And as it happened, on 4 May 2019, Yudkowsky [re-Tweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922)—the point that group differences aren't a matter of any single variable—which was _sort of_ like the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel a lot less personally aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpet this as another "concession" to me? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
-Separately, I visited some friends' house on 30 April 2019 saying, essentially (and sincerely), "Oh man oh jeez, Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're _the only ones backing me up_ on this _incredibly basic philosophy thing_ and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to _go_." The ensuing group conversation made some progress, but was mostly pretty horrifying.
+Separately, on 30 April 2019, I visited the house where "Susan" and her husband Mike and Kelsey Piper and a few other people lived, which I'll call "Arcadia",[^named-houses] saying, essentially (and sincerely), Oh man oh jeez, Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're _the only ones backing me up_ on this _incredibly basic philosophy thing_ and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to _go_. The ensuing group conversation made some progress, but was mostly pretty horrifying.
-In an adorable twist, my friends' 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_.
+[^named-houses]: It was common practice in our subculture to name group houses. My apartment was "We'll Name It Later."
+
+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.
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.
-Secret posse member 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. Secret posse member said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote (in the thread):
+"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):
> 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.
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.
-Secret posse member 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.
+"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.
------
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. Secret posse member 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. "Trent" 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_.
-----
-While visiting Valinor on 7 August 2019, Merlin Blume (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"
+While visiting "Arcadia" on 7 August 2019, Mike and "Susan"'s son (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"
After a long pause, I said, "Yes," as if I had misheard the question as "Are you a boy?" I think it was a motivated mishearing: it was only after I answered that I consciously realized that's not what the kid asked.
--------
-[TODO: Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
+[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
+]
--------
On _Less Wrong_, the mods had just announced [a new end-of-year Review event](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review), in which the best post from the year before would be reviewed and voted on, to see which had stood the test of time and deserved to be part of our canon of cumulative knowledge. (That is, this Review period starting in late 2019 would cover posts published in _2018_.)
-This provided me with [an affordance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review?commentId=d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) to write some "defensive" posts, critiquing posts that had been nominated for Best-of-2018 that I didn't think deserved such glory. In response to ["Decoupling _vs._ Contextualizing Norms"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms) (which had been [cited in a way that I thought obfuscatory during the "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" trainwreck](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/wejvnw6QnWrvbjgns)), I wrote ["Relevance Norms; Or, Grecian Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling),
+This provided me with [an affordance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review?commentId=d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) to write some "defensive"[^defensive] posts, critiquing posts that had been nominated for the Best-of-2018 collection that I didn't think deserved such glory. In response to ["Decoupling _vs._ Contextualizing Norms"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms) (which had been [cited in a way that I thought obfuscatory during the "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" trainwreck](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/wejvnw6QnWrvbjgns)), I wrote ["Relevance Norms; Or, Grecian Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling), appealing to our [academically standard theory of how context affects meaning](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/) to explain why "decoupling _vs._ contextualizing norms" is a false dichotomy.
+
+[^defensive]: Criticism is "defensive" in the sense of trying to _prevent_ new beliefs from being added to our shared map; a critic of an idea "wins" when the idea is not accepted (such that the set of accepted beliefs remains at the _status quo ante_).
More significantly, in reaction to Yudkowsky's ["Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), I published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), explaining why merely refraining from making false statments is an unproductively narrow sense of "honesty", because the ambiguity of natural language makes it easy to deceive people in practice without technically lying. (The ungainly title of my post was "softened" from an earlier draft following feedback from the posse; I had originally written "... Surprisingly Useless".)
A MIRI researcher, Evan Hubinger, asked:
-> Do you think having that debate online was something that needed to happen for AI safety/x-risk? Do you think it benefited AI safety at all? I’m genuinely curious. My bet would be the opposite—that it caused AI safety to be more associated with political drama that helped further taint it.
-
-[TODO—
+> Do you think having that debate online was something that needed to happen for AI safety/x-risk? Do you think it benefited AI safety at all? I'm genuinely curious. My bet would be the opposite—that it caused AI safety to be more associated with political drama that helped further taint it.
-summarize "Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators"
+In my reply post, I claimed that our belief that AI safety was the most important problem in the world was causally downstream from from people like Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom trying to do good reasoning, and following lines of reasoning to where they led. The [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) of assuming that your current agenda was the most important thing, and then distorting the process of inquiry to preserve its political untaintedness wouldn't have led us to _noticing_ the alignment problem, and I didn't think it would be sufficient to solve it.
-(I had the "calculator that won't display 13" analogy cached from previous email correspondence.)
+In some sense, it should be easier to have a rationality/alignment community that _just_ does systematically correct reasoning, rather than a politically-savvy community that does systematically correct reasoning _except_ when that would taint AI safety with political drama, analogously to how it's easier to build a calculator that just does correct arithmetic, than a calculator that does correct arithmetic _except_ that it never displays the result 13.
-Wei Dai's "premature abstractions" post was explicit about the inspiration; it said "because of this conversation", and the link is to Wei's comment about my "'Worried' is an understatement" footnote on the Brent-ban post
-]
+In order to build a "triskadekaphobic calculator", you would need to "solve arithmetic" anyway, and the resulting product would be limited not only in its ability to correctly compute `6 + 7`, but also the infinite family of calculations that included 13 as an intermediate result: if you can't count on `(6 + 7) + 1` being the same as `6 + (7 + 1)`, you lose the associativity of addition. And so on. (I had the "calculator that won't display 13" analogy cached from previous email correspondence.)
It could have been a comment instead of a top-level post, but I wanted to bid for the extra attention. I think, at some level, putting Hubinger's name in the post title was deliberate. It wasn't inappropriate—"Reply to Author's Name on Topic Name" is a very standard academic title format, [which](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [I](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) [often](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/) [use](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) [myself](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins)—but it also wasn't necessary, and might have been a little weird given that I was mostly using Hubinger's comment as a jumping-off point for my Free Speech for Shared Maps campaign, rather than responding point-by-point to a longer piece Hubinger might have written. It's as if the part of my brain that chose that subtitle wanted to set an example, that arguing for cowardice, being in favor of concealing information for fear of being singled out by a mob, would just get you singled out _more_.
I had [an exchange with Scott Alexander in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to/comment/JdsknCuCuZMAo8EbP).
-"I know a bunch of people in academia who do various verbal gymnastics to appease the triskaidekaphobics, and when you talk to them in private they get everything 100% right," [he said](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to?commentId=mHrHTvzg8MGNH2CwB) (in a follow-up comment, on 5 January 2020).
+"I know a bunch of people in academia who do various verbal gymnastics to appease the triskaidekaphobics, and when you talk to them in private they get everything 100% right," [he said](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to?commentId=mHrHTvzg8MGNH2CwB) (in a follow-up comment on 5 January 2020).
I'm happy for them, I replied, but I thought the _point_ of having taxpayer-funded academic departments was so that people who _aren't_ insider experts can have accurate information with which to inform decisions?
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.
-Secret posse member 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.
+"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.
(It does not, actually, have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)
------
-While visiting Valinor on 4 February 2020, I remember my nose dripping while I was holding Koios, the baby. Alicorn offered me a tissue. I asked if I shouldn't be holding the baby while my nose was dripping and I therefore plausibly had a cold. She said it was fine. On the topic of possible sickness, I said that I hoped the novel coronavirus people were talking about didn't go pandemic.
+While visiting "Arcadia" on 4 February 2020, I remember my nose dripping while I was holding the baby. Alicorn offered me a tissue. I asked if I shouldn't be holding the baby while my nose was dripping and I therefore plausibly had a cold. She said it was fine. On the topic of possible sickness, I said that I hoped the novel coronavirus people were talking about didn't go pandemic.
It did. The Berkeley rats took social distancing guidelines very seriously, so it would be a while before I could visit again.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff