It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring ["I" statements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message) is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space made a pattern click. If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby threaten them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that accomplishes cognitive work,[^i-statements] like good literary criticism. A rationalist space needs to be able to talk about the territory.
-[^i-statements]: At best, "I" statements make sense in a context where everyone's speech is considered part of the "official record". Wrapping claims in "I think" removes the need for dissenters to immediately object for fear that the claim will be accepted onto the shared map.
+[^i-statements]: At best, "I" statements make sense in a context where everyone's speech is considered part of the "official record". Wrapping controversial claims in "I think" removes the need for opponents to immediately object for fear that the claim will be accepted onto the shared map.
To be fair, the same comment I quoted also lists "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced. But I think (_I_ think) it's also fair to note that (as we had seen on _Less Wrong_ earlier that year), lip service is cheap. It's easy to say, "Of course I don't think politeness is more important than truth," while systematically behaving as if you did.
What I would hope for from a rationality teacher and a rationality community, would be efforts to instill the general skill of modeling things like regression to the mean and selection effects, as part of the general project of having a discourse that does collective information-processing.
-And from the way Yudkowsky writes these days, it looks like he's ... not interested in collective information-processing? Or that he doesn't actually believe that's a real thing? "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private," he writes! I agree that the positive purpose of public criticism isn't solely to help the author. (If it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it.) But readers _do_ benefit from insightful critical commentary. (If they didn't, why would they read the comments section?) When I read a story, and am interested in reading the comments _about_ a story, it's because I want to know what other readers think about the work. I don't want other people to self-censor comments on any plot holes or [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) they noticed for fear of dampening someone else's enjoyment or hurting the author's feelings.
+And from the way Yudkowsky writes these days, it looks like he's ... not interested in collective information-processing? Or that he doesn't actually believe that's a real thing? "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private," he writes! I agree that the positive purpose of public criticism isn't solely to help the author. (If it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it.) But readers _do_ benefit from insightful critical commentary. (If they didn't, why would they read the comments section?) When I read a story, and am interested in reading the comments _about_ a story, it's because I'm interested in the thoughts of other readers, who might have picked up subtleties I missed. I don't want other people to self-censor comments on any plot holes or [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) they noticed for fear of dampening someone else's enjoyment or hurting the author's feelings.
Yudkowsky claims that criticism should be given in private because then the target "may find it much more credible that you meant only to help them, and weren't trying to gain status by pushing them down in public." I'll buy this as a reason why credibly _altruistic_ unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private.[^altruistic-criticism] Indeed, meaning _only_ to help the target just doesn't seem like a plausible critic motivation in most cases. But the fact that critics typically have non-altruistic motives, doesn't mean criticism isn't helpful. In order to incentivize good criticism, you _want_ people to be rewarded with status for making good criticisms. You'd have to be some sort of communist to disagree with this![^communism-analogy]
The "Reducing Negativity" post also warns against the failure mode of attempted "author telepathy": attributing bad motives to authors and treating those attributions as fact without accounting for uncertainty or distinguishing observations from inferences. I should be explicit, then: when I say negative things about Yudkowsky's state of mind, like it's "as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible", that's a probabilistic inference, not a certain observation.
-But I think making probabilistic inferences is ... fine? The sentence "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" sure does look to me like text that's likely to have been generated by a state of mind that doesn't believe that reasoning in public is useful or possible. Someone who did believe in public reason would have noticed that criticism has information content separate from its potential to harm an author's reputation or feelings. If you think I'm getting this inference wrong, feel free to let me _and other readers_ know why in the comments.
+But I think making probabilistic inferences is ... fine? The sentence "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" sure does look to me like text that's likely to have been generated by a state of mind that doesn't believe that reasoning in public is useful or possible.[^criticism-inference] Someone who did believe in public reason would have noticed that criticism has information content whose public benefits might outweigh its potential to harm an author's reputation or feelings. If you think I'm getting this inference wrong, feel free to let me _and other readers_ know why in the comments.
+
+[^criticism-inference]: More formally, I'm claiming that the [likelihood ratio](https://arbital.com/p/likelihood_ratio/) P(wrote that sentence|doesn't believe in public reason)/P(wrote that sentence|does believe in public reason) is greater than one.
-----
I said I would bite that bullet: yes! Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a lame excuse.
-This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false-representations-optimized-to-move-resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between different senses of _fraud_. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were distinct from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.) I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.
+This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false-representations-optimized-to-move-resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that this usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between different senses of _fraud_. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.) I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.
-------
I thought this one cut to the heart of the shocking behavior that we had seen from Yudkowsky lately. (Less shocking as the months rolled on, and I told myself to let the story end.) The "hill of meaning in defense of validity" affair had been been driven by Yudkowsky's pathological obsession with not-technically-lying, on two levels: he had proclaimed that asking for new pronouns "Is. Not. Lying." (as if _that_ were the matter that anyone cared about—as if conservatives and gender-critical feminists should just pack up and go home after it had been demonstrated that trans people aren't _lying_), and he had seen no interest in clarifying his position on the philosophy of language, because he wasn't lying when he said that preferred pronouns weren't lies (as if _that_ were the matter that my posse cared about—as if I should keep honoring him as my Caliph after it had been demonstrated that he hadn't _lied_). But his Sequences had [articulated a higher standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument) than merely not-lying. If he didn't remember, I could at least hope to remind everyone else.
-I also wrote a little post on 20 December 2019, ["Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), arguing that 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. 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 also wrote a little post, ["Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), arguing that 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. In order to build a "[triskadekaphobic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia) 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.
-----
During a phone call around early December 2019, Michael had pointed out that since [MIRI's 2019 fundraiser](https://intelligence.org/2019/12/02/miris-2019-fundraiser/) was going on, and we had information about how present-day MIRI differed from its marketing story, there was a time-sensitive opportunity to reach out to a perennial major donor, whom I'll call "Ethan", and fill him in on what we thought we knew about the Blight.
-I wrote to Jessica and Jack Gallagher (cc'ing Michael) on 14 December asking how we should organize this. (Jessica and Jack had relevant testimony about working at MIRI, which would be of more central interest to "Ethan" than my story about how the "rationalists" had lost their way.) Michael mentioned "Tabitha", a lawyer who had been in the MIRI orbit for a long time, as another person to talk to.
+On 14 December 2019, I wrote to Jessica and Jack Gallagher, another disaffected ex-MIRI researcher, asking how we should organize this. (Jessica and Jack had relevant testimony about working at MIRI, which would be of more central interest to "Ethan" than my story about how the "rationalists" had lost their way.) Michael also mentioned "Tabitha", a lawyer who had been in the MIRI orbit for a long time, as another person to talk to.
-On 22 December, I apologized, saying that I wanted to postpone setting up the meeting, partially because I was on a roll with my productive blogging spree, and partially for a psychological reason: I was feeling subjective pressure to appease Michael by doing the thing that he explicitly suggested because of my loyalty to him. But that would be wrong, because Michael's ideology said that people should follow their sense of opportunity rather than obeying orders. I might feel motived to reach out to "Ethan" and "Tabitha" in January.
+About a week later, I apologized, saying that I wanted to postpone setting up the meeting, partially because I was on a roll with my productive blogging spree, and partially for a psychological reason: I was feeling subjective pressure to appease Michael by doing the thing that he explicitly suggested because of my loyalty to him, but that would be wrong, because Michael's ideology said that people should follow their sense of opportunity rather than obeying orders. I might feel motived to reach out to "Ethan" and "Tabitha" in January.
-Michael said that that implied my sense of opportunity was driven by politics, and that I believed that simple honesty couldn't work. I wasn't sure about this. It seemed like any conversation with "Ethan" and "Tabitha" would be partially optimized to move money, which I thought was politics.
+Michael said that implied that my sense of opportunity was driven by politics, and that I believed that simple honesty couldn't work; he only wanted me to acknowledge that. I was not inclined to affirm that characterization; it seemed like any conversation with "Ethan" and "Tabitha" would be partially optimized to move money, which I thought was politics.
-Jessica pointed out that "it moves money, so it's political" was erasing the non-zero-sum details of the situation. If people can make better decisions (including monetary ones) with more information, then informing them was pro-social. If there wasn't any better decisionmaking from information to be had, and it was just a matter of exerting social pressure in favor of one donation target over another, then that would be politics.
+Jessica pointed out that "it moves money, so it's political" was erasing the non-zero-sum details of the situation. If people can make better decisions (including monetary ones) with more information, then informing them was pro-social. If there wasn't any better decisionmaking from information to be had, and all speech was just a matter of exerting social pressure in favor of one donation target over another, then that would be politics.
I agreed that my initial "it moves money so it's political" intuition was wrong. But I didn't think I knew how to inform people about giving decisions in an honest and timely way, because the arguments [written above the bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) were an entire traumatic worldview shift. You couldn't just say "CfAR is fraudulent, don't give to them" without explaining things like ["bad faith is a disposition, not a feeling"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) as prerequisites. I felt more comfortable trying to share the worldview update in January even if it meant the December decision would be wrong, because I didn't know how to affect the December decision in a way that didn't require someone to trust my judgement.
------
-On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking about asking about autogynephilia on next _Slate Star Codex_ survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or a suggestion of any "intelligent and friendly opponents" to consult on the other side of the question. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being painful for me ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/), who I thought was more qualified on both counts. (Tailcalled had a lot of experience running surveys, and ran a "Hobbyist Sexologists" Discord server, which seemed likely to have some friendly opponents.)
+On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking about asking about autogynephilia on the next _Slate Star Codex_ survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or if I could suggest any "intelligent and friendly opponents" to consult for designing the question. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being painful for me ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/), who I thought was more qualified than me on both counts. (Tailcalled had a lot of experience running surveys, and ran a "Hobbyist Sexologists" Discord server, which seemed likely to have some friendly opponents.)
The next day (I assume while I happened to be on his mind), Scott also [commented on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E) "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist", my post from back in October replying to his "Against Lie Inflation."
-I was ... frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account considerations that I had already covered. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I [succumbed to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7) [the temptation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH) [to blow up at him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF) in the comments.
+I was frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account points that I had already covered in detail. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I [succumbed to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7) [the temptation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH) [to blow up at him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF) in the comments.
After commenting, I noticed that maybe Christmas Eve wasn't the best time to blow up at someone like that, and added a few more messages to our Discord chat—
> oh, I guess we're Jewish
> that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat
-Scott messaged back at 11:08 _a.m._ the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed, and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convincingly-to-me demonstrate his sincerity, and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).
+Scott messaged back at 11:08 _a.m._ the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed, and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convincingly-to-me demonstrate his sincerity and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).
I explained that the reason I accused him of being motivatedly dumb was that I _knew_ he knew about strategic equivocation, because he taught everyone else about it (as in his famous posts about [the motte-and-bailey doctrine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), or [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)). And so when he acted like he didn't get it when I pointed out that this also applied to "trans women are women", that just seemed _implausible_.
-He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses," being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted [an article from the prominent progressive magazine _The Nation_](https://web.archive.org/web/20191223235051/https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/): "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women _are in fact women_." Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).
+He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses" being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted [an article from the _The Nation_](https://web.archive.org/web/20191223235051/https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/): "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women _are in fact women_." Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).
-I didn't think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as _I_ could before being allowed to object to these kinds of Shenanigans. I thought "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running the clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to "wireheading" (optimizing someone's map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) and "war" (optimizing someone's map to not reflect the territory, in order to gain an advantage over them). If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it actually wasn't. That's ... not actually a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
+I didn't think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as I could before being allowed to object to this kind of chicanery. I thought "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running a clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to "wireheading" (optimizing someone's map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) or "war" (optimizing someone's map to not reflect the territory in order to manipulate them). If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it actually wasn't. That's not actually a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
-Scott thought that trans people had some weird thing going on in their brain such that it being referred to as their natal sex was intrinsically painful, like an electric shock. The thing wasn't an agent, so the [injunction to refuse to give in to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) didn't apply. Having to use a word other than the one you would normally use in order to not subject someone to painful electric shocks was worth it.
+Scott thought that trans people had some weird thing going on in their brains such that being referred to as their natal sex was intrinsically painful, like an electric shock. The thing wasn't an agent, so the [injunction to refuse to give in to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) didn't apply. Having to use a word other than the one you would normally use in order to not subject someone to painful electric shocks was worth it.
-I claimed that I knew things about the etiology of transness such that I didn't think the electric shock was inevitable, but I didn't want the conversation to go there if it didn't have to, because I didn't have to ragequit the so-called "rationalist" community over a complicated empirical thing; I only had to ragequit over bad philosophy.
+I thought I knew things about the etiology of transness such that I didn't think the electric shock was inevitable, but I didn't want the conversation to go there if it didn't have to, because I didn't have to ragequit the so-called "rationalist" community over a complicated empirical question; I only had to ragequit over bad philosophy.
Scott said he might agree with me if he thought the world-model-clarity _vs._ utilitarian benefit tradeoff was unfavorable—or if he thought it had the chance of snowballing like in his "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lighting".
I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.
-I had technical reasons to be very skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs ... doesn't seem like a nice place to live, right? Doesn't seem like a culture that can solve AI alignment, right?
+I was skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs doesn't seem like a culture that could solve AI alignment.
+
+I linked to Zvi Mowshowitz's post about how [the claim that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) gets used an excuse to silence people trying to point out the thing: "'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from the male multivariate distribution rather than the female multivariate distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out?" But I didn't think that everyone knew.[^survey-whether-everyone-knows] I thought the people who sort-of knew were being intimidated into doublethinking around it.
-I linked to Zvi Mowshowitz's post about how [the claim that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) gets used an excuse to silence people trying to point out the thing (because they don't see people behaving as if it were common knowledge): "'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from the male multivariate distribution rather than the female multivariate distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out?" But I didn't think that everyone knew. I thought the people who sort-of knew were being intimidated into doublethinking around it. I thought this was bad for clarity.
+[^survey-whether-everyone-knows]: On this point, it may be instructive to note that a 2023 survey [found that only 60% of the UK public knew that "trans women" were born male](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/06/third-of-britons-dont-know-trans-women-born-male/).
-At this point it was almost 2 _p.m._ (the paragraphs above summarize a larger volume of typing), and Scott mentioned that he wanted to go to the Event Horizon Christmas party, and asked if I wanted to come and continue the discussion there. I assented, and thanked him for his time; it would be really exciting if we could avoid a rationalist civil war. (I thought my "you need accurate models before you can do utilitarianism" philosophy was also near the root of Ben's objections to the EA movement.)
+At this point, it was almost 2 _p.m._ (the paragraphs above summarize a larger volume of typing), and Scott mentioned that he wanted to go to the Event Horizon Christmas party, and asked if I wanted to come and continue the discussion there. I assented, and thanked him for his time; it would be really exciting if we could avoid a rationalist civil war. (I thought my "you need accurate models before you can do utilitarianism" philosophy was also near the root of Ben's objections to the EA movement.)
-When I arrived at the party, people were doing a reading of [the "Hero Licensing" dialogue epilogue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing) to _Inadequate Equilibria_, with Yudkowsky himself was playing the part of the Mysterious Stranger. At some point, Scott and I retreated upstairs to continue our discussion. By the end of it, I was at least feeling more assured of Scott's sincerity (rather than him being coerced into not saying anything incriminating over email). Scott said he would edit in a disclaimer note at the end of "... Not Man for the Categories".
+When I arrived at the party, people were doing a reading of [the "Hero Licensing" dialogue epilogue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing) to [_Inadequate Equilibria_](https://equilibriabook.com/toc/), with Yudkowsky himself playing the Mysterious Stranger. At some point, Scott and I retreated upstairs to continue our discussion. By the end of it, I was at least feeling more assured of Scott's sincerity, if not his competence. Scott said he would edit in a disclaimer note at the end of "... Not Man for the Categories".
-It would have been interesting if I also got the chance to talk to Yudkowsky for a few minutes, but if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to recount any details of that here due to the privacy norm I'm following in this post.
+It would have been interesting if I also got the chance to talk to Yudkowsky for a few minutes, but if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to recount any details of that here due to the privacy norms I'm following in this post.
The rest of the party was nice. People were reading funny GPT-2 quotes from their phones. At one point, conversation happened to zag in a way that let me show off the probability fact I had learned during Math and Wellness Month. A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
-All in all, I was feeling less ragequitty about the rationalists[^no-scare-quotes] after the party—as if by credibly _threatening_ to ragequit, the elephant in my brain had managed to extort more bandwidth from our leadership. The note Scott added to the end of "... Not Man for the Categories" still betrayed some philosophical confusion, but I now felt hopeful about addressing that in a future blog post explaining my thesis that unnatural category boundaries were for "wireheading" or "war", rather than assuming that anyone who didn't get the point from "... Boundaries?" was lying or retarded.
+All in all, I was feeling less ragequitty about the rationalists[^no-scare-quotes] after the party—as if by credibly threatening to ragequit, the elephant in my brain had managed to extort more bandwidth from our leadership. The note Scott added to the end of "... Not Man for the Categories" still betrayed some philosophical confusion, but I now felt hopeful about addressing that in a future blog post explaining my thesis that unnatural category boundaries were for "wireheading" or "war", rather than assuming that anyone who didn't get the point from "... Boundaries?" was lying or retarded.
[^no-scare-quotes]: Enough to not even scare-quote the term here.
In January 2020, Michael told me that he had changed his mind about gender and the philosophy of language. We talked about it on the phone. He said that the philosophy articulated in ["A Human's Guide to Words"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) was inadequate for politicized environments where our choice of ontology is constrained. If we didn't know how to coin a new third gender, or teach everyone the language of "clusters in high-dimensional configuration space", our actual choices for how to think about trans women were basically three: creepy men (the TERF narrative), crazy men (the medical model), or a protected class of actual woman.[^reasons-not-to-carve]
-[^reasons-not-to-carve]: I had already identified three classes of reasons not to carve reality at the joints: [coordination (wanting everyone to use the same definitions)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), wireheading (making the map look good, at the expense of it failing to reflect the territory), and war (sabotaging someone else's map to make them do what you want). This would fall under coordination.
+[^reasons-not-to-carve]: I had identified three classes of reasons not to carve reality at the joints: [coordination (wanting everyone to use the same definitions)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), wireheading (making the map look good, at the expense of it failing to reflect the territory), and war (sabotaging someone else's map to make them do what you want). This would fall under "coordination".
-According to Michael, while "Trans women are real women" was a lie (in the sense that he agreed that me and Jessica and Ziz were not part of the natural cluster of biological females), it was _also_ the case that "Trans women are not real woman" was a lie (in the sense that the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories were wrong). "Trans women are women" could be true in the sense that truth is about processes that create true maps, such that we can choose the concepts that allow discourse and information-flow. If the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories are a cause of silencing, then—under present conditions—we had to chose the "protected class" story in order for people like Ziz to not be silenced.
+According to Michael, while "trans women are real women" was a lie (in the sense that he agreed that me and Jessica and Ziz were not part of the natural cluster of biological females), it was _also_ the case that "trans women are not real women" was a lie (in the sense that the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories were wrong). "Trans women are women" could be true in the sense that truth is about processes that create true maps, such that we can choose the concepts that allow discourse and information-flow. If the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories are a cause of silencing, then—under present conditions—we had to chose the "protected class" story in order for people like Ziz to not be silenced.
My response (more vehemently when thinking on it a few hours later) was that this was a _garbage bullshit_ appeal to consequences. If I wasn't going to let Ray Arnold get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people feel Safe", I shouldn't let Michael get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people aren't Oppressed". Maybe the wider world was ontology-constrained to those three choices, but I was aspiring to higher nuance in my writing, and it seemed to be working pretty well.
On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent _Slate Star Codex_ survey.
-I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Nov/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation.
+I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three and a half years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Nov/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/).
-Briefly, based on eyballing the survey data, Alexander proposes "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory, but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is _not_ boring and actually takes on a big complexity penalty: I just don't think the group of gay men _and_ lesbians _and_ straight males with female gender identities _and_ straight females with male gender identities have much in common with each other, except sociologically (being "queer"), and by being human.
+Briefly, based on eyballing the survey data, Alexander proposes "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory, but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is not boring and takes on a big complexity penalty: I don't think the group of gay men _and_ lesbians _and_ straight males with female gender identities _and_ straight females with male gender identities have much in common with each other, except sociologically (being "queer"), and by being human.
(I do like the [hypernym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy) _autogenderphilia_.)
-------
-There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
+There's another extremely important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
-Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message.
+Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent it. The intent of privacy norms is to conceal information. But [_information_ in Shannon's sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory) is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text.
-If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information, but also wants to comply with privacy norms, has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm, that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay _just_ shy of being that egregious.
+If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information but also wants to comply with privacy norms has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay only just shy of being that egregious.
-Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against "lying", I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."
+Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against lying, I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."
Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent a number of hours from early May 2020 to early July 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occured to me earlier that year.
-Previously, I had _already_ thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children, that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys. Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at _d_ ≈ 1.31 for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).) A solid supermajority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would get affirmed into a cross-sex identity (and being a lifelong medical patient) much earlier, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
+Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
+
+Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at _d_ ≈ 1.31 for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).) A solid supermajority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
-What made this crazy, in my view, was not just that child transition is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though the vast supermajority of trans adults were in the AGP taxon and therefore _had never resembled_ these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions of _guys like me_.
+What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in the late-onset/AGP taxon and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions of guys like me.
That much was obvious to anyone who's had their Blanchardian enlightenment, and wouldn't have been worth the effort of writing a special private Document about. The disturbing hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020 was that, in the culture of the current year, affirmation of a cross-sex identity might happen to kids _who weren't even HSTS-taxon at all_.
-Very small children who are just learning what words mean say a lot of things that aren't true (I'm a grown-up; I'm a cat; I'm a dragon), and grownups tend to play along _in the moment_ as a fantasy game, but they don't _coordinate to make that the permanent new social reality_. Ten years ago, if an otherwise ordinary three-year-old boy had occasionally claimed to be a girl, I think his nice smart liberal unschooling grownups would treat it about the same way as when the kid claims to be a cat. (I'm going with the MtF case with only a little loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to "trans" females at this age.)
+Very small children who are just learning what words mean say a lot of things that aren't true (I'm a grown-up; I'm a cat; I'm a dragon), and grownups tend to play along in the moment as a fantasy game, but they don't _coordinate to make that the permanent new social reality_. Ten years ago, if an otherwise ordinary three-year-old boy had occasionally claimed to be a girl, I think his nice smart liberal unschooling caretakers would treat it about the same way as when the kid claims to be a cat. (I'm going with the MtF case without too much loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to transition females at this age, but the dynamics are broadly similar.)
-But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore evidence that the kid "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that _would not have existed_ if not for their belief in it.
+But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore contrary evidence that the kid "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that would not have existed if not for their belief in it.
-Crucially, if innate gender identity _isn't_ a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [_Toddlers_ are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play styles tend to emerge within a few years. (Did you know the [sex difference in preference for toy cars is _d_ ≈ 2.44?!](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf)) What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as "a girl", only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the [many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) where people are using "gender" (percieved sex) to make a prediction or decision?
+Crucially, if innate gender identity isn't a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but large sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. (There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.)
+
+What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as "a girl", only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the [many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) where people are using "gender" (percieved sex) to make a prediction or decision?
Some might protest, "But what's the harm? She can always change her mind later if she decides she's actually a boy." I don't doubt that if the child were to clearly and distinctly insist, "I'm definitely a boy," the nice smart liberal grown-ups would unhesitatingly accept that.
-But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that hurts to not be respected. (What _is_ an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously verbally asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy."
+But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that hurts to not be respected. (What is an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously verbally asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy."
+
+Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). A culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans, and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, has concept-shaped holes that would make it hard for a kid to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution of juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans", even if it's true.
+
+The epistemic difficulties extend to grown-ups as well. I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation should find the story I've laid out above pretty compelling, but the parents themselves are likely to be more skeptical. They _know_ they didn't coach the child to claim to be a girl. On what grounds could a stranger who wasn't there (or a skeptical family friend who sees the kid maybe once a month) assert that subconscious influence must be at work?
+
+Apparently, people can have very different priors about these things. In the early 20th century, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten claimed to have taught his horse, Clever Hans, to do arithmetic and other intellectual feats. One could ask, "How much is 2/5 plus 1/2?" and the stallion would first stomp his hoof nine times, and then ten times—representing 9/10ths, the correct answer. An investigation concluded that no deliberate trickery was involved: Hans could often give the correct answer when questioned by a stranger, demonstrating that von Osten couldn't be secretly signaling the horse when to stop stomping. But further careful experiments by Oskar Pfungst revealed that Hans was picking up on unconscious cues "leaked" by the questioner's body language as the number of stomps approached the correct answer: for instance, Hans couldn't answer questions that the questioner themself didn't know.[^pfungst]
+
+[^pfungst]: Oskar Pfungst, [_Clever Hans (The Horse Of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution To Experimental Animal and Human Psychology_](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33936/33936-h/33936-h.htm), translated from the German by Carl L. Rahn
+
+Notably, von Osten didn't accept Pfungst's explanation, continuing to believe that his intensive tutoring had succeeded in teaching the horse arithmetic.
