* Kelsey says in Discord that Michael is trying to get re-included
* I email her with quotes trying to argue that that's not his game
* She doesn't find the quotes convincing, because she thinks Vassar is a liar
+ * (sleep?!?)
* I call Ben to the stand, then Sarah ("You're a great prosecutor", I say in the channel)
* Kelsey in meatspace tells me that Vassar has a benefactor that she can't name; I'm retarded enough to not infer that it's him and she was obfuscating for compliance
...
--------
-[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
+[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver; discussion of Vassar on "ialdabaoth is banned"]
--------
I also polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.
-On _Less Wrong_, the mods had just announced a new end-of-year Review event, 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_.)
+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 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), 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.
-]
+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?
[TODO:
* Yudkowsky made a stray remark about social media causing people to say crazy thing
* I got enraged, posted a couple Tweets, including a preview of "Unnatural Categories"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1304824253015945216
+> Hypothesis: social media has an effect promoting Terrible Straw Arguments to being used by many actual people. One crazy on Side A makes a bad argument. Side B subtweets with a refutation and that gets a million views. So people on Side A hear about it as Side A's argument.
+>
+> And the result looks so incredibly surreal. People be going "2 + 3 = 4" and the replies are things like "lol but 4 is a prime number you moron". The entire conversation has been implicitly selected to sound insane to the other side.
+
+
+> 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—
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838346695348224
+
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838486810193921
+> Or, "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a symbol like '2' or '+', brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." (I'm still very angry at you! This shouldn't be hard to clear up in public!) 1/2
+>
+> If not the object-level application on Twitter, at least the abstract philosophy-of-language issue on Less Wrong?! Please!?! I've been working on a more detailed explanation that should be ready within a few weeks. 2/2
+
* something in my boiled over, and I eventually ended up staying up late writing an angry email
* this ruins my chances for being a "neutral" bridge between the Vassarites and the Caliphate, but that's OK
* mostly reproduce below (with a few redactions for either brevity or compliance with privacy norms, but I'm not going to clarify which)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff