Which brings me to the second reason the naïve anti-extortion argument might fail: [what counts as "extortion" depends on the relevant "property rights", what the "default" action is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qjaaux3XnLBwomuNK/countess-and-baron-attempt-to-define-blackmail-fail). If having free speech is the default, being excluded from the dominant coalition for defying the orthodoxy could be construed as extortion. But if being excluded from the coalition is the default, maybe toeing the line of orthodoxy is the price you need to pay in order to be included.
-Yudkowsky has [a proposal for how bargaining should work between agents with different notions of "fairness"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2YwmzuT7nWx62Kfh/cooperating-with-agents-with-different-ideas-of-fairness). Suppose Hayley and Isaac are splitting a pie, and if they can't initially agree on how to split it, they have to fight over it until they do agree, destroying some of the pie in the process. Hayley thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Isaac claims that he contributed more ingredients to the baking process and that it's therefore fair that he gets 75% of the pie, pledging to fight if offered anything less.
+Yudkowsky has [a proposal for how bargaining should work between agents with different notions of "fairness"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2YwmzuT7nWx62Kfh/cooperating-with-agents-with-different-ideas-of-fairness). Suppose Greg and Heather are splitting a pie, and if they can't initially agree on how to split it, they have to fight over it until they do agree, destroying some of the pie in the process. Greg thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Heather claims that she contributed more ingredients to the baking process and that it's therefore fair that she gets 75% of the pie, pledging to fight if offered anything less.
-If Hayley were a causal decision theorist, she might agree to the 75/25 split, reasoning that 25% of the pie is better than fighting until the pie is destroyed. Yudkowsky argues that this is irrational: if Hayley is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Isaac has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Isaac's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
+If Greg were a causal decision theorist, he might agree to the 75/25 split, reasoning that 25% of the pie is better than fighting until the pie is destroyed. Yudkowsky argues that this is irrational: if Greg is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Heather has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Heather's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
-Instead, Yudkowsky argues, Hayley should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Isaac also does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split in Isaac's favor (after 100−(32+48) = 20% of the pie has been destroyed by the costs of fighting) or an 42/18 split (where 40% of the pie has been destroyed). This isn't Pareto-optimal (it would be possible for both Hayley and Isaac to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Hayley to burn some of Isaac's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by him, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the entire pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
+Instead, Yudkowsky argues, Greg should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Heather also does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split in Heather's favor (after 100−(32+48) = 20% of the pie has been destroyed by the costs of fighting) or an 42/18 split (where 40% of the pie has been destroyed). This isn't Pareto-optimal (it would be possible for both Greg and Heather to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Greg to burn some of Heather's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by her, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the entire pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
It seemed to me that in the contest over the pie of Society's shared map, the rationalist Caliphate was letting itself get exploited by the progressive Egregore, doing worse than the fair outcome without dealing any damage to the Egregore in return. Why?
[The logic of dump stats](/2023/Dec/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#dump-stats), presumably. Bargaining to get AI risk on the shared map—not even to get it taken seriously as we would count "taking it seriously", but just acknowledged at all—was hard enough. Trying to challenge the Egregore about an item that it actually cared about would trigger more fighting than we could afford.
-In my illustrative story, if Hayley and Isaac destroy the pie fighting, then neither of them get any pie. But in more complicated scenarios (including the real world), there was no guarantee that non-Pareto Nash equilibria were equally bad for everyone.
+In my illustrative story, if Greg and Heather destroy the pie fighting, then neither of them get any pie. But in more complicated scenarios (including the real world), there was no guarantee that non-Pareto Nash equilibria were equally bad for everyone.
I had a Twitter exchange with Yudkowsky in January 2020 that revealed some of his current-year thinking about Nash equilibria. I [had Tweeted](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1206718983115698176):
It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Jocelyn says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Keith says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Jocelyn says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Jocelyn is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Jocelyn was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Irene says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Jonas says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Irene says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Irene is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Irene was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]
[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]: I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am _I_ crazy, or is _everyone else_ crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just _an_ ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious.
-But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, honestly, is probably some kind of _major asshole_. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
+But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, bluntly, can be kind of an asshole. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
Additionally, it was really obnoxious when people had tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, didn't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself wasn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
-Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with the November 2018–April 2019 thing (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an _enormous_ favor for _me_ and _my_ agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That's _absurd_. Had he no shame?
+Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with [the November 2018–April 2019 thing](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an enormous favor for me and my agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That was absurd. Had he no shame?
-I _did_, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
+I did, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
-When Scott expressed concern about the group-yelling behavior that [Ziz had described in a blog comment](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") and [Yudkowsky had described on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_"), I clarified that that thing was very different from what it was like to actually be friends with them. The everyone-yelling operation seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wield as a psychological weapon only against people who they think are operating in bad faith? In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 "Lenore" disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
+[TODO— straighten this out—
+
+Scott expressed concern about reports of
+
+ [Ziz had described in a blog comment](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") and [Yudkowsky had described on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_")
+
+ * I thought I recognized the behavior being described that thing was very different from what it was like to actually be friends with them.
+
+ * However, when I ran an earlier draft of this post by them, they pointed out that "arguing passionately" can be adversarially interpreted as "yelling" by someone who doesn't want to hear it
+
+The everyone-yelling operation seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wield as a psychological weapon only against people who they think are operating in bad faith?
+
+> Jessica called me transphobic scum; Michael said that I should have never been born, that I should be contemplating suicide, that I could barely begin to make up what I owe to Sasha if I gave her everything I own; Jack said that I'm only useful as an example of how bad other people should feel, if they knew what I knew. At midnight, I actually was on the edge of psychosis—there's this very distinct fear-of-Hell sensation—but because I had been there before and knew what was happening to me, and because I already knew not to take Michael literally, I was able to force myself to lie down and get some sleep and not immediately go crazy, although I did struggle for the next month. (I ended up taking a week off of my dayjob and got a Seroquel perscription from Kaiser.)
+
+]
+
+In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the Vassarites were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
Great, I said, I was happy to provide information to help hold people (including Michael as a particular instance of "people") accountable for the specific bad things that they're actually guilty of, rather than scapegoated as a Bad Man with mysterious witch powers.
-Scott supposed that he should also be investigating "Lenore", who he sarcastically remarked was liable to be yet another case of someone having a psychotic break just as she was getting close to the Vassarites, but that somehow there's no plausible connection between those two things.
-
I pointed out that that's exactly what one would expect if the Vassar/breakdown correlation was mostly a selection effect rather than causal—that is, if the causal graph was the fork "prone-to-psychosis ← underlying-bipolar-ish-condition → gets-along-with-Michael".
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](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633396201427984384)?
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