+
+It's hard to blame him, really. He had spent more time with Hans than anyone else. Hans observably _could_ stomp out the correct answers to questions. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a horse could learn arithmetic, why should he trust Pfungst's nitpicky experiments over the plain facts of his own intimately lived experience? But what was in question wasn't the observations of Hans's performance, only the interpretation of what those observations implied about Hans's psychology. As Pfungst put it: "that was looked for in the animal which should have been sought in the man."
+
+Similarly, in the case of a reputedly transgender three year old, a skeptical family friend isn't questioning the observations that the child what the child was reported to have said, only the interpretation of what those observations imply about the child's psychology. From the family's perspective, the evidence is clear: the child claimed to be a girl on many occasions over a period of months, and expressed sadness about being a boy. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a child could be transgender, what could make them doubt the obvious interpretation of the plain facts of their own intimately lived experience?
-Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). A culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans, and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, has concept-shaped holes that make it hard to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution of juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans", even if it's true.
+From the skeptical family friend's perspective, there are a number of anomalies that cast serious doubt on what the family thinks is the obvious interpretation.
-... anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I haven't studied child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who _was_ "actually trans", whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.
+(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically; the following anecdotes might be fictional—)
-For some reason, it seemed really important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. If I get around to it, I might clean it up and publish it as its own blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data").
+For one thing, the child's information environment does not seem to have provided instruction on some of the relevant facts. Six months before the child's social transition went down, another friend had reportedly explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." (Apparently, grown-ups in Berkeley in the current year don't see the need to be any more specific.) But if no one in the child's life has been willing to clarify that girls and women, specifically, are the ones that don't have penises, and that boys and men are the ones that do, that makes it more plausible that the child's subsequent statements on the matter reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need.
-Given that I spent so many hours on this little research/writing project in May–July 2020, I think it makes sense for me to mention it at this point in the memoir, where it fits in chronologically. I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my research interests obviously doesn't violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else's family, or criticizing someone else's parenting decisions.
+For another thing, from the skeptical family friend's perspective, it's striking how the family and other grown-ups in the child's life seem to treat the child's statements about gender starkly differently than the child's statements about everything else.
-(Only—you two have such beautiful children!)
+Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—probably something like, practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local culture environment (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). If you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
+
+It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender-related case. Suppose the child's father's name is Kevin Smith, and that after a grown-up explains ["Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles) after it [happened to come up in fiction](https://wreckitralph.fandom.com/wiki/Fix-It_Felix,_Jr._(character)), the child declares that his name is Kevin Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statment as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you _Kevin_ or _Kev Jr._, or just _Junior_?") With enough followup, it seems entirely plausible that a name change to "Kevin Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the [optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization)—the selection that this particular one of the child's many statements should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated a cute thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.
+
+Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. For example, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, the father reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_".
+
+I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (_d_ ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might be so bold as to suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition? But that mode of thought is forbidden to nice smart liberal parents in the current year.
+
+Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I'm not an expert on child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who _was_ "actually trans", whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.
+
+For some reason, it seemed important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. If I get around to it, I might clean it up and publish it as a public blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data"), but for some reason, that didn't seem as pressing.
+
+I put an epigraph at the top:
+
+> If you love someone, tell them the truth.
+>
+> —Anonymous
+
+Given that I spent so many hours on this little research and writing project in May–July 2020, I think it makes sense for me to mention it at this point in my memoir, where it fits in chronologically. I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my research interests obviously doesn't violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else's family, or criticizing someone else's parenting decisions.
+
+(Only—[you two have such beautiful children](/2023/Nov/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress/)!)
-----
-On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
+On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light?) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of systematically correct reasoning that made the community valuable in the first place.
He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing _Slate Star Codex_ posts were taken down. A [lone post on the main page](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) explained that the _New York Times_ piece was going to reveal Alexander's real last name, and that he was taking his posts down as a defensive measure. (No blog, no story?) I [wrote a script](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191) (`slate_starchive.py`) to replace the _Slate Star Codex_ links on this blog with links to the most recent Internet Archive copy.
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-I continued to work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis. The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:
+I continued my philosophy of language work, looking into the academic literature on formal models of communication and deception and writing a [couple](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) [posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) encapsulating what I learned from that—and I continued work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis, the sequel to ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)
+
+The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:
> I had hoped that the Israel/Palestine example above made it clear that you have to deal with the consequences of your definitions, which can include confusion, muddling communication, and leaving openings for deceptive rhetorical strategies.
-This is certainly an _improvement_ over the original text without the note, but I took the use of the national borders metaphor here to mean that Scott still hadn't really gotten my point about there being underlying laws of thought underlying categorization: mathematical principles governing _how_ definition choices can muddle communication or be deceptive. (But that wasn't surprising; [by Scott's own admission](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), [he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/).)
+This is certainly an improvement over the original text without the note, but I took the use of the national borders metaphor to mean that Scott still hadn't gotten my point about there being underlying laws of thought underlying categorization: mathematical principles governing _how_ definition choices can muddle communication or be deceptive. (But that wasn't surprising; [by Scott's own admission](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), [he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/).)
Category "boundaries" are a useful _visual metaphor_ for explaining the cognitive function of categorization: you imagine a "boundary" in configuration space containing all the things that belong to the category.
-If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous U.S. states. It may be inconvenient that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, and we have to deal with the consequences of that, but there's no sense in which it's _wrong_ that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.
+If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous U.S. states. It may be inconvenient that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, and we have to deal with the consequences of that, but it's not "wrong" that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.
-But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is shallow.
+But if you do have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is shallow.
-A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
+A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of which government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
-But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
+But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get close to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
-The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people do with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be _illustrated_ similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to explain why gerrymandered categories were allegedly okay, showed that he Didn't Get It.
+The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people do with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be illustrated similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to explain why gerrymandered categories were allegedly okay, demonstrated that he didn't understand this.
-I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone _want_ a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign higher utility to doing it this way", had to be messing with you. Where would such a utility function come from? Intuitively, it had to be precisely _because_ squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would realistically want to do that would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold."
+I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone want a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign higher utility to doing it this way" had to be messing with you. Where would such a utility function come from? Intuitively, it had to be precisely _because_ squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would realistically want to do that would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold".
-That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of _closeness_ that made some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
+That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of "closeness" that made some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
-Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I wanted to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's _more useful_ than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`—but that would require the numerals in _Y_ to be _numbers_ rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from lg<sub>2</sub> 8 = 3 to lg<sub>2</sub> 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter "which" three states they were.
+Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I wanted to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's more useful than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`. But that would require the numerals in _Y_ to be numbers rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from lg<sub>2</sub> 8 = 3 to lg<sub>2</sub> 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter "which" three states they were.
-How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the variance of my features conditional on category-membership? Was "connectedness" intrinsically the what I wanted, or was connectedness only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness was intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are _similar enough to make similar decisions about_.
+How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the variance of my features conditional on category-membership? Was "connectedness" intrinsically the what I wanted, or was connectedness only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness was intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are similar enough to make similar decisions about.
I put the question to a few friends in July 2020 (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't.
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-I decided on "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" as the title for my advanced categorization thesis. Writing it up was a large undertaking. There were a lot of nuances to address and potential objections to preëmpt, and I felt that I had to cover everything. (A reasonable person who wanted to understand the main ideas wouldn't need so much detail, but I wasn't up against reasonable people who wanted to understand.)
+I decided on "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" as the title for my advanced categorization thesis. Writing it up was a major undertaking. There were a lot of nuances to address and potential objections to preëmpt, and I felt that I had to cover everything. (A reasonable person who wanted to understand the main ideas wouldn't need so much detail, but I wasn't up against reasonable people who wanted to understand.)
-In September 2020, Yudkowsky Tweeted [something about social media incentives prompting people to make nonsense arguments](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1304824253015945216). Something in me boiled over. The Tweet was fine in isolation, but I rankled at it in the context of his own incentive-driven nonsense remaining unaddressed. I left [a pleading, snarky reply](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838486810193921) and [vented on my own timeline](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838346695348224) (with preview images from the draft of "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"):
+In September 2020, Yudkowsky Tweeted [something about social media incentives prompting people to make nonsense arguments](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1304824253015945216), and something in me boiled over. The Tweet was fine in isolation, but I rankled at it given the absurdly disproprotionate efforts I was undertaking to unwind his incentive-driven nonsense. I left [a pleading, snarky reply](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838486810193921) and [vented on my own timeline](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838346695348224) (with preview images from the draft of "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"):
> Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky's robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn't surprising, but—
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