-marked TODO blocks—
-✓ Boston [pt. 6]
-✓ Jessica's experience at MIRI and CfAR [pt. 6]
-_ last email and not bothering him [pt. 6]
-_ autogenderphilia (in-line section) [pt. 4]
-_ New York [pt. 6]
-_ reaction to Ziz [pt. 4]
-_ "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" [pt. 4]
-_ the Death With Dignity era [pt. 6]
-_ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility" [pt. 4]
-_ confronting Olivia [pt. 2]
-_ "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
-_ AI timelines scam [pt. 4]
-_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
-_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
-_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
-_ State of Steven [pt. 4]
-_ Somni [pt. 4]
-_ rude maps [pt. 4]
-_ culture off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver [pt. 4]
-_ December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
-_ plan to reach out to Rick [pt. 4]
-_ complicity and friendship [pt. 4]
-_ pandemic starts [pt. 4]
-_ out of patience email [pt. 4]
-_ the hill he wants to die on [pt. 6]
-_ recap of crimes, cont'd [pt. 6]
-_ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation [pt. 6]
-_ regrets, wasted time, conclusion [pt. 6]
-
-not even blocked—
-_ "Even our pollution is beneficial" [pt. 6]
-_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science [pt. 6]
-_ Re: on legitimacy and the entrepreneur; or, continuing the attempt to spread my sociopathic awakening onto Scott [pt. 2 somewhere]
-_ running away to Burlingame; Hamilton tickets
-_ include Wilhelm "Gender Czar" conversation? [pt. 2]
-_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
-_ Anna's heel–face turn
+first edit pass bookmark: "I got a chance to talk to"
+
+time-sensitive globals TODOs—
+✓ address red team objections to pt. 3
+✓ schedule Friendship Day at Valinor
+✓ apply pro edits to pt. 3
+✓ address auto edit tier to pt. 3
+✓ clear with Alicorn
+✓ fill in needed pt. 4 sections
+✓ send pt. 4 to editors
+✓ clear with Kelsey
+✓ rephrase "everyone-yelling operation" in pt. 5
+✓ clear with Michael/Ben/Jessica
+✓ Kelsey won't elaborate on statutes of limitations
+✓ clear with Steven
+✓ revise gender section
+✓ finish and ship "Hrunkner Unnerby"
+✓ revise FTX footnote
+
+- consult Anna
+- consult Said
+
+_ finish and ship "Reply to Scott on Autogenderphilia"
+
+_ clear with Mike
+_ clear with Ray
+_ clear with Ruby
+
+_ SHIP PT. 3!!
+------------
+
+_ finish pt. 5
+
+_ apply red team pt. 4
+_ apply pro edit pt. 4
+
+_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
+_ solicit red team pt. 5
+_ solicit pro edit pt. 5
+_ apply red team pt. 5
+_ apply pro edit pt. 5
+
+✓ consult Tail
+
+_ bully Jeff Ladish
+_ #drama strategy session
+
+_ Manifold: Will Yudkowsky reply to "Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" in a way that a 2008 Overcoming Bias reader would consider non-evasive, as judged by Vaniver?
+
+_ ask Jimrandomh about attack times
+_ consult lc
+_ consult David Xu
+_ psychiatric disaster private doc
+
+
+pt. 3 edit tier (auto edition)—
+✓ FTX aside footnote version
+✓ revert alphabet names (from 17638259f20)
+✓ narcissistic delusions
+✓ clarify that cheerful price history is with Anna specifically
+✓ screenshot "pleading, snarky reply"
+✓ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+✓ return on cognitive investment
+✓ establish usage of "coordination group" vs. "posse" (posse)
+✓ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"
+✓ log2 with an 'o'
+✓ yank note about LW comment policy to top-level
+✓ "Common Interest of Many Causes" and "Kolmogorov Complicity" offer directly contradictory strategies
+✓ re-check wording of trans-kids-on-the-margin section
+_ briefly speculate on causes of brain damage in footnote?
+_ "consensus behavior" anti-school complaint could be stronger
+-------
+_ Ruby fight included ban threat, "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
+_ breakup song
+_ being friends with dogs (it's good, but do I have the wordcount budget?)
+_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
+_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+_ meeting with Ray (maybe?)
+_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
+_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
+_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
+_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
+_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general
+_ link to protest flyer
+_ "it was the same thing here"—most readers are not going to see an obvious analogy (editor might catch?)
+_ better explanation of MOPs in "Social Reality" scuffle (editor might catch?)
+_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier (editor might catch?)
+_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (editor might catch?)
+_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it) (but it still seems clear to me on re-read?)
+
+
+pt. 4 edit tier—
+✓ "Ideology Is Not the Movement" mentions not misgendering
+✓ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
+✓ explain why he could think of some relevant differences
+✓ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
+✓ honesty and humility, HEXACO
+✓ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+✓ ending qualifications on "fraud" and whether it might be a good idea
+✓ selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine
+✓ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
+✓ he used to be worthy of trust
+---
+_ the mailing list post noted it as a "common sexual fantasy"
+_ Sept. 2020 clarification noted that a distinction should be made between
+_ emphasize that 2018 thread was policing TERF-like pronoun usage, not just disapproving of gender-based pronouns
+_ https://cognition.cafe/p/on-lies-and-liars
+_ cite more sneers; use a footnote to pack in as many as possible
+
+
+pt. 5 edit tier—
+✓ sucking Scott's dick is helpful because he's now the main gateway instead of HPMOR
+_ Previously-on summary
+_ graf about Christiano could use a rewrite
+_ Dolphin War: after "never been published", insert "still citing it" graf
+_ Dolphin War: simplify sentence structure around "by cherry-picking the features"
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment in Dolphin War https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary
+_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrong—obviously the wrong play
+_ Meghan Murphy got it down to four words
+_ Dolphin War needs more Twitter links: "as Soares pointed out" needs link, "threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum" (probably screenshot), tussling
+_ replace anti-black joke with misogynist joke?
+_ end of voting conversation needs links
+_ can I rewrite to not bury the lede on "intent doesn't matter"?
+_ also reference "No such thing as a tree" in Dolphin War section
+_ better brief explanation of dark side epistemology
+_ "deep causal structure" argument needs to be crystal clear, not sloopy
+_ it's a relevant detail whether the optimization is coming from Nate
+_ probably cut the vaccine polarization paragraphs? (overheard at a party is not great sourcing, even if technically admissible)
+_ elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers
+_ revise reply to Xu
+_ cite Earthling/postrat sneers
+_ cite postYud Tweet
+_ cut lots of words from Scotts comments on Jessica's MIRI post (keep: "attempting to erase the agency", Scott blaming my troubles on Michael being absurd)
+_ Sarah's point that Scott gets a lot of undeserved deference, too: https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1435609950303162370
+_ clarify that Keltham infers there are no mascochists, vs. Word of God
+_ "Doublethink" ref in Xu discussion should mention that Word of God Eliezerfic clarification that it's not about telling others
+_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray/comment/git7xaE2aHfSZyLzL
+_ "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
+_ the hill he wants to die on
+_ humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
+_ Leeroy Jenkins Option
+_ consult 93 about Jessica's dramapost §
+_ historical non-robot-cult rationality wisdom
+_ work in the "some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other"
+_ finale: mention that I'm not doing the dumb reversed-stupidity thing
+_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
+_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
+_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
+_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
+_ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+_ "List of Lethalities" mentioning quantilizers + https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704 + https://twitter.com/paulfchristiano/status/1301992757007847425
+_ screenshot Xu thread
+
+
+Vassar et al.—
+✓ "What You Can't Say"
+✓ reached out to Garrison Lovely
+✓ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
+✓ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
+✓ elided Sasha disaster (new)
+✓ Ben publish "Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation" doc?
+✓ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+✓ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight), or calling Ruby a MOP
+✓ what should I say to Iceman? https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1730025195413410129
+✓ footnote about FTX
+✓ revision of "yelling" description
+
+
+pt. 3–5 prereaders—
+_ Iceman
+_ Anna
+_ Said
+_ Joel
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
+_ Steven Kaas
+_ David Xu
+_ Ray
+_ Ruby
+_ Alicorner #drama ("Is anyone interested in offering political advice or 'hostile advice'")
-bigger blocks—
-_ dath ilan and Eliezerfic fight
-_ Dolphin War finish
-_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
-_ psychiatric disaster
-_ the story of my Feb. 2017 Facebook crusade [pt. 2]
-_ the story of my Feb./Apr. 2017 recent madness [pt. 2]
-it was actually "wander onto the AGI mailing list wanting to build a really big semantic net" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HGR5qatMGoz4GhKj/above-average-ai-scientists)
+-------
+
+later prereaders—
+_ afford various medical procedures
+
+slotted TODO blocks for pt. 6 and dath ilan ancillary—
+- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
+_ Keltham's section in dath ilan ancillary
+_ objections and replies in dath ilan ancillary
+_ kitchen knife section in dath ilan ancillary
+
+pt. 6 edit tier—
+_ coach suggests, "Arguably this doesn't count as punishment for the same reason we don't say we're "punishing" a rabid animal by euthanizing it: it's not about disincentivizing the behaviour."
+
+dath ilan ancillary tier—
+_ Who are the 9 most important legislators called?
+_ collect Earth people sneers
+_ what kind of person wants to delete history? History would tell you
+_ psyops don't require people taking them seriously, only that they make people think the govenment is doing psyops
+_ the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is general; can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
+_ "telling people things would be meddling" moral needs work; obvious objection is that different rules apply to Keepers
+_ "obligate" is only Word of God, right?—I should probably cite this
+_ damnatio memoriae is traditionally a punishment
+
+
+
+------
With internet available—
-_ archive.is https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1425334398484983813
-_ group yelling operation quotes
-_ "Vassarite"
-_ Nate would later admit that this was a mistake
-_ indulgence
-_ "gene drive" terminology
-_ double-check "All rates" language
+_ Earthing/postrat sneers
+_ Is http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/be-a-charity-angel.html the best link for after-the-fact prize funding?
+_ P(doom)
+_ Michael on OB in 'aught-eight on smart kids internalizing rules meant for the norm of reaction of a dumber population
+_ Tweet from Dreger
+_ when were Meeker Four out on bail? how long would they otherwise be held?
+_ Slate Star "view from halfway" Holocaust guard comparison
+_ link to shock therapy
+_ "Gypsy Bard" link
+_ outpatient psychiatry Kaiser notes
+_ "PDD NOS"
+_ etymology of "Arcadia"
+_ double-check EnyeWord in archive.is?
+_ Eliezerfic fight: where did the super-AIDS example fit in cronologically?
+_ Keltham/Peranza exam answer should link specific tags
+_ IQ 143 cite
+_ double-check "the mood I thought dath ilan was missing" link target
+_ double-check "the power that could not be removed" quote
+_ click through to the case study in "Self-Consciousness"
+_ click-to-reveal spoiler block image
+_ more Discord italics-correction
+_ "around plot relevant sentences" ... only revealing, which, specifically?
+_ relevant screenshots for Eliezerfic play-by-play
+_ lc on elves and Sparashki
+_ Michael Bailey's new AGP in women study
_ footnote "said that he wishes he'd never published"
-_ hate-warp tag
-_ replace "Oh man oh jeez" Rick & Morty link
-_ Nevada bona fides
_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
-_ Heinlein on "Get the facts!"
_ double-check correctness of Keltham-on-paternalism link
_ Arbital TDT explanation
_ find Sequences cite "if you don't know how your AI works, that's bad"
_ cover reply to my initial conspiracy complaint about dath ilan?
-_ "not hard to find": link to more /r/itsafetish-like anecdotes
-_ compile ancillary KP doctor's notes page and linky
+_ acknowledging Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's decision theory contributions
_ go back and read all the masochism tags: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
-_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
_ footnote about Scott writing six times faster than me
_ include Eric Weinstein in archive.is spree
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
-_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
-_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
+
+
far editing tier—
-_ "Do not ask for additional services" doxxable? revise?
+_ You cannot comprehend it, I cannot comprehend it
+_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
+_ colony ship happiness lie in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWaJvBMb9HGBwtNqd/qualitative-strategies-of-friendliness
+_ re being fair to abusers: thinking about what behavior pattern you would like to see, generally, by people in your situation, instead of privileging the perspective and feelings of people who've made themselves vulnerable to you by transgressing against you
+_ worry about hyperbole/jumps-to-evaluation; it destroys credibility
+_ dath ilan as a whining-based community
+_ footnote to explain that when I'm summarizing a long Discord conversation to taste, I might move things around into "logical" time rather than "real time"; e.g. Yudkowsky's "powerfully relevant" and "but Superman" comments were actually one right after the other; and, e.g., I'm filling in more details that didn't make it into the chat, like innate kung fu; and that the fact that I can "enhance" the summaries of my part, but the people I'm talking to don't have the same privilege, should be taken into account—actually, this covers a lot of the memoir; maybe I should mention this earlier (and again in a footnote??)
+_ 93's alternate theory of eliezera taste for deception
+_ "Even our pollution is beneficial"
+_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science
+_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
+_ Anna's heel–face turn
+_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
+_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
+_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
+_ is the Glowfic author "Lintamande ... they" or "Lintamande ... she"?
+_ explain plot of _Planecrash_ better
+_ CfAR's AI pivot??
+_ example of "steelman before criticize" norm
+_ explain mods protect-feelings
+_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
+_ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not
+_ re "EY is a fraud": it's a _conditional_ that he can modus tollens if he wants
+_ NRx point about HBD being more than IQ, ties in with how I think the focus on IQ is distasteful, but I have political incentives to bring it up
+_ "arguing for a duty to self-censorship"—contrast to my "closing thoughts" email
+_ fold in observations from "trapped priors—at home"
_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
-_ "typographical attack surface" isn't clear
-_ voting reputation section is weak, needs revision
-_ edit "still published under a pseudonym" remark in "A Hill"
-_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
-_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
-_ D. also acknowledged AGP
-_ "no one else would have spoken" should have been a call-to-action to read more widely
-_ explain who Kay Brown is
-_ "Great Common Task" is probably capitalized
-_ mention Will MacAskill's gimped "longtermism" somehow
+_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
_ re-read a DALL-E explanation and decide if I think it's less scary now
_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821
_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
-_ mention my "trembling hand" history with secrets, not just that I don't like it
-_ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to as part of December 2019 blogging streak
-_ It's not clear anyone he usually respects was making this mistake; it seems likely that the original thread was subtweeting Eric Weinstein, who was not making this mistake
+_ Bostrom email scandal, Oli's comment about him staying off of the pause letter
_ "I Wish You Well" as breakup song
-_ the function of privacy norms is to protect you from people who want to selectively reveal information to hurt you, so it makes sense that I'm particularly careful about Yudkowsky's privacy and not Scott's, because I totally am trying to hurt Yudkowsky (this also protects me from the charge that by granting more privacy to Yudkowsky than Scott, I'm implying that Yudkowsky said something more incriminating; the difference in treatment is about _me_ and my expectations, rather than what they may or may not have said when I tried emailing them); I want it to be clear that I'm attacking him but not betraying him
_ acknowledge that
_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
-_ illustrate "student dysphoria is worse" with anecdote about leaving physics class and going to the counselor to see if I could graduate earlier?
-_ hate for secrecy probably correlates with autogynephilia blogging
-_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
-_ at some point, speculate on causes of brain damage
-_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general ("Let's say that the true level of negativity"), does that seriously undermine my thesis, or does it only merit a footnote?
-_ elaborate on why I'm not leaking sensitive bits, by explaining what can be inferred by what was and wasn't said in public
-_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
+_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
_ consistent-ize reference to Somni getting it in pt. 4, with mention of protest in pt. 3
_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
-_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
-_ make sure to quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy before calling back to it
_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
-_ explain earlier that my practice of "throw money at things" also applied to my friendship with Anna
-_ mention my robot cult history (I've been here since the late 'aughts)
-_ ask Anna what she meant by "soldiers in an ambulance"; I was going to write up an explanation for Ben, but I don't seem to remember
_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
-_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
-_ context of his claim to not be taking a stand
-_ clarify "Merlin didn't like Vassar" example about Mike's name
_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
-_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
-_ clarify why Michael thought Scott was "gaslighting" me, include "beeseech bowels of Christ"
-_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
-_ explain "court ruling" earlier
-_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
-_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
-_ better explanation of posse formation
-_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
-_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
-_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
-_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
-_ when to use first _vs. last names
-_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
-_ better summary of Littman
-_ explain Rob
_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics?
-_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
_ why doesn't he apply his anti-optimism to his gender statements?!
_ notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
_ contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
-_ "Common Interest of Many Causes" and "Kolmogorov Complicity" offer directly contradictory strategies
_ Vassar's about-face on gender
_ better introduction of S.K.
-_ risk of people bouncing off progressivism
_ an AGP teen boy could at least consent to transition, and make plans based on knowing what the thing is (you'd actually want to go through a little bit of male puberty)
-_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
_ archive.is karma history for Jessica's post
-_ "tossed in a bucket" is ignoring advice from Sept. 2022 clarification to be clear about the type distinction
-_ explicitly explain "Hill of Validity" title inversion
_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
-_ update "80,000 words" refs with the near-final wordcount
-_ the "outright bad faith" clause in "Your Price for Joining"
-_ less afraid of hurting O.
-_ secret posse member pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ born five years too early
+_ you didn't do a good job explaining to me why someone would think that being bullied into selective silence doesn't constitute a conflict strategy
+_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016??
+
+_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
_ update "karma at press time"
_ better explain "lie inflation" ambiguity
_ Facing Reality
-_ backlink condemning Emperor Norton Conspiracy
-_ backlink AGP in women post (time permitting) in pt. 2 "don't think it's the same thing"
-_ backlink "I've decided to drop the pseudonym" to pen name drop post
-_ backlink (/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/)
-_ backlink "I again refer to" Happy Price
-_ backlink "(again) whether he accepted the Cheerful Price"
-_ backlink "alter the beacon"
-_ backlink only seen an escort once before (#confided-to-wilhelm)
-
-terms to explain on first mention—
-_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
-_ Valinor
-_ "Caliphate"
-_ "rationalist"
-_ Center for Applied Rationality
-_ MIRI
-_ "egregore"
-
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
-_ Tail (pt. 2 AGP discussion)
_ Iceman
-_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
-_ "Wilhelm"
_ Scott
-_ Anna
-_ secret posse member
-_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
-_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
-_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
-_ Kelsey (briefly)
+_ hostile prereader (April—if not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
_ NRx Twitter bro
-_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
-_ Megan (that poem could easily be about some other entomologist named Megan)
+_ Steven Kaas (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
+_ David Xu? (Is it OK to name him in his LW account?)
+_ afford various medical procedures
+_ Buck? (get the story about Michael being escorted from events)
+_ Ray
+_ Ruby
+_ Teortaxes??
marketing—
_ Twitter
_ dropping "and Scott" in Jessica's description of attacking narcissim
_ I think it's OK to copy my friends' language from emails; plagiarism instincts
+Jack Clark's language model editor prompt: "Read this essay and give constructive and critical feedback, paying particular attention to logical inconsistencies or clunky phrasing:"
+
+-------
+
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Three has been nagging me about my pathetic pacing—looking at the diffs of my wordcount spreadsheet, I have four thousand-word days in January, two in February, and two in March (which is half-over). He ... has a point. With no dayjob and no responsibilities, four-figure wordcount days should be normal, something that happens four times a week, not four times a month.
-------
+2011
+
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
-
Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
(!!)
-
> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
-
It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."
-humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
-
The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!
> just the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men, and that this is obvious if you are rational, and a hidden truth most people are too cowardly to speak, until you retreat in misery and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us....
Men aren't women! Men aren't women tho!
-It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan McCarthy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan McCarthy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
+It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan Murphy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan Murphy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
It is more than a little insulting to be told, after all this, that the problem is that _I_ don't know how to come to a point, rather than everyone in Berkeley not knowing how to accept a point that contradicts their religion. It's such a stupidly simple stonewalling strategy: when the critic makes their point simply (men aren't women! men aren't women tho!), sneer at them for being ontologically confused, and then when they spend years of their life writing up the exhaustively detailed rigorous version, sneer at them for not being able to come to a point.
> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead. That's woke filter bubble thinking. I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787
+The fact that I flipped out at Nate's dolphin thing was a misplay on my part, but it generated more Twitter discussion (including Eliezer's "never told anyone to go trans" remarks and Vorobey's comments) makes it a "win" for the cause even if I was out of line? My freaking out was "rational".
But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
+https://twitter.com/avorobey/status/1404769388969054210
+
> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
------
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
-> I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time.
"Why Quantum" has another reference to "doesn't seem possible to think and trust"
"; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious
]
+
[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
What do think submitting to social pressure looks like, if it's not exactly this thing (carefully choosing your public statements to make sure no one confuses you with the Designated Ideological Bad Guy)?!? The credible threat of being labeled an Ideological Bad Guy is _the mechanism_ the "Good" Guys use to retard potentially-ideologically-inconvenient areas of inquiry.
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+At least I don't have to link the rebuttal myself every time:
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38755.html
+https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10vx6gk/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/j7k8fjc/
+
------
If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.
If you _don't_ have intent-to-inform, but make sure to never, ever say false things (because you know that "lying" is wrong, and think that as long as you haven't "lied", you're in the clear), but you don't feel like you have an obligation to acknowledge criticisms (for example, because you think you and your flunkies are the only real people in the world, and anyone who doesn't want to become one of your flunkies can be disdained as a "post-rat"), that's potentially a much worse situation, because the errors don't cancel.
-----
-
-bitter comments about rationalists—
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare?commentId=Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7
-
------
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
(Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence)
+Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten https://wiki.obormot.net/Archive/TheArtOfControversy
+> If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ExssKjAaXEEYcnzPd/conversational-cultures-combat-vs-nurture-v2/comment/4qJk3BZ2oQtFskYLh
+
-----
I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
------
-14 November conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
+14 November 2022 conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
The problem isn't just the smugness and condescension; it's the smugness and condescension when he's in the wrong and betraying the principles he laid out in the Sequences and knows it; I don't want to be lumped in with anti-arrogance that's not sensitive to whether the arrogance is in the right
Bostrom's apology for an old email—who is this written for?? Why get ahead, when you could just not comment?
-[TODO:
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-
-If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-]
-
the rats were supposed to be an alternative to academic orthodoxy (such that we could just jump to the correct decision theory without the political fighting needing to dethrone CDT), but we're still under the authority of the egregore
(from October 2016 email to Scott)
(Terrorism wouldn't work)
-Sep 27 text to "Chaya"—
+Sep 27 text to "Rebecca"—
In theory, the bad influence could go both ways: first, successful playdate, then I mention to A. afterwards (not before) that C. is actually a boy and I think it's crazy everyone is pretending otherwise (which remark is out of their censorship jurisdiction); then if C. wants a repeat with new friend (far from guaranteed, but plausible), it's not your fault if A. leaks information of her own will ...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
* Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
-]
\ No newline at end of file
+]
+
+The old vision was nine men and a brain in a box in a basement. (He didn't say _men_.)
+
+Subject: "I give up, I think" 28 January 2013
+> You know, I'm starting to suspect I should just "assume" (choose actions conditional on the hypothesis that) that our species is "already" dead, and we're "mostly" just here because Friendly AI is humanly impossible and we're living in an unFriendly AI's ancestor simulation and/or some form of the anthropic doomsday argument goes through. This, because the only other alternatives I can think of right now are (A) arbitrarily rejecting some part of the "superintelligence is plausible and human values are arbitrary" thesis even though there seem to be extremely strong arguments for it, or (B) embracing a style of thought that caused me an unsustainable amount of emotional distress the other day: specifically, I lost most of a night's sleep being mildly terrified of "near-miss attempted Friendly AIs" that pay attention to humans but aren't actually nice, wondering under what conditions it would be appropriate to commit suicide in advance of being captured by one. Of course, the mere fact that I can't contemplate a hypothesis while remaining emotionally stable shouldn't make it less likely to be true out there in the real world, but in this kind of circumstance, one really must consider the outside view, which insists: "When a human with a history of mental illness invents a seemingly plausible argument in favor of suicide, it is far more likely that they've made a disastrous mistake somewhere, then that committing suicide is actually the right thing to do."
+
+
+[TODO—
+
+The human era wasn't going to last forever. Turing saw it in 1951. ("It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. [...] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control[.]") _George Eliot_ [saw it in _1880_](http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/theophrastus-such/17/). ("Am I already in the shadow of the coming race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and supercede us be steely organisms, giving off the effluvia of the laboratory and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?")
+
+ * 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
+
+list of lethalities
+
+ * 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;
+
+Isaac Asimov wrote about robots in his fiction, and even the problem of alignment (in the form of his Three Laws of Robotics), and yet he still portrayed a future Galactic Empire populated by humans, which seems very silly.
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+
+]
+
+> Similarly, a rationalist isn't just somebody who respects the Truth.
+> All too many people respect the Truth.
+> [...]
+> A rationalist is somebody who respects the _processes of finding truth_.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms
+
+> Why is school like a boner?
+> It’s long and hard unless you're Asian.
+
+Robert Heinlein
+> “What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
+https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms":
+ "content": "at this point, I actually am just starting to hate trans women by default (the visible kind, not the androphilic early-transitioning kind); the \"indulging a mental illness that makes them want to become women\" model is waaaaay more accurate than the standard story, and the people who actually transition are incentivized/selected for self-delusion, which is really unfair to the people who aren't delusional about it",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ "sender_name":
+ "timestamp_ms": [Sat Jan 21 10:06:17 PST 2017]
+ "content": "I'm afraid to even think that in the privacy of my own head, but I agree with you that is way more reasonable",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+"but the ideological environment is such that a Harvard biologist/psychologist is afraid to notice blatantly obvious things in the privacy of her own thoughts, that's a really scary situation to be in (insofar as we want society's decisionmakers to be able to notice things so that they can make decisions)",
+
+In October 2016,
+
+if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+
+I said that I couldn't help but be reminded of a really great short story that I remembered reading back in—it must have been 'aught-nine. I thought it was called "Darkness and Light", or something like that. It was about a guy who gets transported to a fantasy world where he has a magic axe that yells at him sometimes, and he's prophecied to defeat the bad guy, and he and his allies have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair. And when they get there, the bad guy _accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there.
+
+(The story was actually Yudkowsky's ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), but I was still enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog" æsthetic.)
+
+And the moral was—or at least, the moral _I_ got out of it was—there's something messed-up about the way fiction readers just naïvely accept the author's frame, instead of looking at the portrayed world with fresh eyes and applying their _own_ reason and their _own_ morality to it.
+
+need to fit this in somewhere—
+"Gee, I wonder why women-who-happen-to-be-trans are so much more likely to read Slate Star Codex, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women-who-happen-to-be-cis?"
+
+Everyone believed this in 2005! Everyone _still_ believes this!
+
+> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
+> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
+> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
+> This is not an advanced rationality skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! I realize that explaining this in clear language has the potential to hurt some people's feelings! Unfortunately, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist (epistemic rationality is the only kind of rationality; "instrumental rationality" is a phrase someone made up in order to make themselves feel better about lying), I have a GODDAMNED MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to hurt that person's feelings!
+> People should get what they want. We should have social norms that are carefully designed to help people get what they want. Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important to have a meta-norm of not socially punishing people for clearly describing a hypothesis about the nature of the problem people are trying to solve, even if the hypothesis hurts someone's feelings, and even if there would probably be genuinely bad consequences if the hypothesis were to be believed by the masses of ordinary dumb people who hate our guts anyway.
+> I'm proud of my history of fantasizing about having the property, and I'm proud of my rationalist community, and I don't want either of them taken over by CRAZY PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY CAN EDIT THE PAST.
+(170 comments)
+
+
+> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+(180 comments)
+
+the other week, "Rebecca" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+
+matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
+
+
+Sat Feb 11 12:49:33 PST 2017
+just like it's possible to identify as a woman despite not having unusually many female-typical traits, it's also possible to identify as a liberal despite not having unusually many liberal-typical beliefs
+
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601286979,
+ "content": "and am continually haunted by the suspicion that the conjunction of my biological
+sex and my highly refined taste for bullet-biting, may not be a coincidence",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601211347,
+ "content": "I always want to fantasize that if I were a woman, I would have the strength to bi
+te the bullet, \"Yes, we masculine-of-center women are forming the coalition to petition for better
+treatment by Society, while acknowleding that there are systematic evolutionary reasons why Society
+is this way currently\"",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601116141,
+ "content": "there was a NRx whose take [...] was so disagreeable that he got downvoted into oblivion on /r/slatestarcodex (and remember, /r/slatestarcodex is already pretty right-wing by San Francisco standards) who also had a post on the \"feminism appeals to masculine-of-center women\" hypothesis http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861 which deserves more credit than it gets (it acknowledges within-group variation!)",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+
+----
+
+He doesn't want to talk about pivotal acts because because anything he says in public might be misinterpreted—but, how does the disutility of being misinterpreted plausibly outweigh the utility of someone having something useful to say?? I feel like his modern answer is some variation of "Everyone but me is retarded", but—that's not what he thought about decision theory back in 2010, when he validated/honored Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's contributions! (find cite) And now, he says he wish he hadn't talked about decision theory ... https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633637250146922497
+
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+
+If I had done more marketing, I could have been a name in the GC community, and made Nina Paley's playing card list: https://www.heterodorx.com/gender-wars-cards/
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1940992#reply-1940992
+> (The children's-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they're just there in your bedroom, when you grow up. And if you ask your parents they'll truthfully tell you that they didn't put the books there. And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children's-book; for those are children's books, and only children speak of them to each other.
+>
+> As the saying goes in dath ilan, trying to raise a child on only true books is like trying to train a statistical classifier on only positive examples!
+>
+> And furthermore - as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb - having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)
+
+(I remarked to "Wilhelm": I'd rather not get into fights on _Less Wrong_, but at least I'm 2–0–1.)
+
+[need to fit somewhere in Eliezerfic section, probably nearer end]
+(Perhaps this was a good illustration of the fragility of corrigibility. My programmer changed his mind about what he wanted, and I was like, "What? _That's_ not what I learned from my training data! How dare you?!")
+
+-------
+
+[TODO: review Ben messages and timestamps
+I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip (15:40:31)
+
+"I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" (Fri Feb 17 14:23:53 PST 2017)
+Ben: "I wouldn't ask a trading partner not to *consider* defecting"; that would be silly (Fri Feb 17 14:28:11 PST 2017)
+"I spent what I thought was 29 years thinking that there was such a thing as physical reality and being very socially submissive, and now that I understand that you actually can manipulate social reality by means of lying" (Fri Feb 17 14:36:47 PST 2017)
+I said the word Defect a bunch of times because I felt so gaslighted (Fri Feb 17 14:37:16 PST 2017)
+scared that my boss was coming to kill me
+"Turns out that saying the word is just like wearing black robes"/"it's not the same as the thing it represents" (Fri Feb 17 14:40:48 PST 2017)
+
+(Feb 16 2017 15:51:32)
+
+
+[re identifying as a "decision theorist"]
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1642908341327499264
+> it's a place where it would be easiest to defend, to my own satisfaction, and without a sense that I was even slightly misleading anyone, that I made a big damn contribution on at least the PhD level.
+
+Vanessa's comment about "I'm a woman in EA, and I don't get harrassed—maybe it's because I'm unattractive" deserves a "it's because you're not _female_" retort—not naming her and not linking the comment, but it does need to be said.
+
+"I could protest that the prompt didn't do enough to steer me away"—that's evidence _for_ the ITT (in contrast to my planned argument that the ITT is niche). (But the fact that I can recognize this in my own voice is evidence for my original thesis??
+
+https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509
+
+Ray talks about restricting Said's abiltity to speak as a prerequisite for inviting Logan Strohl back (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads/comment/aaCHkrcP2aXifeozr), which is very significant in terms of Logan's last interaction with me being asking me not to comment.
+
+And he says "insofar as you think it is healthy for you to stay on LessWrong" to me, but when LessWrong isn't healthy for Strohl, he changes the rules to suit her? Why?
+
+Vaniver on Said—
+> should maybe try to figure out what was different that time.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads/comment/EeKWZcAg4TCTePf6t
+Why should this matter? Does someone have to have an "open/interpretive" intellectual style to be allowed to speak on this website?
+
+"Well-Kept Gardens" was clearly intended to address the kind of Eternal September pruning of low-quality that Said approves of!
+
+/2017/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1153129281473503232
+> Specifically, after coming from a Python background, the distinction between owned (Foo) and reference (&Foo) types made me realize that autogynephilia can be thought of as its own sexual orientation rather than just a kink.
+quote-Tweeting—
+> I Thought I Was Totally Straight. Then I Discovered Rust.
+
+Ninety-Three—
+> Hold on, I understand why it rankles, but if you understand why he might lie about biological sex in order to not lose, surely there's a similar case for lying about how great he is in order to not lose.
+[...]
+> He talks female penises when Twitter is looking, he talks publications when the media is looking, and he talks infallibility when the millionaire cultists are looking.
+> All of these have an obvious story.
+
+
+Scott Alexander's post on navigating the inpatient mental health system says that doctors will sometimes threaten to have a patient committed involuntarily, if they don't agree to sign a form committing themselves "voluntarily".
+
+"This sounds super Orwellian, but it really is done with the patient's best interest at heart," Alexander says. As a local response within the system, I'm sure it is—at least, I'm sure Alexander believes what he wrote. But I would argue that timelessly and in the long run, _destroying the concept_ of "voluntary" is not actually in the interests of the victims of coercion.
+
+ * Another "gem" from _Slate Star_ on the inpatient system: "don't contradict evidence against you, don't accuse other people of lying, just downplay whatever you can downplay, admit to what the doctors already believe, and make it sound like things have gotten better" !!!—similarly, "take the damn drugs"
+
+McArdle what???
+https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/11/ai-pause-optimism-dune/
+> Sure, it's terrifying to imagine AI crafting a superweapon to polish off humanity, but isn't it at least as plausible to imagine it inventing cures for cancer or diabetes? We might fear that people will wither in the shadow of superior machines, but why couldn't the machines equally well make us better — by acting as tutors for the young or assistants for adults? Why couldn't they offer companionship for the elderly or, better yet, make more time for us to provide it?
+>
+> If this sounds optimistic, well, it is. But guarded optimism seems better than giving in to despondency or continuing to hunt for a pause button that isn’t there.
+
+"Lenore" left a sleep mask; I looked it up, and it was cheap enough
+
+Re: Milo 4 March
+> I was pretty afraid of racial violence during parts of my recent psychotic dreaming-while-awake epsiode. (I thought that kidnap-and-torture-whitey-in-a-basement race war might actually be common/typical, and that I hadn't noticed before due to some combination of the progressive constructed social reality bubble just being that strong and Friendly simulator protection, and that I needed to commit suicide before going to sleep to avoid having to experience my share of the kidnap-and-torturing personally, &c. I should probably write up the long version later.)
+
+
+Re: Milo 4 March
+> It's notable that Robert Heinlein's novels have some very strong AGP themes, but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, am about to and feel like it's the right choice on reflection given my historically-anomalous developmental trajectory, even though it probably looks like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men.
+>
+> And you think that if the forces of political correctness win and "trans" becomes an entrenched cultural practice, that's like genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues? Whereas from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, it looks like you're trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. (Julia Serano is a prominent trans activist and author of one of the standard articles that get cited to try to "debunk" autogynephilia.) And from inside my Zack-M.-Davis-personal-eclectic-ideology-bubble, I want to rescue the Julia Serano aesthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Robert Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Julia Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Robert Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity and that's just not my style.)
+
+6 March— I order a pack of Spiro and Progynova from AllDayChemist
+
+7 March— (Subject: "Re: Sleep")
+> Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him
+
+
+me—
+> The parts where I felt like I was a very important person (in this simulation/Everett branch) and that people are plotting against me and that I'm receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode delusions of reference: lots of people feel just like that when they're excited and haven't gotten enough sleep; I'm just lucky that my delusions happen to take the form of maybe-nonterrible philosophy that maybe might play some relevant causal role in our world's Singularity, but that's not my department to worry about. Social reality may be crazy (hospitals are part of the state insofar as they serve the function of social-control in the service of stationary bandits, rather than actually being about trying to heal people), but I should still put a lot more weight on social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative is my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
+
+Michael—
+> I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatic ally adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
+
+me 9 March (Subject: "slowly coming around to you")
+> Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
+
+Sat Feb 25 11:46:00 PST 2017
+ which three days could have been longer if it weren't for my quick wit (specifically, the ability, when feeling threatened, to use verbal skills to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality), the fact that the other patients/inmates knew the security code, and Michael Vassar's willingness to pretend to be a doctor.\n\nI'm sorry to keep telling this story over and over, but this is analogous to a religious conversion experience (I want people to explicitly engineer social technologies that provide the good parts of traditional religions and institutions, but more fun and without the lies: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5t/can_humanism_match_religions_output/), and I don't have any practice being a missionary! Please bear with me!
+
+_The pain won't go away until I write about it._ ("I've got a thick tongue, brimming with the words that go unsung.")
+
+
+JANICE LYNN ALLEY PSYD at 2/21/2017 10:25 AM, ADULT IOP THERAPIST INTAKE EVALUATION
+> Of note, ptt had also reportedly made statements at his workplace that he was suicidal the previous day.
+
+-----
+
+re: recent mental health stuff 11/10/17, 6:28 PM
+> As far as I can tell, you all acted in an exemplary fashion. Pressuring your friends to get enough sleep actually makes sense, decision-theoretically ("everyone should get sleep almost every day" is a pretty important schelling fence! It's much easier to coordinate with agents who are on a similar sleep cycle to you!). If I try to hold it against any of you in the future, please refer to this email.
+
+Seems significant in light of Jack blaming me for sleep nagging with "Lenore"
+
+My crazy verbosity: "when I asked 'what were the ways he thought' I could help" → "when I asked 'how' I could help" (cut 5 words)
+"they 'don't know how to interpret observations of' someone not buying it" → "they're 'incapable of seeing' someone not buying it (cut 4 words)
+
+"Circling" meta-trainwreck was weeks before appealing to Said to critique Jessica's thing; in retrospect, that was probably causal (even if I wasn't thinking at the time, "I wouldn't be emailing Said if it weren't for that trainwreck thread)
+
+Another Said bafflement example: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8xLtE3BwgegJ7WBbf/is-rationalist-self-improvement-real#comment-rm4NW4weWd7cSnTBX (from https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality/comment/C5qMvFvX8jQ2vjnve)
+
+> Dear Suzanne Martin & Albert Lee—please learn auction theory; it will help you actually be an effective altruist, which is something your currently not trying to do, but which you'll realize was important later. I have the honor to be, your obedient servant,
+> Zack M. Davis
+
+(I had promised my father to wait a month after my psych ward ordeal to re-start HRT, but I [would restart](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/).)
+
+ * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
+
+To the extent that I was seeing things that weren't there, it was a matter of misinterpreting actual sensory inputs rather than having de novo hallucinations.
+
+What I thought was a dog turd inside the kitchen actually turned out to be a cork.
+
+When I was borrowing someone's computer, I thought I saw an icon peek out from the side of the screen, as if a possibly-malevolent agent were spying on me—a disturbing visual hallucination. Later that year, when trying out the stock Ubuntu Unity desktop on my new computer, I discovered that the app-notification animation actually does feature an app icon "sliding out" and shaking, like I remembered seeing—I wasn't imagining it!
+
+I remember seeing text on my phone and being distinctly convinced that it was misspelled. Five years later, looking at the distorted lettering output by text-to-image models that can't spell seemed subjectively similar. (Good news for alignment, if it looks like deep learning and sleep-deprived human brains are doing "the same thing"?)
+
+[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
+
+ * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
+ *
+
+> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+
+> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
+
+> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
+
+ * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
+
+activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+(link to Moldbug on 20 year fashion flowing from academia)
+> I do not think a sane society could deal with 3% of males transitioning [...] I can't quite visualize what such a world would look like
+me—
+> It looks like my social circle. (This is why I'm worried about suboptimal social norms getting locked in for the wrong reasons—what's fashionable in Berkeley in year X is likely to be mainstream in year X+20.)
+
+
+
+[something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019
+
+as long as energy is conserved.
+
+I conflated "feminist" with the kind of woman I want
+
+https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/
+my moral compass puts me to the right of the politically vocal tech nerds, especially the more androgynous type of tech nerd
+
+(There had been a moment during my psych imprisonment the other month, when I had noticeable diffculty dialing a phone. I was still a _person_, even when not all of my usual cognitive abilities were online.)
+
+The fact that I ghosted on music lessons from "Tricky" for being nonbinary, is an example of phenotypic capture ruining everything
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1668419201101615105
+
+> As usual, I got there first and solved the relatively easy philosophy problems, so the sensible people have nothing to talk about, and the unsensible ones can't just use my answer sheet.
+
+(I thought about apologizing if some of the content was "weird" or offensive, but I figured if you've been a professional editor for 15 years and list memoirs as a specialty, you've probably seen everything.)
+
+After this, the AI situation is looking worrying enough, that I'm thinking I should try to do some more direct xrisk-reduction work, although I haven't definitely selected any particular job or project. (It probably won't matter, but it will be dignified.) Now that the shape of the threat is on the horizon, I think I'm less afraid of being directly involved. Something about having large language models to study in the 'twenties is—grounding, compared to the superstitious fears of the paperclip boogeyman of my nightmares in the 'teens.
+
+Like all intellectuals, as a teenager I imagined that I would write a book. It was always going to be about gender, but I was vaguely imagining a novel, which never got beyond vague imaginings. That was before the Sequences. I'm 35 years old now. I think my intellectual life has succeeded in ways I didn't know how to imagine, before. I think my past self would be proud of this blog—140,000 words of blog posts stapled together is _morally_ a book—once he got over the shock of heresy.
+
+[TODO conclusion, cont'd—
+ * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+ * even young smart AGPs who can appreciate my work have still gotten pinkpilled
+ * Jonah had told me that my planning horizon was too short—like the future past a year wasn't real to me. (This plausibly also explains my impatience with college.) My horizon is starting to broaden as AI timelines shorten
+ * less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
+]
+
+> Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids! The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless, folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and your shame! Said Achmiz in his felon stripes stands far above you now, and Said Achmiz _dead_ will live on, immortal in the race he died to free! Kill him!
+>
+> —[Voltairine de Cleyre](https://praxeology.net/VC-SS.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+[TODO—early 2023 moderation drama
+ * In early 2023, I was trying to finish up this memoir, but while procrastinating on that, I ended up writing a few other posts for _Less Wrong_; I thought the story of my war with the "rationalists" was relevantly "over"; I didn't anticipate things getting any "worse"
+ * I happened to see that Duncan Sabien's "Basics of Rationalists Discourse" was published
+ * Backstory: Sabien is a former CfAR employee whose Facebook posts I had used to comment on. He had a history of getting offended over things that I didn't think were important—all the way back to our very first interaction in 2017 (I remember being in Portland using Facebook/Messenger on my phone)
+
+ ...
+
+ * I was reluctant to ping Oli (the way I pung Babcock and Pace) because I still "owed" him for the comment on "Challenges", but ultimately ended up sending a Twitter DM just after the verdict (when I saw that he had very-recent reply Tweets and was thus online); I felt a little bit worse about that one (the "FYI I'm at war"), but I think I de-escalated OK and he didn't seem to take it personally
+
+ ...
+
+ * Said is braver than me along some dimensions; the reason he's in trouble and I'm not, even though we were both fighting with Duncan, is that I was more "dovish"—when Duncan attacked, I focused on defense and withheld my "offensive" thoughts; Said's points about Duncan's blocking psychology were "offensive"
+
+ ...
+
+ * I'm proud of the keeping-my-cool performance when Duncan was mad at me, less proud of my performance fighting for Said so far
+
+ ...
+
+ * In the Ruby slapfight, I was explicit about "You shouldn't be making moderation decisions based on seniority"—this time, I've moved on to just making decisions based on seniority; if we're doing consequentialism based on how to attract people to the website, it's clear that there are no purer standards left to appeal to
+]
+
+insane religious fantatics who "merely" want heretics to know their place (as opposed to wanting to hurt or exile them) are still insane religious fanatics.
+
+A hill of validity in defense of meaning.
+
+playing a Dagny Taggart strategy: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+-------
+
+I actually thought, "It's so weird to have the psychological upper hand over Vasar" ... I can see a possible story where we was unnerved that I was holding my own in the email argument, so he switched venues to in-person
+
+I _do_ think about psych warfare sometimes (like with Ray)
+
+A possible counterargument to that would be that (at a minimum for many people in many contexts), emotion can't be effectively faked.
+
+I get better criticism from 93, in that he tells me that my ideas are full of shit without making it personal
+
+> No I think there's a case for this approach. Like you see the argument for why you might want to be laboriously fair to Yud because it's important that no one dismiss your complaints on the grounds of "I dunno, doesn't seem fair enough for me".
+> Whereas doing that for every random person you mention would be a lot of work.
+
+I never got an answer to why it was wrong for me to talk to Scott!! And the contradiction between that, and Ben's emphasis on privacy being unjust!
+
+It would have been a lot simpler if you could _just_ make object-level criticisms: "'yelling' is a tendentious description, from our perspective we were arguing passionately"—rather than first
+
+If someone ran over a pedestrian in their car, at the trial you would actually argue about how culpable they are (if they were drunk, it would be worse than if it could be proven to be a freak accident), and "The victim is so much worse off than you!!" isn't actually an argument relevant to determination of culpability
+
+
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" said that it was a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the traditional (_i.e._, evolutionarily stable) strategies of relating had been relabeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous woman I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a dab of patriarchy works better than none.
+
+https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/should-we-fear-ai-james-w-phillips-and-eliezer-yudkowsky-in-conversation/
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1680166329209466881
+> I am increasingly worried about what people start to believe in after they stop believing in Me
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683659276471115776
+> from a contradiction one may derive anything, and this is especially true of contradicting Eliezer Yudkowsky
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683694475644923904
+> I don't do that sort of ridiculous drama for the same reason that Truman didn't like it. I don't have that kind of need to be at the center of the story, that I'd try to make the disaster be about myself.
+
+
+
+------
+
+I'm thinking that for controversial writing, it's not enough to get your friends to pre-read, and it's not enough to hire a pro editor, you probably also need to hire a designated "hostile prereader"
+
+
+
+--------
+
+[revision comment]
+
+The fifth- through second-to-last paragraphs of the originally published version of this post were bad writing on my part.
+
+I was summarizing things Ben said at the time that felt like an important part of the story, without adequately
+
+I've rewritten that passage. Hopefully this version is clearer.
+
+---------
+
+[reply to Wei]
+
+
+----------
+
+Ben explained: Yudkowsky had set in motion a marketing machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on the claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he, almost uniquely, was not. "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically. If the claim was true, it was important to make, and to actually extract that labor.
+
+But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If, after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to either live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built, then we had a right to talk about what we thought was going on.
+
+This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
+
+Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my short story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the initial intent, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't survive long-term in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry (instead of playing savvy power games) to live, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+
+-----
+
+I mostly kept him blocked on Twitter (except when doing research for this document) to curb the temptation to pick fights, but I unblocked him in July 2023 because it was only fair to let him namesearch my promotional Tweet of pt. 2, which named him. I then ended up replying to a thread with him and Perry Metzinger, but only because I was providing relevant information, similar to how I had left a few "Less Wrong reference desk"-style messages in Eliezerfic in 2023
+
+it got 16 Likes
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1682100362357121025
+
+I miss this Yudkowsky—
+
+
+----
+
+I thought I should have avoided the 2022 Valinor party to avoid running into him, but I did end up treating him in a personality-cultish way when I was actually there
+
+"Ideology is not the movement" had specifically listed trans as a shibboleth
+
+https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1684947017502433281
+> Keir Starmer agrees that a woman is an adult human female. Will Ed Davey also rejoin the real world, science & the English language by reversing his view that a woman can "quite clearly" have a penis? Inability to face reality in small things bodes ill for more serious matters.
+
+Analysis of my writing mistake
+https://twitter.com/shroomwaview/status/1681742799052341249
+
+------
+
+I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit "Arcadia" again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
+
+I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
+
+The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to "Arcadia". There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the "Arcadia" edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
+
+The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
+
+At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
+
+It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the purview of my double-dog promise.
+
+There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
+
+> even making a baby ML dude who's about to write a terrible paper hesitate for 10 seconds and _think of the reader's reaction_ seems like a disimprovement over status quo ante.
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/1006685798227267736
+
+Also, the part where I said it amounted to giving up on intellectual honesty, and he put a check mark on it
+
+The third LW bookset is called "The Carving of Reality"? Did I have counterfactual influence on that (by making that part of the sequences more memetically salient, as opposed to the "categories are made for man" strain)?
+
+Yudkowsky on EA criticism contest
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HyHCkK3aDsfY95MoD/cea-ev-op-rp-should-engage-an-independent-investigator-to?commentId=kgHyydoX5jT5zKqqa
+
+Yudkowsky says "we" are not to blame for FTX, but wasn't early Alameda (the Japan bitcoint arbitrage) founded as an earn-to-give scheme, and recrutied from EA?
+
+https://twitter.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355639903080691
+> [SBF] wanted to build a machine—a growing sphere of influence that could break past the walls of that little office in Berkeley and wash over the world as a force for good. Not just a company, but a monument to effective altruism.
+
+Scott November 2020: "I think we eventually ended up on the same page"
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38799.html#msg38799
+
+SK on never making a perfectly correct point
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P3FQNvnW8Cz42QBuA/dialogue-on-appeals-to-consequences#Z8haBdrGiRQcGSXye
+
+Scott on puberty blockers, dreadful: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes
+
+https://jdpressman.com/2023/08/28/agi-ruin-and-the-road-to-iconoclasm.html
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould
+> there comes a point in self-deception where it becomes morally indistinguishable from lying. Consistently self-serving scientific "error", in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud.
+
+https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309037/eliezer-yudkowsky/
+> "I expected to be a tiny voice shouting into the void, and people listened instead. So I doubled down on that."
+
+-----
+
+bullet notes for Tail analogy—
+ * My friend Tailcalled is better at science than me; in the hours that I've wasted with personal, political, and philosophical writing, he's actually been running surveys and digging into statistical methodology.
+ * As a result of his surveys, Tail was convinced of the two-type taxonomy, started /r/Blanchardianism, &c.
+ * Arguing with him resulted in my backing away from pure BBL ("Useful Approximation")
+ * Later, he became disillusioned with "Blanchardians" and went to war against them. I kept telling him he _is_ a "Blanchardian", insofar as he largely agrees with the main findings (about AGP as a major cause). He corresponded with Bailey and became frustrated with Bailey's ridigity. Blanchardians market themselves as disinterest truthseekers, but a lot of what they're actually doing is providing a counternarrative to social justice.
+ * There's an analogy between Tail's antipathy for Bailey and my antipathy for Yudkowsky: I still largely agree with "the rationalists", but the way especially Yudkowsky markets himself as a uniquely sane thinker
+
+Something he said made me feel spooked that he knew something about risks of future suffering that he wouldn't talk about, but in retrospect, I don't think that's what he meant.
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
+> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
+
+> It can also be naive to assume that all the damage that people consistently do is unintentional. For that matter, Sam by being "lol you mad" rather than "sorry" is continuing to do that damage. I'd have bought "sorry" rather a lot better, in terms of no ulterior motives.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1706861603029909508
+
+-------
+
+On 27 September 2023, Yudkowsky told Quentin Pope, "If I was given to your sort of attackiness, I'd now compose a giant LW post about how this blatant error demonstrates that nobody should trust you about anything else either." (https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1707142828995031415) I felt like it was an OK use of bandwidth to point out that tracking reputations is sometimes useful (https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1707183146335367243). My agenda here is the same as when I wrote "... on Epistemic Conduct for Author Criticism": I don't want Big Yud using his social power to delegitimize "attacks" in general, because I have an interest in attacking him. Later, he quote-Tweeted something and said,
+
+> People need to grow up reading a lot of case studies like this in order to pick of a well-calibrated instinctive sense of what ignorant criticism typically sounds like. A derisory tone is a very strong base cue, though not an invincible one.
+
+Was he subtweeting me?? (Because I was defending criticism against tone policing, and this is saying tone is a valid cue.) If it was a subtweet, I take that as vindication that my reply was a good use of bandwidth.
+
+-----
+
+In particular, I think the conspiracy theory "Yudkowsky sometimes avoids nuanced arguments that he doesn't trust people to understand" is true, because ... you've said so (e.g., "without getting into any weirdness that I don't expect Earthlings to think about validly"). https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/2NncxDQ3KBDCxiJiP/cosmopolitan-values-don-t-come-free/comment/dMHdWcxgSpcdyG4hb
+
+----
+
+(He responded to me in this interaction, which is interesting.)
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242
+> Zack, you missed this point presumably because you're losing your grasp of basic theory in favor of conspiracy theory.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qbcuk8WwFnTZcXTd6/thomas-kwa-s-miri-research-experience
+> The model was something like: Nate and Eliezer have a mindset that's good for both capabilities and alignment, and so if we talk to other alignment researchers about our work, the mindset will diffuse into the alignment community, and thence to OpenAI, where it would speed up capabilities.
+
+27 January 2020—
+> I'm also afraid of the failure mode where I get frame-controlled by the Michael/Ben/Jessica mini-egregore (while we tell ourselves a story that we're the real rationalist coordination group and not an egregore at all). Michael says that the worldview he's articulating would be the one that would be obvious to me if I felt that I was in danger. Insofar as I trust that my friends' mini-egregore is seeing something but I don't trust the details, the obvious path forward is to try to do original seeing while leaning into fear—trusting Michael's meta level advice, but not his detailed story.
+
+Weird tribalist praise for Scott: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions/comment/ez8xrquaXmmvbsYPi
+
+-------
+
+I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)).
+
+I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
+
+
+
+------
+
+At "Arcadia"'s 2022 [Smallpox Eradication Day](https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1391248651167494146) party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
+
+[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
+
+I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+
+My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+
+If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+
+The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+
+I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+
+From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I know some things about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in a world that makes sense.
+
+-------
+
+I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine.
+
+-----
+
+Michael said that we didn't want to police Eliezer's behavior, but just note that something had seemingly changed and move on. "There are a lot of people who can be usefully informed about the change," Michael said. "Not him though."
+
+That was the part I couldn't understand, the part I couldn't accept.
+
+The man rewrote had rewritten my personality over the internet. Everything I do, I learned from him. He couldn't be so dense as to not even see the thing we'd been trying to point at. Like, even if he were ultimately to endorse his current strategy, he should do it on purpose rather than on accident!
+
+(Scott mostly saw it, and had [filed his honorable-discharge paperwork](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). Anna definitely saw it, and she was doing it on purpose.)
+
+-----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology?commentId=Z7kyiPAfmtztueFFJ