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@@ -1,44 +1,186 @@
-waypointsâ
-â Jessica help with "Unnatural Categories"
-â wireheading his fiction subreddit
-â discrediting to the community
-- let's recap
-- people-I-usually-respect footnote
-- Yudkowsky is trying to be a religious leader
+first edit pass bookmark: "I got a chance to talk to"
+
+pt. 3 edit tierâ
+_ footnote on the bad-faith condition on "My Price for Joining"
+_ "it might matter timelessly" â there are people with AI chops who are PC (/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/)
+_ confusing people and ourselves about what the exact crime is
+_ footnote explaining quibbles on clarification
+_ FTX validated Ben's view of EA!! ("systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done")
+_ "your failure to model social reality is believing people when they claim noble motives"
+_ hint at Vanessa being trans
+_ quote Jack on timelines anxiety
+_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
+_ 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?âand conditional on my separate retro emailâalso the Zolpidem thing
+_ link to protest flyer
+_ "it was the same thing here"âmost readers are not going to understand what I see as the obvious analogy
+_ better explanation of MOPs in "Social Reality" scuffle
+_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier
+_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
+_ establish usage of "coordination group" vs. "posse"?
+_ LessWrong vs. GreaterWrong for comment links?
+_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (if people want to read them, they can click through ... but on review, these descriptions seem pretty reasonable?)
+_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it) (but it still seems clear to me on re-read?)
+_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+_ meeting with Ray (maybe?)
+_ friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment (maybe a footnote in the § explaining the background to "Unnatural Categories")
+_ Ruby fight: "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
+_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
+_ 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?
+_ quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
+_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
+_ 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
+
+pt. 4 edit tierâ
+_ body odors comment
+_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
+_ if he wanted to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences (I should explain)
+_ emphasize that 2018 thread was policing TERF-like pronoun usage, not just disapproving of gender-based pronouns
+_ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
+_ to-be-continued ending about how being a fraud might be a good idea
+_ selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine
+_ cite more sneers; use a footnote to pack in as many as possible
+_ Litany Against Gurus, not sure humans can think and trust at the same time; High Status and Stupidity
+_ when EY put a checkmark on my Discord message characterizing his strategy as giving up on intellectual honesty
+_ honesty and humility, HEXACO
+_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
+_ "Common Interest of Many Causes" and "Kolmogorov Complicity" offer directly contradictory strategies
+_ "tossed in a bucket" is ignoring advice from Sept. 2022 clarification to be clear about the type distinction
+
+pt. 5 edit tierâ
+_ 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"
+_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrongâobviously 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
+_ 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
+_ 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?
+
+
+things to discuss with Michael/Ben/Jessicaâ
+_ Anna on Paul Graham
+_ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+_ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight this)
+_ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
+_ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
+_ elided Sasha disaster (new)
+
+pt. 3â5 prereadersâ
+_ Iceman
+_ Scott? (cursory notification)
+_ 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'")
+
+
+-------
+
+later prereadersâ
+_ afford various medical procedures
+
+slotted TODO blocks for pt. 6 and dath ilan ancillaryâ
+- 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 tierâ
+_ 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."
-sectionsâ
-- existential risk interlude; social justice game theory; I could forgive him
-- September 2020 Category War victory
-- prelude to pronouns post
+dath ilan ancillary tierâ
+_ 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?âI should probably cite this
-dedicated day each?â
-_ the dolphin war
-_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
-_ Sasha disaster
+------
With internet availableâ
-_ record of Yudkowsky citing TDT as part of decision to prosecute Emerson?
-_ university library sells borrowing privileges
+_ 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"
+_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
+_ 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?
+_ 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
+_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
+_ footnote about Scott writing six times faster than me
+_ include Eric Weinstein in archive.is spree
+_ link to Kay Brown's summary of the "Social Desirability Response Set" paper, and footnote paper link and my brief methodology explanation
+_ something to support Metz being a pro for decades
+_ "not taking into account considerations" â rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
_ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn
-_ Eddie Izzard
_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance (MIRI dialogues, knew how to say anything at all)
-_ rational-ist/physics-ist analogy (and link to Yudkowsky Tweet where I think I got this from)
-_ "linking to K-complicity in my replies", link the specific reply
-_ Wentworth on mutual information being on the right track?
-_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
-_ "not taking into account considerations" â rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
-_ except when it's net bad to have concluded Y: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/[Error%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server]/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
-_ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
-_ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning Children
-_ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
_ that neuroscience paper backing the two-types
-_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
-_ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
@@ -46,79 +188,86 @@ _ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
far editing tierâ
+_ 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 accountâactually, 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" brandâeven visible in MIRI dialogues
+_ Anna's heelâface 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"âcontrast to my "closing thoughts" email
+_ fold in observations from "trapped priorsâat home"
+_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
+_ 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"
+_ 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?
-_ as an author and a critic, I expect to lose status when my critics make good points, and expect to gain status when my criticism makes good points; communism analogy: you wouldn't expect credibly helpful work to be unpaid; and I have to make this kind of analysis even he didn't _say_ "I'm a communist"
-_ 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?
-_ worth footnoting the "some sort of communist" joke?
-_ 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?
-_ clarify sequence of outreach attempts
-_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
-_ 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?
+_ 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
+_ Vassar's about-face on gender
+_ better introduction of S.K.
+_ 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)
+_ archive.is karma history for Jessica's post
+_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
+_ 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??
-
-terms to explain on first mentionâ
-_ "Caliphate"
-_ "rationalist"
-_ Center for Applied Rationality
-_ MIRI
-_ "egregore"
-
+_ 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
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objectionâ
_ Iceman
-_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
_ Scott
-_ Anna
-_ secret posse member
-_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
-_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
-_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader (Swimmer?)
-_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
-_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
+_ hostile prereader (Aprilâif not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
+_ NRx Twitter bro
+_ 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??
marketingâ
_ Twitter
@@ -131,27 +280,20 @@ things to bring up in consultation emailsâ
_ 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:"
-------
-4 November progress assessment: My 113 word TODO bullets on "discrediting to the community" bloated up into 563 words of prose, a decompression ratio of 5. Taking this at face valueâ
-
-My remaining TODO notes in the pt. 3 ms. are about 1400 wordsâdoes that mean they become 7000 words, with the finished pt. 3 weighing in at 46K words??
-
-For pt. 2, does 970 words of TODO inflate into 5K words of prose, for a finished pt. 2 at 16K words? Feels more likely to be an underestimate due to these notes being sparser on average? An additional 7K words, to finish at 18K??
-
-For pt. 4, I have 617 words of TODO notes, but those also feel pretty sparse and should expand at a higher ratio than 5. An additional 5K words, to finish at 19K??
-
-Projected post lengths: 18K + 46K + 19K = 83K??
-Projected additional words: 17K??
-Projected additional drafting: 17K / 750 K/day = 23 days??
-cross-referenced with my dayjob schedule implies ... finished draft ms. on 15 December?
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Three has been nagging me about my pathetic pacingâlooking 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
+> 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
+
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) andâI don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nineâan 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
-https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
@@ -232,23 +374,11 @@ I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _alre
----
-Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, becauseâwhatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)âand however much many of us would prefer not to talk about themâon the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral oneâand that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows itâeven if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
-
(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):
-
-
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.)
-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
-
-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
-
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.
@@ -291,12 +421,10 @@ The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm
Or at leastâeven 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 aboutâlike, 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 beliefâand, 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
@@ -339,10 +467,6 @@ I guess I feel pretty naïve now, butâI _actually believed our own propoganda_
I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked itâevidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-
-https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
-"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
-
The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
@@ -369,9 +493,6 @@ https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
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
@@ -444,8 +565,6 @@ If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?
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 matterâdoesn'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....
@@ -471,22 +590,40 @@ back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as i
Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinionsâyou should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
-
-
+-------
Yudkowsky complainsânot entirely without justificationâthat I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)
But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.
-You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words: "Men aren't women tho."
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words, which could have been three[^contraction]: "Men aren't women tho."
+
+[^contraction]: I think the contraction [_aren't_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aren%27t) counts as one word in this context; the _tho_ (though) can be dropped to get down to three.
+
+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 detailsâwhy 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 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.
+
+Does the elephant in his brain really expect to get away with that? Are Earth people really that gullible?
+
+------
+[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
+
+And if _you_ don't think you can politically afford to acknowledge your faithful student's proof that 6 + 7 = 13 [(because Stalin doesn't like it when people use the number 13)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), it can feel like safety or self-justification to issue a Pronouncement that the answer to 6 + 7 depends on what base you're working in[^base]; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with your faithful student's allegation that the only reason you're issuing Pronouncements about alternate bases for arithmetic, is to win favor with the Party by standing by and letting them cite you as a credible authority when they claim that 6 + 7 = 15, while thinking yourself "honest" because you've sold yourself a story about how _you_ were just teaching those vile _kulaks_ an important lesson about placeâvalue arithmetic, and never technically said yourself that 6 + 7 = 15 _in base ten_.
+
+[^base]: For example, in base 8, one would write 6 + 7 = 15, where the symbol "15" represents the number **1** · 81 + **5** · 80, which is equal to **1** · 101 + **3** · 100, which we normally (in base 10) write as "13".
+
+------
> 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
@@ -494,6 +631,8 @@ Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether y
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...
@@ -519,8 +658,8 @@ Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their
I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone elseâthat our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+
+
"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation mattersâit's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lieâpivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
@@ -555,6 +694,10 @@ It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to
https://www.readthesequences.com/
> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
+Is that not true?
+
+Can you lie about immediate life for political convenience
+
> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
@@ -579,8 +722,6 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG8i7ZiqLxthACaBi/do-fandoms-need-awfulness
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
-contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard (supposedly for the benefit of people with your sexuality), you don't take it lying down
-
Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!
Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
@@ -745,13 +886,15 @@ the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
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"
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus
+
If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
->
-> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but [too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theoryâwhat a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I claim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
@@ -870,8 +1013,6 @@ subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"
Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
-The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor
-
(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequencesâthat's what words like _good_ doâbut that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)
âand would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
@@ -928,6 +1069,7 @@ Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to tr
"; 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.
@@ -1124,7 +1266,6 @@ Maybe he was following the same sucking-off-Stalin algorithm internally the whol
http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/
-
origins of the strawberry example
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155625884574228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
@@ -1132,27 +1273,9 @@ https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
lack of trust as a reason nothing works: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ shouldn't the rats trust each other?
-
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way
> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
-
-
-[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)âI don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-
-If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to got 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_âeven 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.
-]
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
I'm totally still doing this
@@ -1232,19 +1355,16 @@ Still citing it (19 Sep 22): https://twitter.com/ingalala/status/156839169106472
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 rationalistsâ
-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
@@ -1451,6 +1571,10 @@ John Snygg, _A New Approach to Differential Geometry Using Clifford's Geometric
(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_.)
@@ -1528,26 +1652,6 @@ I'm a natural true believer in Yudkowskian ideology https://balioc.tumblr.com/po
Yudkowsky's assessment of Moldbug: "Politics mindkilled him; he cannot separate the normative and the descriptive." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs#TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs
------
-
-I just got off the phone with my mother. I told her that I wouldn't be able to visit her this weekend because I had a terrible week and I'm going to need to do dayjob work on Sunday to catch up with how behind I am.
-
-She told me that she believes in angels, that she prays to God for me at night, that the angels are like God's helpers, like how Santa has elves
-
-(My family is ethnically Jewishâyou know, like everyone elseâbut my mother's personal brand of spirituality is very vague; these particular sentences felt unusually Christian-themed given that she identifies as a Jewish Buddhist, but not out of character.)
-
-I told her not to bother with the prayers, unless it helps her sleep.
-
-As I was wrapping up the call, I mentioned that the reason it was a bad week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.
-
-"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.
-
-"They're not fish, right?" I asked.
-
-"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."
-
-Thanks, Mom. I'm so lucky to have a mother that's _less retarded than the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute_.
-
----
2019 comments to "Wilhelm"â
@@ -1598,7 +1702,7 @@ I assume starting a detransition market would be not-OK
-----
-FYI, I think this turned out significantly harsher on you than my January 2022 emails made it sound, thus occasioning this one additional email (because I want to be very sure I'm only attacking you and not betraying you; a true friend stabs you in the front).
+FYI, I think this turned out significantly harsher on you than my January 2022 emails made it sound, thus occasioning this one additional email.
I'm planning on publishing the drafts linked below on [dates].
@@ -1607,6 +1711,1103 @@ I'm planning on publishing the drafts linked below on [dates].
* "Agreeing with Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" (19K words)
* **"Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty"** (1.5K word summary of the parts of the Whole Dumb Story that are specifically an attack on your reputation)
-I'm available if you want to contest anything you think is unfair or challenge my interpretation of the "can't directly refer to private conversations" privacy norm, but I doubt it's a high-value use of your time. End transmission.
+**If you want to contest any purported factual inaccuracies or my interpretation of the "no direct references to private conversations" privacy norm, get back to me before [date].** If you have anything else to say for yourself, you can say it in the public comments section.
+
+(Or if you had something to say privately, I would _listen_; it just doesn't seem like a good use of time. I think it's undignified that I have reason to publish a post titled "Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty", but you seem very committed to not meeting my standards of intellectual honesty, so I have an interest in telling everyone else that.)
+
+
+[13 November: #drama discussion today (https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041586188961714259) makes me feel like I don't want to put a "Why I Don't Trust ..." post, like it would be too cruel]
+
+[no awareness that people like me or Michael or Jessica would consider this a betrayal coming from the author of the Sequences (even if it wouldn't be a betrayal coming from a generic public intellectual)]
+
+----
+
+(If you weren't interested in meeting my standards for intellectual honest before, it's not clear why you would change your mind just because I spent 80,000 words cussing you out to everyone else.)
+
+----
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BbM47qBPzdSRruY4z/instead-of-technical-research-more-people-should-focus-on
+
+I hate that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1405032189708816385
+> Egregore psychology is much easier and more knowable than individual human psychology, for the same reason macroscopic matter is more predictable than individual particles. But trying to tell people what the egregore is doing doesn't work because they don't believe in egregores!!
+
+20 June 2021, "The egregore doesn't care about the past", thematic moments at Valinor
+
+You don't want to have a reputation that isn't true; I've screwed up confidentiality before, so I don't want a "good at keeping secrets" reputation; if Yudkowsky doesn't want to live up to the standard of "not being a partisan hack", then ...
+
+Extended analogy between "Scott Alexander is always right" and "Trying to trick me into cutting my dick off"âin neither case would any sane person take it literally, but it's pointing at something important (Scott and EY are trusted intellectual authorities, rats are shameless about transition cheerleading)
+
+Scott's other 2014 work doesn't make the same mistake
+
+"The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy"
+https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
+
+"English is fragile"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1590460598869168128
+> I now see even foom-y equations as missing the point.
+(!)
+
+----
+
+dialogue with a pre-reader on "Challenges"â
+
+> More to the point, there's a kind of anthropic futility in these paragraphs, anyone who needs to read them to understand won't read them, so they shouldn't exist.
+
+I think I'm trying to humiliate the people who are pretending not to understand in front of the people who do understand, and I think that humiliation benefits from proof-of-work? Is that ... not true??
+
+> No, because it makes you look clueless rather than them look clueless.
+
+-----
+
+compare EY and SBF
+
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexanderâ
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly _insinuates_ nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it _does_ present.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown
+
+https://twitter.com/jstn/status/1591088015941963776
+> 2023 is going to be the most 2005 it's been in years
+
+-------
+
+re the FTX debacle, Yudkowsky retweets Katja:
+
+https://twitter.com/KatjaGrace/status/1590974800318861313
+> So I'd advocate for instead taking really seriously when someone seems to be saying that they think it's worth setting aside integrity etc for some greater good
+
+I'm tempted to leave a message in #drama asking if people are ready to generalize this to Kolmogorov complicity (people _very explicitly_ setting aside integrity &c. for the greater good of not being unpopular with progressives). It's so appropriate!! But it doesn't seem like a good use of my diplomacy budget relative to finishing the memoirâthe intelligent social web is predictably going to round it off to "Zack redirecting everything into being about his hobbyhorse again, ignore". For the same reason, I was right to hold back my snarky comment about Yudkowsky's appeal to integrity in "Death With Dignity": the universal response would have been, "read the room." Commenting here would be bad along the same dimension, albeit not as extreme.
+
+------
+
+effects on my social lifeâcalculating what I'm allowed to say; making sure I contribute non-hobbyhorse value to offset my hobbyhorse interruptions
+
+----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FKJ8yiF3KjFhAuivt/impco-don-t-injure-yourself-by-returning-ftxff-money-for
+when that happens, in EA, I often do suspect that nobody else will dare to speak the contrary viewpoint, if not me.
+
+Michael, June 2019
+> If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship
+
+------
+
+Piper and Yudkowsky on privacy normsâ
+
+https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1591996891734376449
+> if such promises were made, they should be kept, but in practice in the present day, they often aren't made, and if you haven't explicitly promised a source confidentiality and then learn of something deeply unethical from them you should absolutely whistleblow.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1592002777429180416
+> I don't think I'd go for "haven't explicitly promised" here but rather "if you're pretty sure there was no such informal understanding on which basis you were granted that access and information".
+
+------
+
+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
+
+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
+
+My obsession must look as pathetic from the outside as Scott Aaronson'sâwhy doesn't he laugh it off, who cares what SneerClub thinks?âbut in my case, the difference is that I was betrayed
+
+-----
+
+dath ilan on advertising (https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1589520#reply-1589520)â
+> So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions. Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.
+
+
+I wrote a Python script to replace links to _Slate Star Codex_ with archive links: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191f1e8f9#patch23
+
+John Wentworthâ
+> I chose the "train a shoulder advisor" framing specifically to keep my/Eliezer's models separate from the participants' own models.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas#comment-zL728sQssPtXM3QD9
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1355712437006204932
+> A "Physics-ist" is trying to engage in a more special human activity, hopefully productively, where they *think* about light in order to use it better.
+
+Wentworth on my confusion about going with the sqaured-error criterion in "Unnatural Categories"â
+> I think you were on the right track with mutual information. They key insight here is not an insight about what metric to use, it's an insight about the structure of the world and our information about the world. [...] If we care more about the rough wall-height than about brick-parity, thatâs because the rough wall-height is more relevant to the other things which we care about in the world. And that, in turn, is because the rough wall-height is more relevant to more things in general. Information about brick-parity just doesnât propagate very far in the causal graph of the world; it's quickly wiped out by noise in other variables. Rough wall-height propagates further.
+
+not interested in litigating "lying" vs. "rationalizing" vs. "misleading-by-implicature"; you can be _culpable_ for causing people to be misled in a way that isn't that sensitive to what exactly was going on in your head
+
+-----
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl?comment_id=10159410429909228&reply_comment_id=10159410748194228
+
+> Zack, and many others, I think you have a vulnerability where you care way too much about the reasons that bullies give for bullying you, and the bullies detect that and exploit it.
+
+
+
+> Everyone. (Including organizers of science fiction conventions.) Has a problem of "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies." We also have an inevitable Kolmogorov Option issue but that should not be confused with the inevitable Evil Bullies issue, even if bullies attack through Kolmogorov Option issues.
+
+----
+
+Someone else's Dumb Story that you can read about on someone else's blog
+
+all he does these days is sneer about Earth people, but he _is_ from Earthâcarrying on the memetic legacy of Richard Feynmann and Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan
+
+"Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma" https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business
+> One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in _this_ generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not.
+
+https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/be-afraid-9802
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TQSb4wd6v5C3p6HX2/the-pascal-s-wager-fallacy-fallacy#pART2rjzcmqATAZio
+> egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now.
+(I remembered this as suggesting some plausibility in sudden Singularity even then, but in context it's more clearly in thought-experimental mode)
+
+from "Go Forth and Create the Art"â
+> To the best of my knowledge there is _no_ true science that draws its strength from only one person. To the best of my knowledge that is _strictly_ an idiom of cults. A true science may have its heroes, it may even have its lonely defiant heroes, but _it will have more than one_.
+
+contrast Sequences-era "Study Science, Not Just Me" with dath ilan sneering at Earth
+
+I have no objection to the conspiracies in Brennan's world! Because Brennan's world was just "here's a fictional world with a different social structure" (Competitive Conspiracy, Cooperative Conspiracy, &c.); sure, there was a post about how Eld Science failed, but that didn't seem like _trash talk_ in the same way
+
+contrast the sneering at Earth people with the attitude in "Whining-Based Communities"
+
+from "Why Quantum?" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDL9NDEXPxYpDf4vz/why-quantum)
+> But would you believe that I had such strong support, if I had not shown it to you in full detail? Ponder this well. For I may have other strong opinions. And it may seem to you that _you_ do't see any good reason to form such strong beliefs. Except this is _not_ what you will see; you will see simply that there _is_ no good reason for the strong belief, that there _is_ no strong support one way or the other. For our first-order beliefs are how the world seems to _be_. And you may think, "Oh, Eliezer is just opinionatedâforming strong beliefs in the absence of lopsided support." And I will not have time to do another couple of months worth of blog posts.
+>
+> I am _very_ far from infallible, but I do not hold strong opinions at random.
+
+Another free speech exchange with S.K. in 2020: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YE4md9rNtpjbLGk22/open-communication-in-the-days-of-malicious-online-actors?commentId=QoYGQS52HaTpeF9HB
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAfmMTiaSjEY8PxXC/say-it-loud
+
+Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+
+------
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047796598488440843
+
+I'm still pretty annoyed by how easily people are falling for this _ludicrous_ "Ah, it would be bad if people _on Earth_ tried to do this, but it's OK _in dath ilan_ because of how sane, cooperative, and kind they are" excuse.
+
+Exception Handling is depicted as _explicitly_ having a Fake Conspiracy section (). Why is that any more okay, than if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department?
+
+Isn't dath ilan just very straightforwardly being _more_ corrupt than Earth here? (Because FTX and Enron were _subverting_ our usual governance and oversight mechanisms, as contrasted to the usual governance mechanisms in dath ilan _explicitly_ being set up to deceive the public.)
+
+I understand that you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that, "it's okay; no one is 'really' being deceived, because 'everybody knows' that the evidence for Sparashki being real is too implausible", and you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that it's necessary to save their world from AGI and mad science.
+
+But someone writing a story about "Effective Altruism" (instead of "Exception Handling") on "Earth" (instead of "dath ilan") could just as easily _assert by authorial fiat_, "it's okay, no one is 'really' being defrauded, because 'everybody knows' that crypto is a speculative investment in which you shouldn't invest anything you can't afford to lose".
+
+What's the difference? Are there _generalizable reasons_ why fraud isn't worth it (not in expectation, and not in reality), or is it just that Sam and Caroline weren't sane, cooperative, and kind enough to pull it off successfully?
+
+What is "It would be OK in dath ilan, but it's not OK on Earth" even supposed to _mean_, if it's not just, "It's OK for people who genetically resemble Eliezer Yudkowsky to deceive the world as long as they have a clever story for why it's all for the greater good, but it's not OK for you, because you're genetically inferior to him"?
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047374488645402684
+
+A. J. Vermillion seems to be complaining that by not uncritically taking the author assertions at face value, I'm breaking the rules of the literary-criticism gameâthat if the narrator _says_ Civilization was designed to be trustworthy, I have no license to doubt that is "actually" is.
+
+And I can't help but be reminded of a great short story that I remember reading back inâa long time ago
+
+I think it must have been 'aught-nine?
+
+yeah, it had to have been _late_ in 'aught-nine, because I remember discussing it with some friends when I was living in a group house on Benton street in Santa Clara
+
+anyway, there was this story 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 choose between Darkness and Light, and they have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair
+
+and when they get there, the bad guy (spoilers) ||_accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there!!||
+
+and the moral wasâor at least, the simpler message I extracted from it wasâthere's something messed-up about the genre convention of fantasy stories where 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 itâ
+
+That if it's wrong to murder people with a different racial ancestry from you _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a fantasy kingdom setting and the race in question are ogres.
+
+And that if it's wrong to kill people and take their stuff _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a period piece about pirates on the high seas.
+
+And (I submit) if it's wrong to decieve the world by censoring scientific information about human sexuality _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a social-science-fiction setting about a world called dath ilan.
+
+(You can _assert by authorial fiat_ that Keltham doesn't mind and is actually grateful, but you could also _assert by authorial fiat_ that the ogres were evil and deserved to die.)
+
+but merely human memory fades over 13 years and merely human language is such a lossy medium; I'm telling you about the story _I_ remember, and the moral lessons _I_ learned from it, which may be very different what was actually written, or what the author was trying to teach
+
+maybe I should make a post on /r/tipofmytongue/, to ask themâ
+
+_What was the name of that story?_
+
+_What was the name of that author?_
+
+(What was the name of the _antagonist_ of that story?âactually, sorry, that's a weird and random question; I don't know why my brain generated that one.)
+
+but somehow I have a premonition that I'm not going to like the answer, if I was hoping for more work from the same author in the same spirit
+
+that the author who wrote "Darkness and Light" (or whatever the story was called) died years ago
+
+or has shifted in her emphases in ways I don't like
+
+------
+
+"the absolute gall of that motherfucker"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8KRqc9oGSLry2qS9e/what-motte-and-baileys-are-rationalists-most-likely-to?commentId=qFHHzAXnGuMjqybEx
+
+In a discussion on the Eliezerfic Discord server, I've been arguing that the fact that dath ilan tries to prevent obligate sexual sadists from discovering this fact about themselves (because the unattainable rarity of corresponding masochists would make them sad) contradicts the claim that dath ilan's art of rationality is uniformly superior to that of Earth's: I think that readers of _Overcoming Bias_ in 2008 had a concept of it being virtuous to face comfortable truths, and therefore would have overwhelmingly rejected utilitarian rationales for censoring scientific information about human sexuality.
+
+------
+
+https://archive.vn/hlaRG
+
+> Bankman-Fried has been going around on a weird media tour whose essential message is "I made mistakes and was careless, sorry," presumably thinking that that is a _defense_ to fraud charges, that "carelessness" and "fraud" are entirely separate categories [...] If you attract customers and investors by saying that you have good risk management, and then you lose their money, and then you say "oh sorry we had bad risk management," that is not a defense against fraud charges! That is a confession!
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1602215046074884097
+> If you could be satisfied by mortal men, you would be satisfied with mortal reasoning and mortal society, and would not have gravitated toward the distant orbits of my own presence.
+
+it's just so weird that, this cult that started out with "People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so", has progressed to, "But what if a prediction market says they can't??"
+
+"The eleventh virtue is scholarship! Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy" just doesn't have the same ring to it, you know?
+"The first virtue is curiosity! A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy" also does not have the same ring to it, even if you stipulate by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing
+
+------
+
+so, I admitted to being a motivated critic (having a social incentive to find fault with dath ilan), but that I nevertheless only meant to report real faults rather than fake faults, and Yudkowsky pointed out that that's not good enough (you also need to be looking for evidence on the other side), and that therefore didn't consider the criticism to be coming from a peer, and challenged me to say things about how the text valorizes truth
+(and I didn't point out that whether or not I'm a "peer"âwhich I'm clearly not if you're measuring IQ or AI alignment contributions or fiction-writing abilityâshouldn't be relevant because https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority, because I was eager to be tested and eager to pass the test)
+and I thought I wrote up some OK answers to the query
+(I definitely didn't say, "that's impossible because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate truth")
+but he still wasn't satisifed on grounds of me focusing too much on what the characters said, and not what the universe said, and then when I offered one of those, he still wasn't satisfied (because the characters had already remarked on it)
+and I got the sense that he wanted Original Seeing, and I thought, and I came up with some Original Philosophy that connected the universe of godagreements to some of my communication theory ideas, and I was excited about it
+so I ran with it
+
+[...]
+
+Zack M. Davis â Today at 10:18 PM
+but the Original Philosophy that I was legitimately proud of, wasn't what I was being tested on; it legitimately looks bad in context
+
+--------
+
+OK, so I'm thinking my main takeaways from the Eliezerfic fight is that I need to edit my memoir draft to be both _less_ "aggressive" in terms of expressing anger (which looks bad and _far more importantly_ introduces distortions), and _more_ "aggressive" in terms of calling Yudkowsky intellectually dishonest (while being _extremely clear_ about explaining _exactly_ what standards I think are not being met and why that's important, without being angry about it).
+
+The standard I'm appealing to is, "It's intellectually dishonest to make arguments and refuse to engage with counterarguments on political grounds." I think he's made himself very clear that he doesn't give a shâ
+
+(no, need to avoid angry language)
+
+âthat he doesn't consider himself bound by that standard.
----
+
+
+Fool! There is no Equilibrium
+
+and you'd think that people who are so obsessed with prediction markets (whose trustworthiness does not stem from individual traders having unimpeachably perfect cognition) would be able to appreciate the value of the somewhat older social technology of ... debate
+
+> god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that's always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. *i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky*
+https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1542781304621518848
+
+Said Achmiz on Eliezer's degenerationâ
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=kS4BfYJuZ8ZcwuwfB
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=4kLTSanNyhn5H8bHv
+
+> What I'm saying is that, in the discussion as a whole, which is constituted by the post itself, plus comments thereon, plus related posts and comments, etc., an author has an obligation to respond to reader inquiries of this sort.
+>
+> As for where said obligation comes fromâwhy, from the same place as the obligation to provide evidence for your claims, or the obligation to cite your sources, or the obligation not to be logically rude, or the obligation to write comprehensibly, or the obligation to acknowledge and correct factual errors, etc., etc.ânamely, from the fact that acknowledging and satisfying this obligation reliably leads to truth, and rejecting this obligation reliably leads to error. In short: it is _epistemically rational_.
+
+Namespace on standing and warrantâ
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=c7Xt5AnHwhfgYY67K
+
+I've been playing a Dagny Taggart strategy
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+Michael 19 April 2019â
+> Intellectualism to survive, has to distinguish between having been betrayed and having been defeated. The difference is frequently known as "courage". It's absence causes people like Aaronson, without ever becoming complicit, to nonetheless transition directly from denial of a crisis to advocacy of "The Kolmagorov Option".
+
+during the dispute with James, Jonah said it seemed like the future beyond a year wasn't real to me (this also explains my behavior in college)
+
+you can't trust his behavior, even if you can trust his "conscious intent" which conveniently doesn't do anything
+
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1608191251991662592
+> Keeping a secret is like casting the killing curseâit might be the best option available in a conflict, but even when it's the least bad option it tears your soul a bit regardless.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1599889168234336257
+> One of the retrospective less-obvious lessons of the #FTX blowup: We should have been more worried about the early split in Alameda where half the people left with @Tara_MacAulay to run a less wild trading company. In retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone sane!
+
+Likewise, we should have been more worried about the Vassar split; in retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone principled
+
+The thing that makes Earth bad is that everyone is lying about everything all the time, and when you challenge them on it, they have some clever rationalization for why it isn't really bad.
+
+https://manifold.markets/Alicorn/will-my-son-successfully-get-a-bath#
+I'm not allowed to say, "Which one?"âit's known that I'm the sort of person who believes that, but I'm not allowed to puncture the shared reality
+
+I said I perceived a nearest-unblocked-strategy pattern, where I'm trying to optimize my goals subject to the constraint of maintaining good diplomatic relations. But Anna points out that if I internalized "good diplomatic relations" as my own goal
+
+Speaking of coordination: you know what's useful for coordination? Principles! Common knowledge!
+
+the post introducing the litany of Gendlin was literally titled "You _Can_ Face Reality"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
+
+Re: "it's deception aimed at crazy people"âbut if you're so casual about deceiving crazy people, you probably don't care much about sane non-Keepers, either. (Same energy: if your date is rude to the waiter, he won't be a good partner, either. Or parents who lie to their kids for convenience.)âand in fact, empathy towards crazy people _is_ shown in the section on Thellim's mother in "but hurting people is wrong"
+
+"Criticism not welcome, it's just a story; if you don't like it, don't read it" works for normal glowfic, but it doesn't work when you're earnestly spreading memes about how your fictional Society is superior to our Earth; if you're going to make _that_ claim in earnest, you should expect people to subject your fictional Society to scrutiny to check whether it holds together
+
+Clara says to just roll your eyes and ignore him, but in a way, that seems _more_ disrespectfulâto just _write someone off_, rather than having faith that they can be reached by argument
+
+There's a difference between jokes where the audience is supposed to "get the joke" (and you're willing to accept collateral damage to people who didn't get the joke), and political moves where
+
+When he says "no one but Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it", I regard that as an abject failure of the community, but he regards it has "working as intended"?
+
+Vassar had once praised me as "Zack is pretty much always right" (when I express an opinion; he still thought I was dumb/unperceptive), and I accepted the praise that it wasn't meant literallyâbut if someone had a longstanding dispute with me and objected to the praise, I would fundamentally "get" why they were objecting (they don't want Vassar encouraging people to defer to me), rather than assuming _they_ thought it was meant literally
+
+I did "get what I needed" out of the Eliezerfic fight (before, I still had anxiety about whether I should email him before publishing this memoir; and now, I don't)
+
+He could have saved, like, six years of my life, if the March 2016 post had said, "I think 30% of males are gender-dysphoric and might benefit from transitioning"
+
+Fri 14 Jul 2017
+(03:54:42 PM) alicorn24: holy fuck that is a lot of money
+(03:54:53 PM) alicorn24: when I read that blog post I was imagining you'd like, throw fifty bucks at some people
+(03:55:06 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: what? that would be insulting
+(03:57:46 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: there's a calibration thing about being a San Francisco software engineer; and, April could have been really really much worse if I didn't have friends
+
+"probably won't understand" self-commentsâ
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me/comment/gYSsBbZ6xvaf2b3Eh
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/pK9JHSTTnnpjbbqZp
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WijMw9WkcafmCFgj4/do-scientists-already-know-this-stuff/comment/EFg4p7KRbthgH3SnR
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/r5H6YCmnn8DMtBtxt/you-are-a-brain/comment/CsqYAeCPnsAsdQb7d
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QB9eXzzQWBhq9YuB8/rationalizing-and-sitting-bolt-upright-in-alarm/comment/2FfTFrA7iKK6kxqMq
+
+I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
+
+I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
+
+my father's men's group kicked out a gay man (who was at least still male!); women are too nice to eject MtFs
+
+"Something to Protect" says: "you should never _actually_ end up deliberately believing a useful false statement" (but it's OK for Civilization to end up engineering that you do)
+
+explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks "I'll need a research team and five years" September 2014
+
+May 2019: David MacIver is in on it, too! https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/#comment-366840
+
+"whosever lies _in a journal article_ is guilty of utter heresy"
+
+first I ordered _Nevada_ 24 March 2016; first ordered _MTiMB_ on 6 August 2016
+ordered additional copies of MTiMB 14 September 2016 and 19 December 2016
+
+> We passed word to the Fake Conspiracy section of Exception Handling, and they've spent the last few hours quickly planting evidence consistent with how Civilization should look if the Sparashki are real. The notion being that their apparent fictional status and licensing is just a cover, so Sparashki can walk around if they have to and just get compliments on their incredible cosplay. Since this event is medium-secret, the CEO of Yattel's Less Expensive Tunneling Machines has been photographed by surprise through a window, looking like a Sparashki, to explain why conspiracy-theoretic research is suddenly focusing there and turning up the evidence we've planted."
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952
+
+the generic experience is that the future is more capable but less aligned, and we basically expect this to continue
+people from the past would envy our refrigeration, vaccines, infinite food, &c., but that doesn't mean they would regard our value-drifted-with-respect-to-them culture as superior
+paperclipping is just that turned up to 11 (well, 10¹¹)
+
+Bostrom's apology for an old emailâwho 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)âI 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_âeven 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)
+This is not an advanced rationalist skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! People will quote your "Categories Were Made for the Man" in defense of the idea that someone can be biologically male, think of themselves as a boy, be thought of by others as a boy, and yet still actually have been a girl at the time by virtue of deciding to transition years later. I've been told that "Gender is a floating tag which has one substantial consequence, which is comfort of the people being addressed"!
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937
+> Citizens can't control processes they can't see. For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.
+
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 2:09 AM
+Ziz
+Ziz
+To your memory, am I under any confidentiality agreements with you? Or did we mutually release each other from the only one that one time?
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 9:24 AM
+You sent
+you are not under any confidentiality agreements with me
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946
+> This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.
+
+> It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it. Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you. But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom. There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really. But you must never ever mention it in front of her.
+
+for normal people, when your favorite author gets worse, you just shrug and accept it and enjoy the classics, but when your favorite author is also the Pope of your religion and also in several Discord servers with you, you end up wasting a lot of time scrutinizing their emoji-reacts
+
+For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "trans" is an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+I write the space everywhere because that's the dominant usage ([since 2011](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transman%2Ctrans+man%2Ctranswoman%2Ctrans+woman&year_start=2000&year_end=2022), according to Google ngrams). I don't want to turn off potential readers by failing a simple shibboleth test; I want those readers to be turned off by my actual ideas.
+
+(_I_ don't censor my comment sections of people whom it "looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with".)
+
+-----
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+
+-----
+
+> Well, YES. Paying taxes to the organization that runs ICE, or voting for whichever politician runs against Trump, or trading with a doctor benefiting from an occupational licensing regime; these acts would all be great evils if you weren't trapped.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392
+
+https://twitter.com/jd_pressman/status/1617257360933945344
+> And that the current discourse of "don't advance capabilities, don't think about SOTA, stop thinking, pursue orthogonal directions" is basically about maximizing confusion, minimizing the probability you have any chance of pulling alignment out of the distribution of AI ideas.
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1897710#reply-1897710
+> a dath ilani tragedy isn't about the triumph of Evil over Good. It's about the triumph of erroneous reasoning and ill-coordination over everyone
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044
+> my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.
+
+https://www.truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-boomer-map
+> The lower class _wants_ an upper class it can genuinely look up to. The feeling that Harvard has gone insane is like realizing that Mom and Dad are both on heroin.
+
+25 January 2022: I hesitated for a long time before leaving a comment about Cicero on the Alexander/Yudkowsky dialogue, shows I'm still culty (calculating whether I'm allowed to speak on a post he coauthored; I linked "EA should blurt")
+
+J.D.P. on rationalism's failure
+https://extropian.net/notice/ARvZ3pimn8JQIe4yGG
+
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Threeâ
+> It's like admiring a society that solves crime by having secret police shoot all bad people in the head. What the fuck!? I suddenly have empathy for the experience of seeing your cult defiled. If I got Isekaied onto dath ilan I would _become a terrorist_.
+
+(Terrorism wouldn't work)
+
+Sep 27 text to "Rebecca"â
+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/3nDR23ksSQJ98WNDm/developmental-stages-of-gpts?commentId=wqaCY4hQQTuqqJ7Ma 28 July 2020
+> I'd love to know of a non-zero integer number of plans that could possibly, possibly, possibly work for not dying to a GPT-style near-term AGI.
+
+calculating whether I was "net positive"âI don't know what can be said about the relationship between quantum randomness and macroscopic outcomes, but it seems plausible that there are Everett branches where I died from that salivary stone in 2008
+
+From "My Way"â
+
+> far enough that the art she learned from others fails her, so that she must remake her shattered art in her own image and in the image of her own task. And then tell the rest of us about it.
+
+> But what I'm finding is not just _the_ Way, the thing that lies at the center of the labyrinth; it is also _my_ Way, the path that I would take to come closer to the center, from whatever place I started out.
+
+> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
+
+
+depression-based forecasting in conversation with Carl
+> seems more ... optimistic, Kurzweilian?... to suppose that the tech gets used correctly the way a sane person would hope it would be used
+
+I like this sentence (from "The Matrix Is a System")â
+> If someone is a force on your epistemics towards the false, robustly to initial conditions and not as a fluke, that person is hostile.
+
+An analogy between my grievance against Yudkowsky and Duncan's grievance against me: I think Yudkowsky is obligated to search for and present "anti-trans" arguments in conjunction with searching for and presenting "pro-trans" arguments. Duncan (I'm wildly guessing??) thinks I'm obligated to search for and present "pro-Duncan" and addition to "anti-Duncan" arguments?? A key disanalogy: Yudkowsky is _afraid_ to post "anti-trans" content; I'm not afraid to post pro-Duncan content; I just think agreements are less interesting than disagreements. To prove the disanalogy, maybe I should write a "Things I Liked About 'Basics of Rationalist Discourse'" post as a peace offering??
+
+"Let's not talk to Eliezer." "He's sad and confusing" Commentary reference??
+
+https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/
+
+> All of her fellow employees are vigorously maintaining to anybody outside the hospital itself, should the question arise, that Merrin has always cosplayed as a Sparashki while on duty, in fact nobody's ever seen her out of costume; sure it's a little odd, but lots of people are a little odd.
+>
+> (This is not considered a lie, in that it would be universally understood and expected that no one in this social circumstance would tell the truth.)
+
+I still had Sasha's sleep mask
+
+"Wilhelm" and Steven Kaas aren't Jewish, I think
+
+I agree that Earth is mired in random junk that caught on (like p-values), but ... so are the rats
+
+I'm https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/?commentId=f8Gour23gShoSyg8g at gender and categorization
+
+picking cherries from a cherry tree
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform
+
+https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
+> I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I donât think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or "expert consensus" is extremely variable and complicated and canât be reflected by a single number or position.
+
+https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
+
+Michael Vassar has _also_ always been a very complicated person who's changed his emphases in ways Yudkowsky dislikes
+
+
+[TODO:
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
+
+> The Kiritsugu shrugged. "When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+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
+]
+
+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."
+
+
+[TODOâ
+
+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?
+> Itâs long and hard unless you're Asian.
+
+Robert Heinlein
+> âWhat are the facts? Again and again and again â what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what âthe stars foretell,â avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable âverdict of historyâ â 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!â
+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!âbut 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.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
+> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true informationâor, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselvesâthe only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
+
+I said that I couldn't help but be reminded of a really great short story that I remembered reading back inâit 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 wasâor at least, the moral _I_ got out of it wasâthere'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 somewhereâ
+"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 mâsplat, 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 misinterpretedâbut, 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", butâthat'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 2â0â1.)
+
+[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 harrassedâmaybe it's because I'm unattractive" deserves a "it's because you're not _female_" retortânot 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"âthat'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 Saidâ
+> 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-Tweetingâ
+> I Thought I Was Totally Straight. Then I Discovered Rust.
+
+Ninety-Threeâ
+> 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 isâat 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" !!!âsimilarly, "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 â 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 isnât 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 Marchâ I order a pack of Spiro and Progynova from AllDayChemist
+
+7 Marchâ (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
+
+
+meâ
+> 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.
+
+Michaelâ
+> 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" â "when I asked 'how' I could help" (cut 5 words)
+"they 'don't know how to interpret observations of' someone not buying it" â "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 Leeâplease 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 meâa 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 seeingâI 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
+meâ
+> It looks like my social circle. (This is why I'm worried about suboptimal social norms getting locked in for the wrong reasonsâwhat'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 isâgrounding, 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 blogâ140,000 words of blog posts stapled together is _morally_ a bookâonce he got over the shock of heresy.
+
+[TODO conclusion, cont'dâ
+ * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surelyâit'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 shortâlike 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!
+>
+> â[Voltairine de Cleyre](https://praxeology.net/VC-SS.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+[TODOâearly 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 importantâall 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"âwhen 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"âthis 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"ârather 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 Yudkowskyâ
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why
+> I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary. In fact I try to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I have achieved acceptance in my tribe. When my brain begins thinking something that generates a sense of high status within the tribe, I stop thinking that thought.
+
+----
+
+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 machineâa 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 analogyâ
+ * 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 2020â
+> 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 fearâtrusting 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
+
+https://hpmor.com/chapter/97
+> "Or tricks," Harry said evenly. "Statements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false. I think it's worth making that distinction.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards/comment/TcsXh44pB9xRziGgt
+> A bunch of people we respected and worked with had decided the world was going to end, very soon, uncomfortably soon, and they were making it extremely difficult for us to check their work.
+
+-------
+
+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 peopleâdescribing 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.)
+
+(The authors of the [HEXACO personality model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure) may have gotten something importantly right in [grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality).)
+
+------
+
+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 meâtrying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make senseâwith [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 strategyâthat 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. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
\ No newline at end of file