-thinker equilibrium.)
-Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" _facts_.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad (and that it would be bad if I were doing that without "intending" to). I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had _learned stuff_ from reading far-right authors (most notably Moldbug), and from talking with "Wilhelm". I was starting to appreciate [what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April](#less-precise-is-more-violent) (when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists").
+Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" _facts_.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad (and that it would be bad if I were doing that without "intending" to). I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had _learned stuff_ from reading far-right authors (most notably Moldbug), and from talking with "Thomas". I was starting to appreciate [what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April](#less-precise-is-more-violent) (when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists").
Jessica asked if my opinion would change depending on whether Yudkowsky thought neoreaction was intellectually worth engaging with. (Yudkowsky [had said years ago](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs) that Moldbug was low quality.)
--------
-[TODO: Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)
- * I had an interesting interaction with Somni (who was presumably out on bail at this time) on the 'lowquality' Discord server on 12 December (my username was "Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis"; Somni's was helpimtrappedinausernamefactory)
- * I said, from a certain perspective, it's surprising that you spend so much time complaining about Kelsey/CfAR/&c., but I seem to get along fine with you, because "naïvely", one would think that my views are so much worse. Am I getting a pity pass because you think false consciousness is causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
- * I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as: A certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally-ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have intrinsic moral patiency of women), but can get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so, and no one is allowed to notice this except me, because everyone prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
- * (summarize Somni's remarks about me being victimized and not lying about my agenda)
- * my commentary to Anna: Somni (and Ziz) see themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical/manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Saying "Somni ... she" protects you against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually doesn't protect you against whatever threats might exist from them, as you can see from Somni's hostile disposition towards Kelsey ("linta", after her Discord username) and Scott. It's as if the mere fact that I'm not optimizing for PR ("arent lying about your agenda", as Somni says) is what makes me not-a-direct-enemy (but still a collaborator) in their eyes
-]
+I had an interesting interaction with Somni, one of the "Meeker Four"—presumably out on bail at this time?—on 12 December 2019.
+
+I told her, from a certain perspective, it's surprising that you spend so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, _&c._, but _I_ seemed to get along fine with her—because "naïvely", one would think that my views were _so much worse_. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
+
+To be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally-ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have intrinsic moral patiency of women), but _can_ get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so, and no one was allowed to notice this except me, because everyone prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
+
+Somni said that it was because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting, and that I wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she _should_ be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.
+
+I would later remark to Anna (Subject: "a peek behind the fog of war; and, [redacted]", 6 February 2020) that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior.
+
+Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from _them_. It was as if the mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.
--------
Or, I pointed out, (c) I had ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind _to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular_, and while I had made a lot of progress unwinding this, I was still, still not done, and seeing him at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit.
-"Trent" reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be clarifying and cathartic _for me_. If people in the Caliphate came to their senses, I could either not publish it, or give it a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.
+"Riley" reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be clarifying and cathartic _for me_. If people in the Caliphate came to their senses, I could either not publish it, or give it a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.
(It does not, actually, have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff