> I'm also still pretty _angry_ about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never _actually_ going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! **I _didn't_ just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them:** ["A Sense That More Is Possible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible), ["Raising the Sanity Waterline"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline)
-[TODO: summarize smooth over cheerful-price bit, with a history footnote—
+I added:
> Can you please _acknowledge that I didn't just make this up?_ Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours
-> But, it's kind of bad that I'm thirty-one years old and haven't figured out how to be less emotionally needy/demanding; feeling a little bit less frame-locked now; let's talk in a few months (but offer in email-before-last is still open because rescinding it would be dishonorable)
-
-]
-
-Anna said she didn't want to receive cheerful price offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my custom of throwing money at people to get what I wanted as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her _using_ me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of "A Sense That More Is Possible", "Raising the Sanity Waterline", _&c._, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (_e.g._, ["Politics Is the Mind-Killer"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer)), that it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.
+Anna said she didn't want to receive [cheerful price](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price) offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my custom of throwing money at people to get what I wanted as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her _using_ me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of "A Sense That More Is Possible", "Raising the Sanity Waterline", _&c._, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (_e.g._, ["Politics Is the Mind-Killer"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer)), that it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.
I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a political issue. That was _new evidence_ about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to _think seriously_ about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the 2019-era "rationalists" were _worse than useless_ to me personally. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I was part of a reference class that includes AI researchers).
-------
-[TODO—
- * 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
- ...
-]
+Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that someone (whose identity she would not disclose) had threatened to sue over the report about Michael, so REACH was delaying its release for the one-year statute of limitations. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).
--------
+When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
-[TODO: State of Steven; maybe fold in content from "uh, guys??" 21 July?]
+In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. I count this kind of situation as another reason to be [annoyed at how norms protecting confidentiality](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints) distort information; Kelsey apparently felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person (because I naïvely assumed that if Michael had threatened to sue, Kelsey would have said that). I can't say I never introduce this kind of disortion in my communications (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.
+
+As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't particularly approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub.
+
+This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.
-------
-------
-[TODO: Ziz's protest]
+On 12 and 13 November 2019, Ziz [published](https://archive.ph/GQOeg) [several](https://archive.ph/6HsvS) [blog](https://archive.ph/jChxP) [posts](https://archive.ph/TPei9) laying out her greviances against MIRI and CfAR. On the fifteenth, Ziz and three collaborators staged a protest at the CfAR reunion being held at a retreat center in the North Bay near Camp Meeker. A call to the police falsely alleged that the protestors had a gun, [resulting in a](http://web.archive.org/web/20230316210946/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/deputies-working-to-identify-suspects-in-camp-meeker-incident/) [dramatic police reaction](http://web.archive.org/web/20201112041007/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/authorities-id-four-arrested-in-westminster-woods-protest/) (SWAT team called, highway closure, children's group a mile away being evacuated—the works).
+
+I was tempted to email the links to the blog posts to the Santa Rosa _Press-Democrat_ reporter covering the incident (as part of my information-sharing is Good virtue ethics), but decided to refrain because I predicted that Anna would prefer I didn't.
+
+The main relevance of this incident to my Whole Dumb Story is that Ziz's memoir–manifesto posts included [a 5500 word section about me](https://archive.ph/jChxP#selection-1325.0-1325.4). Ziz portrays me as a slave to social reality, throwing trans women under the bus to appease the forces of cissexism. (I mostly don't think that's what's going on with me, but I can see why the theory was appealing.) I was flattered that someone had so much to say about me, even if I was being portrayed negatively.
--------
--------
-[TODO: complicity and friendship]
+I had a phone call with Michael in which he took issue with Anna having described Ziz as having threatened to kill Gwen, when that wasn't a fair paraphrase of what Ziz's account actually said.[^ziz-gwen-account] In Michael's view, this was tantamount to indirect attempted murder using the State as a weapon to off her organization's critics: Anna casting Ziz as a Scary Bad Guy in [the improv scene of social reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) is the kind of maneuver that contributes to the legal system ruining weird people's lives with spurious charges because weird gets [cast as villains in the act](https://unstableontology.com/2018/11/17/act-of-charity/).
+
+[^ziz-gwen-account]: The relevant passage from [one of Ziz's memoir posts](https://archive.ph/an5rp#selection-419.0-419.442) is:
+
+ > I said if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level, and treat fighting back as new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down, and if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary meant we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there.
+
+ Talking about murder hypothetically as the logical game-theoretic consequence of a revenge spiral isn't the same thing as directly threatening to kill someone. I wasn't sure what exact words Anna had used in her alleged paraphrase; Michael didn't remember the context when I asked him later.
+
+I told Michael that this made me think I might need to soul-search about having been complicit with injustice, but I couldn't clearly articulate why.
+
+I figured it out later (Subject: "complicity and friendship"). I think part of my emotional reaction to finding out about Ziz's legal trouble was the hope that it would lead to less pressure on Anna. I had been nagging Anna a lot on the theme of "rationality actually requires free speech", and she would sometimes defend her policy of guardedness on the grounds of (my paraphrase—), "Hey, give me some credit, oftentimes I do take a calculated risk of telling people things. Or I did, but then ... Ziz."
+
+I think at some level, I was imagining being able to tell Anna, "See, you were so afraid that telling people things would make enemies, and you used Ziz as evidence that you weren't cautious enough. But look, Ziz _isn't going to be a problem for you anymore_. Your fear of making enemies actually happened, and you're fine! This is evidence in favor of my view that you were far too cautious, rather than not being cautious enough!"
+
+But that was complicit with injustice, because the _reason_ I felt that Ziz wasn't going to be a problem for Anna anymore was because Ziz's protest got SWATted, which didn't have anything to do with the merits of Ziz's claims against Anna. I still wanted Anna to feel safer to speak, but I now realized that more specifically, I wanted Anna to feel safe _because_ Speech can actually win. Feeling safe because one's enemies can be crushed by the state wasn't the same thing.
--------
-----
-[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick 14 December
-Anna's reply 21 December
-22 December: I ask to postpone this
-Michael asks for me to acknowledge that my sense of opportunity is driven by politics
-discussion of what is "political"
-mention to Anna that I was postponing in order to make it non-salesy
-January 2020 "my state"?
-]
+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 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+Michael wrote:
+
+> That all makes sense to me, but I think that it reduces to "political processes are largely processes of spontaneous coordination to make it impossible to 'just be honest' and thus to force people to engage in politics themselves. In such a situation one is forced to do politics in order to 'just be honest', even if you would greatly prefer not to".
+>
+> This is surely not the first time that you have heard about situations like that.
+
+I ended up running into "Ethan" at the grocery store in early 2020, and told him that I had been planning to get in touch with him. (I might have mentioned the general topic, but I didn't want to get into a long discussion at the grocery store.)
+
+COVID hit shortly thereafter. I never got around to following up.
------
------
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+"Thanks for being principled," he replied. (He had a few more sentences about the process _vs._ conclusion point being important to his revised-for-politics philosophy of language, but we didn't finish the debate.)
+
+------
+
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/Mar/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 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.
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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff