X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fa-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md;h=1f1b8e115ca208ae8638399edf2df007dc4ed5a8;hb=f32aea7316333933e09fb4953f3542aedcc21940;hp=1a2da3e15db49fb4785697799e181b926664665c;hpb=fcd5ff589813c38925abda33020346c06a22b09d;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git
diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 1a2da3e..1f1b8e1 100644
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -8,11 +8,11 @@ Status: draft
>
> âZora Neale Hurston
-Recapping our story so farâin a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric prison once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
+Recapping our story so farâin a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric jail once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrongâ[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016â7 took BlanchardâBaileyâLawrence as received truth. At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016â7, because BlanchardâBaileyâLawrence is still very obviously _directionally_ correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.
-But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
+But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a November 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could reference a _Slate Star Codex_ post in conversation and expect people to familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis via other people having referenced the idea in conversation. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me, seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's "party line" on trans issues.
@@ -22,13 +22,13 @@ But the post is very wrong in very obvious ways. To be clear, it's true _that_ c
This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. [Yudkowsky wrote a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) back in 'aught-eight, as part of the original Sequences. Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home _over and over and over again_, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)âprinciples that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology."
-In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to be misled into making bad predictions.
+In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to confuse yourself.
Importantly, this is a very general point about how language itself works _that has nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about politically-controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if [positive consequence]" is not the correct philosophy of language, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_.
Also, this ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But at this point I still trusted people in my robot cult to be basically intellectually honest, rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, so I endeavored to respond to the category-boundary argument as if it were a serious argument: when I quit my dayjob in March 2017 in order to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next links post](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later, I followed it up with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument. I'm proud of those posts: I think Alexander's and _Unit of Caring_'s arguments were incredibly dumb, and with a lot of effort, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining exactly why to anyone who was interested and didn't, at some level, prefer not to understand.
-Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone else's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the _Slate Star Codex_ links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. At this point, I was _disappointed_ with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that.
+Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the _Slate Star Codex_ links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. At this point, I was _disappointed_ with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that.
... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war.
@@ -36,112 +36,401 @@ The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I w
Just that month, I had started a Twitter account in my own name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous/established in the that world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the Blanchard retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in the Code of Conduct wars.
-[TODO: SECTION SUMMARIZING AND RESPONDING TO "Hill of Validity" Tweet thread]
+So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
-I was physically shaking. I remember going downstairs to confide in a senior engineer about the situation. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (And I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed less important given the present crisis.)
+> Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
+>
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
+>
+> In saying this, I am not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies. I am making a stand on a hill of meaning in defense of validity, about the distinction between what is and isn't a stand on a hill of facts in defense of truth.
+>
+> I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
+
+Some of the replies tried explain the problemâand [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)â
+
+> Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to conveyâand this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.
+
+â[repeatedly](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
+
+> You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
+>
+> But even ignoring that, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
+
+Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_. Let me explain.
+
+This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I rememberedâthe Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"âwho didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to carve reality at the joints, even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
+
+> [S]aying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
+
+[Similarly](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary):
+
+> Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins. Now you could play the oh-so-clever arguer, and say, "The list: {Salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout} is just a listâyou can't say that a list is _wrong_. I can prove in set theory that this list exists. So my definition of _fish_, which is simply this extensional list, cannot possibly be 'wrong' as you claim."
+>
+> Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list.
+>
+> You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.
+>
+> You cannot hide behind a comforting shield of correct-by-definition. Both extensional definitions and intensional definitions can be wrong, can fail to carve reality at the joints.
+
+One could argue the "Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together" moral doesn't apply to Yudkowsky's new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of common nouns.
+
+But this seems pretty unsatifying in the context of his claim to ["not [be] taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). One of the Tweets that had recently led to radical feminist Meghan Murphy getting [kicked off the platform](https://quillette.com/2018/11/28/twitters-trans-activist-decree/) read simply, ["Men aren't women tho."](https://archive.is/ppV86) This doesn't seem like a policy claim; rather, Murphy was using common language to express the fact-claim that members of the natural category of adult human males, are not, in fact, members of the natural category of adult human females.
+
+If the extension of common words like 'woman' and 'man' is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so is Twitter's anti-misgendering policyâand if it _isn't_ (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I wasn't sure what's _left_ of the "Human's Guide to Words" sequence if the [37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) needs to be retracted.
+
+I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth if have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, a previous Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
+
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+>
+> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+>
+> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+>
+> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
+>
+> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
+>
+> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
+>
+> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
+>
+> ["And this suggests anotherâyes, yet anotherâreason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacityânot just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
+>
+> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
+>
+> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+
+One could argue that this is unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intendedâthat Yudkowsky _only_ meant to slap down the specific false claim that using 'he' for someone with a Y chromosome is lying, without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host a truly exhaustive debate on all related issues every time a fallacy they encounter in the wild annoys them enough for them to Tweet about that specific fallacy.
+
+However, I don't think this "narrow" reading is the most natural one. Yudkowsky had previously written of what he called [the fourth virtue of evenness](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." He had likewise written [of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) (bolding mine):
+
+> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
+
+Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how ["weak men are superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/): speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position, in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments for the position (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by _just_ slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his readers (who trusted him to argue against ideas honestly) into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.
-It seemed better to try to clear this up in private. I still had Yudkowsky's email address. I felt bad bidding for his attention over my gender thing _again_âbut I had to do _something_. Hands trembling, I sent him an email asking him to read my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), suggesting that it may qualify as an answer to his question about ["a page [he] could read to find a non-confused exclamation of how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232), and that, because I cared very much about correcting what I claim are confusions in my rationalist subculture, that I would be happy to pay up to $1000 for his time, and that, if he liked the post, he might consider Tweeting a link.
+To be sure, it imposes a cost on speakers to not be able to Tweet about one specific annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for [endless disclaimers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html) about related but stronger arguments that they're _not_ addressing. But the fact that [Yudkowsky disclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032) he wasn't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that he _didn't_ have an aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings.
-[TODO (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)")]
+Given that, it's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096), deeper in the thread, Yudkowsky wrote:
+
+> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
+
+Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of HRT does not itself take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
+
+The _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different: men are taller, and stronger, and faster, and have bigger lungs. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in the vast majority of sports, with a few exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/) that happen to sample an unusually female-favorable corner of sportspace).
+
+Given the empirical reality of the different trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league, and [_empirically_, hormone replacement therapy after puberty](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3) [doesn't substantially change the picture here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865).
+
+(Similarly, when conducting [automobile races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_racing), you want there to be rules enforcing that all competitors have the same type of car for some common-sense-reasonable operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.)
+
+In light of these empirical observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions."
+
+I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/), but the point is very general: biological sex actually exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime.
+
+Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than a matter of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. If you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
+
+If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere _policy_ decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_. The policymaking categories we use to make decisions are _closely related_ to the epistemic categories we use to make predictions, and people need to be able to talk about them.
+
+An illustration: like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) at fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear languageânot trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territoryâwould say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "adult human female" category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)â2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_â0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_â0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_â0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)âincluding differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
+
+Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly. (Because it's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning", what _trans women_ are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example.) But it _is_ forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster). Crowing in the public square about how people who object to be forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is _ignoring the interesting part of the problem_. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
+
+To this one might reply that I'm giving too much credit to the "anti-trans" coalition for how stupid they're not being: that _my_ careful dissection of the hidden probabilistic inferences implied by words (including pronoun choices) is all well and good, but that calling pronouns "lies" is not something you do when you know how to use words.
+
+But I'm _not_ giving them credit for _for understanding the lessons of "A Human's Guide to Words"_; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that that's a man! Men aren't women!"âwell, I _probably_ wouldn't want to invite such a person-in-the-street to a _Less Wrong_ meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is _performing useful cognitive work_. Because _I_ have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), _I_ know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."
+
+But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As Yudkowsky had once written of [the fourth virtue of evenness](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues): "Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
+
+I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street would be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](http://msblairewhite.com/) (an androphilic transsexual who passes very well). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And _in practice_, the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
+
+If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in [high-dimensional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman, [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
+
+Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which the obviously-absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized, and claim that that difference destroys the relevence of the joke. But on the off-chance that it might help _illustrate_ my objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happenedâ
+
+
+
Bob: Look at this adorable cat picture!
+
Alice: Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually.
+
Bob: You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.
+
+
+If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
+
+Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Meghan Murphee had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that [Yudkowsky's analogue in that world](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) then posted that Murphee's supporters were ontologically confused to object on free inquiry grounds: saying "peace be unto him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact: Murphee wasn't being forced to lie.
+
+I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have any trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. It is, of course, true as an isolated linguistics fact that saying "peace be unto him" is a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes_. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's _why_ the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone says it: it's a lot harder to atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like an atheist.
+
+And that's exactly why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
+
+Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals! If you just don't think "free speech" should go that farâif you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminismâspeech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And _to their credit_, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are intellectually honest about the fact that this is what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_, and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
+
+In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while insinuating that people who oppose the policy are ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being either (somewhat implausibly) stupid or (more plausibly) intellectually dishonest: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_âthe smarter people in the "anti-trans" coalition already know that, and the dumber people in the coalition wouldn't change their coalitional alignment if they were taughtâit's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" coalition, while putting on a show of being politically "neutral."
+
+It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in publicâespecially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author. (Despite my misgivingsâand the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identityâthis blog _is_ still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
+
+But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and stonewalling with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!
+
+------
+
+... I didn't have all of that criticism collected and carefully written up on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I _flipped the fuck out_ when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that wasâI don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it wasâtolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastalâthat had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+
+But trusting Eliezer Yudkowskyâwhose writings, more than any other single influence, had made me who I amâ_did_ seem reasonable. If I put him on a pedastal, it was because he had earned the pedastal, for supplying me with my criteria for how to thinkâincluding, as a trivial special case, how to think about what things to put on pedastals.
+
+So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this _and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it_ (!!!), that was intolerable, inexplicable, incomprehensibleâlike there _wasn't a real world anymore_.
+
+But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (And I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed unimportant in light of the present cause for _flipping the fuck out_.)
+
+It seemed better to try to clear this up in private. I still had Yudkowsky's email address. I felt bad bidding for his attention over my gender thing _again_âbut I had to do _something_. Hands trembling, I sent him an email asking him to read my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), suggesting that it may qualify as an answer to his question about ["a page [he] could read to find a non-confused exclamation of how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232)âand that, because I cared very much about correcting what I claimed were confusions in my rationalist subculture, that I would be happy to pay up to $1000 for his timeâand that, if he liked the post, he might consider Tweeting a linkâand that I was cc'ing my friends Anna Salamon and Michael Vassar as a character reference (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)"). Then I texted Anna and Michael begging them to chime in and vouch for my credibility.
The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, and not _quid quo pro_ advertising, and that if he didn't trust his brain circuitry not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.
-Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ on of your posts? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)âand that it was a way to signal that I _really really didn't want to be ignored_.
+Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)âand that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely a simple person such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
+
+Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
-[TODO: and cc'd Michael and Anna as character references]
+As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowskyâwell, [again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint), I don't think I should say whether he replied to Michael's and my emails, or whether he accepted the money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
-[TODO: I did successfully interest Michael, who chimed inâMichael called me up and we talked about how the "rationalists" were over]
+> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
-[TODO: as with earlier cheerful price offer, I can't confirm or deny whether Yudkowsky replied or whether he accepted the cheerful price offer]
+Look at that! The great _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ said that my position is not ontologically confused. That's _probably_ high praise coming from him! You might think that should be the end of the matter. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion; I already had a related objection written up; and he acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right?
-[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession. You might think that should be the end of the matterâbut this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder? https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529 ]
+I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried in the replies was _much less visible_ than the bombastic, arrogant top level pronouncement insinuating that resistance to gender-identity claims _was_ confused. (1 Like on this reply, _vs._ 140 Likes/21 Retweets on start of thread.) I expected that the typical reader who had gotten the impression from the initial thread that the great Eliezer Yudkowsky thought that gender-identity skeptics didn't have a leg to stand on, would not, actually, be disabused of this impression by the existence of this little follow-up. Was it greedy of me to want something _louder_?
-Greedy or not, I wasn't satisfied. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander, asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I saidâthat's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
+Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander (cc'ing a few other people), asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I saidâthat's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
The _issue_ is that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful): you want to [draw your category boundaries such that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your [information-theoretically limited budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) of short words on the simplest and most wide-rangingly useful categories.
-It's true that the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this to the extent of sending you him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, what kind of asshole does that?!) has to with transgender stuff, but that's not the reason _Scott_ should care. Rather, it's like [his parable about whether thunder or lightning comes first](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): there aren't many direct non-rationalizable-around consequences of the sacred dogmas that thunder comes before lightning or that biological sex somehow isn't real; the problem is that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_. If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_. If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+It's true that [the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) had to with transgender stuff, but wasn't the reason _Scott_ should care.
-And the reason to write this is a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander when I could be working on my own blog, was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the Zeitgeist, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
+The other year, Alexander had written a post, ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), explaining the consequences of political censorship by means of an allegory about a Society with the dogma that thunder occurs before lightning. The problem isn't so much the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to _directly_ make use of the fact that thunder comes first), but that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_.
-So, what do you say, Scott? Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we don't. If you don't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that's fine. I like getting credit, but the important thing is that this "No, the Emperor isn't nakedâoh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garmentsâit would be pretty weird if we were claiming that!âit's just that utilitarianism implies that the social property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" gaslighting maneuver needs to _die_. You alone can kill it.
+It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" got you an endless deluge ofâpolite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!â_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said [imply that lesbians aren't women](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/)? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks could and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably be fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
+
+(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
+
+If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a _convenient rhetorical shorthand_ for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_.
+
+If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in November 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says that the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+
+And the reason to write this as a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander when I could be working on my own blog, was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Alexander and Yudkowsky rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander."
+
+Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we didn't. If Scott didn't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that was _totally fine_; I _liked_ getting credit, but the important thing is that this "No, the Emperor isn't nakedâoh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garmentsâit would be pretty weird if we were claiming _that!_âit's just that utilitarianism implies that the _social_ property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" gaslighting maneuver needed to _die_, and he alone could kill it.
... Scott didn't get it.
-[TODO: paraphrase remaining interaction with Scott, or not worth the space?
+But I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail. If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.
+
+There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of languageâand worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
+
+Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is _not a counterargument_.
+
+Meanwhile, Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying at some point during our occasional meetings. She told me that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreedâI was even willing to go up to "violent"âin the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits?
+
+My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the argumentsâthough I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+
+There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on-track: if no one overtly gets huffily offended and calls to burn the heretic, then the discussion isn't being warped by the fear of heresy.
+
+I do not hold this view. I think there's a _subtler_ failure mode where people know what the politically-favored bottom line is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be targetedly _uninterested_ in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit the party line. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture they're embedded in."
+
+Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being _very good_ at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the world where Scott Alexander didn't have a traumatizing experience with social justice in college, causing him to dump a ton of anti-social-justice, pro-argumentative-charity antibodies in the "rationalist" collective "water supply" after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.) I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for being silenced or shouted down (which I wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to think of this as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Even _if_ the other person was being motivatedly dense, giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")
+
+Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronger writer was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to jump up an additional meta level and explain _how_ people were failing to engage. That is, I had a model of "the rationalists" that kept making bad predictions. What's going on there? Something interesting might happen if I try to explain _that_.
+
+(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional three years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by writing this memoir. Sorry, Benâand thanks.)
+
+One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days). I had been somewhat skeptical of him, then: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions by the standards of ordinary social reality, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists that he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Instituteâthe "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's anti-social mad scientist personalityâso I had been inclined to take his "crazy"-sounding assertions more charitably than I would have in the absence of that social proof.
+
+Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, _including_ your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter than the surrounding the Societyâwell, it's stressful. [There was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Ozy, _The Unit of Caring_, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" communityâjust an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoeverâbut it was salient indicator of the _Zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "categories are subjective, therefore you have no gounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" _mind game_.
+
+In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... Itâreally happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how my mind would have held up intact if I were just facing it alone; it's hard to imagine what I would have done in that case. I definitely wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Scott and Eliezer the way I didâespecially Eliezerâif it was just me alone against everyone else.
+
+But _Michael thought I was in the right_ânot just intellectually on the philosophy issue, but morally in the right to be _prosecuting_ the philosophy issue, and not accepting stonewalling as an answer. That social proof gave me a lot of social bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster upâeven though it would have been better if I could have propagated the implications of the observation that my dependence on him was self-undermining, because Michael himself said that the thing that made me valuable was my ability to think independently.
+
+The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that was a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of Effective Altruism. (I remember at a party in 2015, on asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on if not the EA charities I was considering, being surprised that his answer was, "You.")
+
+Another blow to Michael's "community" reputation was dealt on 27 February, when Anna [published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD), which I found pretty disappointingâmore so as I began to realize the implications.
+
+I agreed with her point about how "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions." That's why I was so heartbroken about about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserved to be _laughed out the room_. Why was she trying to ostracize the guy who was one of the very few to back me up on this incredibly obvious thing!? The reasons to discredit Michael given in the comment seemed incredibly weak. (He ... flatters people? He ... _didn't_ tell people to abandon their careers? What?) And the anti-Michael evidence she offered in private didn't seem much more compelling (_e.g._, at a CfAR event, he had been insistent on continuing to talk to someone who Anna thought was looking sleep-deprived and needed a break).
+
+It made sense for Anna to not like Michael, because of his personal conduct, or because he didn't like EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with _each other_ would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine; that's her business not to invite him. But what did she gain from _escalating_ to publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?!
+
+-----
+
+Anyway, I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new nonâ_Slate Star Codex_âbranded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving. According to poll data and Alexander's personal impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices, but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
+
+[Yudkowsky Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017):
+
+> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
+
+I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
+
+Imagine if someone were to reply: "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to conveyâand this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
+
+How would Yudkowsky react, if someone said that? _My model_ of Sequences-era 2009!Yudkowsky would say, "This is an incredibly intellectually dishonest attempt to [sneak in connotations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations) by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an [appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters); go read ['A Human's Guide to Words.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)"
+
+But I had no idea what 2019!Yudkowsky would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" was reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott _identifies_ as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes.
+
+Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includeed the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.
-> I don't have a simple, mistake-theoretic characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I can do is try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventionsâand of conflicts over possible conventions.
+And this was just _correct_. For example, Alexander's ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) favorably cites Cochran _et al._'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him was meant to conveyâit's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
-helping Norton live in the real world
+Of course, Scott was great, and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it's plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims, much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
-If any concrete negative consequence of taking gender self-identity categories (e.g., more sexual assaults) is going to be waved away with "Oh, that's a mere policy decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender categories", then I guess I can't argue with that. But I wish I knew what happened to my wallet.
+But, I argued, political convenience came at a dire cost to [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). There was a proverb Yudkowsky [had once failed to Google](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings), which ran something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+
+Similarly, once someone is known to [vary](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenienceâif they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility of categorizations being lies when that happens to make them look good politically ...
+
+Well, you're still _somewhat_ better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas [clever arguers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence) who [don't tell explicit lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/) are constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a bluecheck and 20K followers. I know you're very busy; I know your work's importantâbut it might be a useful exercise, for Yudkowsky to think of what he would _actually say_ if someone with social power _actually did this to him_ when he was trying to use language to reason about Something he had to Protect?
+
+(Note, my claim here is _not_ that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. Rather, I'm saying that, as a matter of [local validity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense _as a response to_ "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." _was_ a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman." I was saying that, whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of local validity, apply the _same_ standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist.")
+
+Anyway, without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I _am_ allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
+
+Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
+
+Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott got started back up again, although I wasn't expecting anything to come out of it. I expressed some regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like psych hospitals, orâsomething else) and wanted something from him, which was bad, because it was treating him as a means rather than an endâand then, despite that regret, continued prosecuting the argument.
+
+One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): for example, those who crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into attributing attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" onto what are very noncentral members of those categories.
+
+_Even if_ you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Janie a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectationsâabout Janie's moral character, about the suffering of victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._âmost of which get violated when you subsequently reveal that the murder victim was a four-week-old fetus.
+
+Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the merits_, not by linguistic fiat.
+
+... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. I started drafting a long replyâbut then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse about what we might have done wrong in our attempted outreach to Yudkowsky, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for updateful disagreement-resolution. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
+
+... Scott didn't want to meet. At this point, I considered resorting to the tool of cheerful prices again, which I hadn't yet used against Scottâto say, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day." But that seemed sufficiently psychologically coercive and socially weird that I wasn't sure I wanted to go there. I emailed my posse asking what they thoughtâand then added that maybe they shouldn't reply until Friday, because it was Monday, and I really needed to focus on my dayjob that week.
+
+This is the part where I began to ... overheat. I tried ("tried") to focus on my dayjob, but I was just _so angry_. Did Scott _really_ not understand the rationality-relevant distinction between "value-dependent categories as a result of only running your clustering algorithm on the subspace of the configuration space spanned by the variables that are relevant to your decisions" (as explained by the _dagim_/water-dwellers _vs._ fish example) and "value-dependent categories _in order to not make my friends sad_"? I thought I was pretty explicit about this? Was Scott _really_ that dumb?? Or is it that he was only verbal-smart and this is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you've ever been good at linear algebra?? Did I need to write a post explaining just that one point in mathematical detail? (With executable code and a worked example with entropy calculations.)
+
+My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I resigned myself to stay at the office late to finish that.
+
+But I was just in so much (psychological) pain. Or at leastâas I noted in one of a series of emails to my posse that nightâI felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to intepret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, _&c_.), I think I'm still noticeably _incentivizable_: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be either rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated. (Kevin Simler: [tears are a discount on friendship](https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/).)
+
+I [tweeted a Sequences quote](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089) to summarize how I felt (the mention of @ESYudkowsky being to attribute credit, I told myself; I figured Yudkowsky had enough followers that he probably wouldn't see a notification):
+
+> "âand if you still have something to protect, so that you MUST keep going, and CANNOT resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationalityâ [1/3]
+>
+> "âthen you will be ready to start your journey[.] To take sole responsibility, to live without any trustworthy defenses, and to forge a higher Art than the one you were once taught. [2/3]
+>
+> "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." â@ESYudkowsky (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) [end/3]
+
+Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I had been taught were great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having _forgotten!_
+
+I did, eventually, get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my [2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/) and [2017](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). We didn't want another bad outcome like that; we really didn't. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep will come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people come in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing was to be calm.
+
+I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
+
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for my sanity! Did that matter at all? Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing, if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff? But the _original reason_ it had ever seemed _remotely_ plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the self-designated world-saving good guys", but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the _reason_ that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever; you can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, and suggested that I think of _that_ was what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harrass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that my concerns have merit.
+
+[TODO: Michael jumps in to help, I rebuff him, Michael says WTF and calls me, I take a train home, Alicorn visits with her sonâI mean, her son at the time
+
+One of the other friends I had cc'd on some of the emails came to visit me with her young sonâI mean, her son at the time.
-Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus."; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious.
]
-[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
+(Incidentally, the code that I wrote intermittently between 11 _p.m._ and 4 _a.m._ was a horrible bug-prone mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since, every time someone needs to modify that function and finds it harder to make sense of than it would be if I had been less emotionally overwhelmed in March 2019 and written something sane instead.)
+
+I think at some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But then when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. (Michael seemed to have a theory that people will only change their bad behavior when they see a victim who is being harmed.)
-Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreedâI was even willing to go up to "violent"âin the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
+I supposed that, in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed obviously true, but I was psychologically limited in how much aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, who I still hero-worshipped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 a.m., and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy.)
-When I told Michael about this, he said that I was ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer matters more for your claims than the equivalent of a scientist, and that Ben Hoffman (who I had already shared the thread with Scott with) would be helpful in solidifying my claims to IP defense. I said that I didn't _feel_ like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+Was the answer just that I needed to accept that there wasn't such a thing in the world as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago, at BABSCon, and I just hadn't made the corresponing mental adjustments.)
-[TODO: re Ben's involvementâI shared Scott thread with Ben and Katie; Michael said "could you share this with Ben? I think he is ready to try & help." on 17 December
-19 December
-> talk more with Ben Hoffman, he will be more helpful in solidifying your claims about IP defense etc. ]
-[TOOD: Sarah's involvement: I cc'd her on the 1 December Scott thread, and Sarah chimed in support in that thread, and 16 December draft to Michael]
+On the other hand, a possible reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name and social identity that wasn't just me being stupid was that _the way I talk_ had been trained really hard on this subculture for _ten years_. Most of my emails during this whole campaign had contained multiple Sequences or _Slate Star Codex_ links that I could just expect people to have read. I could spontaneously use [the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you) in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just gave up on "rationalists" being a thing, and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I would lose all that accumulated capital.
-to Sarahâ
-> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
+The language I spoke was _mostly_ educated American English, but I relied on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (and so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, likely because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/)", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. That essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in _Quillette_. The links and phraseology were just too context-bound.
-Ben's replyâ
-> Your special interest is not just a coincidence here.
+Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight a culture war to preserve the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness was having me making crazy decisions.
-Sarah shying away, my rallying cryâ
+[TODO SECTION: proton concession
+ * as it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we got this: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512 (Why now? maybe he saw the "tools have shattered in their hand"; maybe the Quillette article just happened to be timely)
+ * A concession! In the war frame, you'd think this would make me happy
+ * "I did you a favor by Tweeting something obliquely favorable to your object-level crusade, and you repay me by criticizing me? How dare you?!" My model of Sequences-era Eliezer-2009 would never do that, because the species-typical arguments-as-social-exchange
+ * do you think Eliezer is thinking, "Fine, if I tweet something obliquely favorable towards Zack's object-level agenda, maybe Michael's gang will leave me alone now"
+ * If there's some other reason you suspect there might by multiple species of dysphoria, but you tell people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, then you're still kind of misinforming them for political reasons, which is the generalized problem that we're worried about?
+ * Michael's take: not worth the digression; we need to confront the actual crisis
+ * We need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
+]
+
+[TODO: Jessica joins the coalition; she tell me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards);
+Michael said that me and Jess together have more moral authority]
-> There have been times during the last few weeks where it's felt like my mind has shut down with the only thought, "What the hell am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of languageâand worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? I don't want to be one of the Bad Guys. Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
+[TODO: wrapping up with Scott; Kelsey; high and low Church https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
-> Except that I was raised to believe that you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind. And I can't actually point to such a counterargument. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is not a counterargument. When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
+[TODO small section: Ben reiterated that the most important thing was explaining why I've written them off; self-promotion imposes a cost on others; Jessica on creating clarity; Michael on less precise is more violent]
-> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
+[TODO small section: with Ben and Anna about monastaries]
-> But "whatever" is _not a counterargument!_
+[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking]
-> But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_âwhere a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
+[TODO: Jessica's acquaintance said I should have known that wouldn't work]
-> But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
+[TODO: Ben on Eliza the bot therapist analogy
-> I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
+[TODO: after some bouncing off the posse, what was originally an email draft became a public _Less Wrong_ post, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" (note, plural)
+ * Wasn't the math overkill?
+ * math is important for appeal to principleâand as intimidation https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/
+ * four simulacra levels got kicked off here
+ * no politics! just philosophy!
+ * Ben on Michael on whether we are doing politics; "friendship, supplication, and economics"
+ * I could see that I'm including subtext and expecting people to only engage with the text, but if we're not going to get into full-on gender-politics on Less Wrong, but gender politics is motivating an epistemology error, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do! I'm pretty constrained here!
+ *
+ * I had already poisoned the well with "Blegg Mode" the other month, bad decision
+ * We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!?
+]
-> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+[TODO: my reluctance to write a memoir, displacement behavior
+Ben thought it was imporant on 30 Apr, 12 Aug , I confess to being stuck on 9 Nov
+I write more about the philosophy of language instead
+"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
+]
-> I want to emphasize this, because I don't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
-> My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
+curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
-> I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute
+scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility of No"
+LessWrong FAQ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk ]
-> Imagine your friends got a new front porch installed on your house, and you noticed that the boards were smoother and shinier than you expected. A question you might then ask your friend is, "Oh, is this real wood, or one of those wood-plastic composites?"
-> In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
+[TODO section on factional conflict:
+Michael on Anna as an enemy
+24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
+me being regarded as Michael's pawn
+assortment of agendas
+mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
+]
-[TODO: 4 January plea to Yudkowsky againâthis is the part that I should base my thread analysis off of]
+[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
+15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
+]
-[TODO: ... email analysis goes up to 4 January]
+[TODO: Ziz incident; more upset about gender validation than the felony charges, which were equally ridiculous and more obviously linked to physical violence
+complicity with injustice "Ziz isn't going to be a problem for you anymore"
+]
-[TODO: proton concession]
+[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
-[TODO: minor psych episode in March 2019]
+[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
-[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
+[TODO: Christmas party
+people reading funny GPT-2 quotes
+Tsvi said it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area
+motivation deflates after Christmas victory
+5 Jan memoir as nuke
+]
-[TODO: more blogging (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aqumaym7Jd2qhDcy/containment-thread-on-the-motivation-and-political-context), 2019 Christmas party, disclaimer on "Categories Were Made"]
-["Univariate fallacy" also a concession]
+(There's another very important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but unfortunately, it's not my story to tell.)
[TODO: categories clarification from EYâvictory?!]
[TODO: I didn't put this together until looking at my email just now, but based on the timing, the Feb. 2021 pronouns post was likely causally downstream of me being temporarily more salient to EY because of my highly-Liked response to his "anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside" from 17 February; it wasn't gratuitously out of the blue]
[TODO: "simplest and best" pronoun proposal, sometimes personally prudent; support from Oli]
+[TODO: the Law violation]
[TODO: the dolphin war, our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014; this is a sign that we're a cult]