In response to Sarah Constantin mentioning that there was no personal cost to voting third-party, Yudkowsky [pointed out that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216809977144168448) the problem was the [third-party spoiler effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting), not personal cost: "People who refused to vote for Hillary didn't pay the price, kids in cages did, but that still makes the action nonbest."
-(The "cages" in question—technically, chain-link fence enclosures—were [actually](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/26/fact-check-obama-administration-built-migrant-cages-meme-true/3413683001/) [built](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-democratic-national-convention-ap-fact-check-immigration-politics-2663c84832a13cdd7a8233becfc7a5f3) during the Obama administration, but that doesn't seem important.)
+(The cages in question—technically, chain-link fence enclosures—were [actually](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/26/fact-check-obama-administration-built-migrant-cages-meme-true/3413683001/) [built](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-democratic-national-convention-ap-fact-check-immigration-politics-2663c84832a13cdd7a8233becfc7a5f3) during the Obama administration, but that doesn't seem important.)
I asked what was wrong with the disjunction from "Stop Voting for Nincompoops", where the earlier Yudkowsky had written that it's hard to see who should accept the argument to vote for the lesser of two evils, but refuse to accept the argument against voting because it won't make a difference. Unilaterally voting for Clinton doesn't save the kids!
I guess that explains everything. He doesn't think he's part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things. He's not anticipating being asked in the future if he's acted against gender ideology. He's not worried about his reputation with people like me.
-Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to [Sabbatai Zevi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam), the 17th-century Jewish religious leader who purported to be the Messiah, who later converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans. "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
+Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century Jewish religious leader purported to be the Messiah, who later [converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam). "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
I don't think this is as much of a burn as Yarvin does. Zevi was facing some very harsh coercion: a choice to convert to Islam, "prove" his divinity via deadly trial by ordeal, or just be impaled outright. Extortion-resistant decision theories aside, it's hard not to be sympathetic to someone facing this trilemma who chose to convert.
------
-The New York leg of my trip went fine.
+The New York leg of my trip went fine. I visited Sarah. I met another _Less Wrong_-er whose comments I had liked. I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
-[ TODO— New York
- * I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
- * met my NRx Twitter mutual, wore my Quillette shirt
- * he had been banned from Slate Star Codex ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64)
- * he offered to buy me a drink, I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that being drunk was the ritual for how men establish trust, so I had a glass and a half of wine
- * it was so refreshing—not being constrained
- * I explained the AI risk case; he mentioned black people having larger wingspan
- * met Ben and his new girlfriend; Jessica wasn't around; he said the psych disaster was a betrayal, but a finite one; Ben's suggestion that if CfAR were serious, they'd hire me
+I visited Ben and met his new girlfiend. Jessica wasn't around. We hadn't talked much since the "Lenore" disaster nine months before. He said that my behavior then _had_ been a betrayal, but a finite one. It happens. (Not "it happens" meaning that it's _okay_, but that it _happens_; moral agents keep accounts; [you forgive, but don't forget](/2020/Dec/liability/).)
-]
+I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
+
+So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back _coveture_ on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
------
I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people autistic?
-Concerning the lightning parable, Scott said that from his perspective, the point of "Kolmogorov Complicity" was that, yes, people can be crazy, but that we have to live in Society without spending all our time freaking out about it. If, back in the days of my ideological anti-sexism, the first ten Yudkowsky posts I had read had said that men and women are psychologically different for biological reasons and that anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot—which Scott assumed Yudkowsky did think—he could imagine me being turned off. It was probably good for me and the world that that wasn't my first ten experience of the rationalist community.
+Concerning the lightning parable, Scott said that from his perspective, the point of "Kolmogorov Complicity" was that, yes, people can be crazy, but that we have to live in Society without spending all our time freaking out about it. If, back in the days of my ideological anti-sexism, the first ten Yudkowsky posts I had read had said that men and women are psychologically different for biological reasons and that anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot—which Scott assumed Yudkowsky did think—he could imagine me being turned off. It was probably good for me and the world that that wasn't my first ten experiences of the rationalist community.
I agreed that this was a real concern. (I had been so enamored with Yudkowsky's philosophy-of-science writing that there was no chance of _me_ bouncing on account of the sexism that I perceived, but I wasn't the marginal case.) There are definitely good reasons to tread carefully when trying to add sensitive-in-our-culture content to Society's shared map. But I didn't think treading carefully should take precedence over _getting the goddamned right answer_.
[^describing-the-conflict]: I had been making this point for four years. [As I wrote in February 2018's "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#describing-the-conflict), "If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word [...] rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_."
-In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or save it for the memoir, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
+In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror, or save it for the memoir. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
I asked secret posse member for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
Is that ... _not_ evidence of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
-... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker", is what I fantasized about being able to say to Yudkowsky, if I hadn't already expressed an intention not to bother him anymore.
-
-[TODO: the Death With Dignity era April 2022
-
-"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability but that FAI was "impossible", and now he says the probability is ~0
+... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker", is what I fantasized about being able to say, if I hadn't already expressed an intention not to bother him anymore.
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
-
- * swimming to shore analogy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg
+------
-> your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll almost certainly make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
+On 1 April 2022, Yudkowsky published ["MIRI Announces New 'Death With Dignity' Strategy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), a cry of despair in the guise of an April Fool's Day post. MIRI didn't know how to align a superintelligence, no one else did either, but AI capabilities work was continuing apace. With no credible plan to avert almost-certain doom, the most we could do now was to strive to give the human race a more dignified death, as measured in log-odds of survival: an alignment effort that doubled the probability of a valuable future from 0.0001 to 0.0002 was worth one information-theoretic bit of dignity.
- * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+In a way, "Death With Dignity" isn't really an update. Yudkowsky had always refused to give a probability of success, while maintaining that Friendly AI was ["impossible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible). Now, he says the probability is approximately zero.
- * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier; Asimov wrote about robots and psychohistory, but he still portrayed a future galaxy populated by humans, which seems so silly now
+Paul Christiano, who has a much more optimistic picture of humanity's chances, nevertheless said that he liked the "dignity" heuristic. I like it, too. It—takes some of the pressure off. I [made an analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg): your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll probably make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
-/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
-]
+------
-Meanwhile, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
+Perhaps for lack of any world-saving research to do, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope, the [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.[^medianworlds]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff