X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=notes%2Fa-hill-of-validity-sections.md;h=115047c3fe8fc1b74fd736e09b3d9ef6013c00ad;hb=bba25ffa61c1dde92abdd620ab139cda1303a150;hp=517cf2900b1d0651e5ca99a79ee0d4534372342f;hpb=87138ab3a9bbeb2b5dff10304451543f78fc9a29;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git
diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index 517cf29..115047c 100644
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -1,22 +1,81 @@
-editing tierâ
-_ better explanation of posse formation
-_ Emperor Norton ordered Hayes executed
+With internet availableâ
+_ "McCarthyist" should link to Moldbug on the "Brown Scare"
+_ check on wording of Yudkowsky's anti-Moldbug comment
+_ my public objection to Yudkowsky's denunciation of NRx https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120
+_ except when it's net bad to have concluded Y: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/[Error%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server]/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
+_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
+_ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
+_ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning Children
+_ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
+_ "Causal vs. Social Reality"
+_ elaborate on why I'm not leaking sensitive bits, by explaining what can be inferred by what was and wasn't said in public
+_ what is the dictionary definition of _gestalt_ (maybe link it?)
+_ better examples from "Yes Requires the Possibility of No"
+_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
+_ me remarking to "Wilhelm" that I think I met Vanessa at Solstice once, commented on Greg Egan
+_ debate with Benquo and Jessicata
+_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
+_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
+_ that neuroscience paper backing the
+_ Prudentbot § from "Robust Cooperation" paper
+_ JDP on warrant and standing
+_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
+_ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
+_ when did I ask Leon about getting easier tasks?
+_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
+_ 13th century word meanings
+_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
+_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance
+_ dath ilan conspiracy references
+
+
+far editing tierâ
+_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
+_ make sure to quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy before calling back to it
+_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
+_ explain earlier that my practice of "throw money at things" also applied to my friendship with Anna
+_ mention my robot cult history (I've been here since the late 'aughts)
+_ ask Anna what she meant by "soldiers in an ambulance"; I was going to write up an explanation for Ben, but I don't seem to remember
+_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
+_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
+_ context of his claim to not be taking a stand
+_ clarify "Merlin didn't like Vassar" example about Mike's name
+_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
+_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
+_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
+_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
+_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
+_ clarify why Michael thought Scott was "gaslighting" me, include "beeseech bowels of Christ"
_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
+_ explain "court ruling" earlier
+_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
+_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
+_ explain the adversarial pressure on privacy norms
+_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
+_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
+_ better explanation of posse formation
_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
-_ the right way to explain how I'm respecting Yudkowsky's privacy
_ clarify sequence of outreach attempts
_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
-_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow
+_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ Discord discourse with Alicorner
-_ screenshot Rob's Facebook comment which I link
-_ explain first use of Center for Applied Rationality
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
-_ Anna thought badmouthing Michael was OK by Michael's standards
-_ chat with "Wilhelm" during March 2019 minor psych episode
-_ explain the adversarial pressure on privacy norms
-_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
+_ when to use first _vs. last names
+_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
+_ January 2019 meeting with Ziz and Gwen
+_ better summary of Littman
+_ explain Rob
+_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
+
+
+terms to explain on first mentionâ
+_ "Caliphate"
+_ "rationalist"
+_ Center for Applied Rationality
+_ MIRI
+_ "egregore"
+
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objectionâ
_ Iceman
@@ -24,13 +83,23 @@ _ Ben/Jessica
_ Scott
_ Anna
_ secret posse member
+_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
+_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader (Swimmer?)
-_ Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)
-(probably don't bother with Michael?)
+_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
+_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
+(maybe don't bother with Michael?)
+
+marketingâ
+_ Twitter
+_ Facebook
+_ Less Wrong
+_ should I buy Twitter ads to increase reach??
+_ TheMotte.org
things to bring up in consultation emailsâ
_ dropping "and Scott" in Jessica's description of attacking narcissim
-_ I think it's OK to copy my friend's language from emails; plagiarism instincts
+_ I think it's OK to copy my friends' language from emails; plagiarism instincts
-------
@@ -115,11 +184,19 @@ It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even
I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"ânot because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
+
+----
+
Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, becauseâwhatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)âand however much many of us would prefer not to talk about themâon the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral oneâand that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows itâeven if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
+Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows itâeven if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
+
+
+(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):
+
+
Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
@@ -159,6 +236,8 @@ I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the t
It worked once, right?
+-----
+
> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
@@ -172,35 +251,17 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainst
> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
(!!)
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
-https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
-> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
-
-> This about dath ilani, they are trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything, and so at the end of it all you look at what happened and try to build an explanation around that alone.
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866
-
-
-
-> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
"assuming that it was a 'he'"âpeople treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
I realize it wasn't personalâno one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-whom I have variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"
-
-* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
-
> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
@@ -208,11 +269,6 @@ EGS??
(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
@@ -220,8 +276,6 @@ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_we
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
-I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating 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".
-
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any otherâit's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
@@ -229,23 +283,17 @@ https://archive.is/7Wolo
> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
Namespace's point about the two EYs
-[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"â link to the correct contrarian cluster
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
-
-Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
-what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
I guess I feel pretty naïve now, butâI _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked itâevidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
@@ -267,11 +315,6 @@ I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://be
(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-
-It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?âor rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
-
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
-
E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
@@ -279,6 +322,8 @@ The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the se
> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
+
> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
@@ -304,7 +349,6 @@ https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
-
If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
@@ -314,12 +358,8 @@ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-gover
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
-the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
-You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)âwhy do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
-but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical realityâif human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobicâwell, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
-which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)âwe can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
+
that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
@@ -328,7 +368,10 @@ that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Rea
[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
-> anything that people are motivated to argue about is not arbitrary. It is being controlled by invisible criteria of evaluation, it has connotations with consequences
+> Appeal to arbitrariness - again, the notion that [word definitions are arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/) serves as a good example (in fact I was harvesting some of these appeals from that sequence). It's not just that this is wrong, but that it serves to cut off further discourse. Generally, anything that people are motivated to argue about is not _arbitrary_. It is being controlled by invisible criteria of evaluation, it has connotations with consequences, and if _that_ isn't true either, the topic of discourse is probably not "arbitrary" but just "meaningless". No map that corresponds to an external territory can be arbitrary.
+
+> _Appeal to inner privacy_ - "you can't possibly know how I feel!" It's true that modern technology still encounters some slight difficulties in reading thoughts out of the brain, though work is underway as we speak. But it is rare that the exact details of how you feel are the key subject matter being disputed. Here the bony borders of the skull are being redeployed as a hard barrier to keep out further arguments.
+
If Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man ..." had never been published, would we still be talking about dolphins and trees in the same way?
@@ -352,9 +395,6 @@ https://twitter.com/fortenforge/status/1402057829142302721
uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
-It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
-
If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?
When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matterâdoesn't _fucking_ matter."
@@ -368,58 +408,6 @@ The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!
People change their opinion with the party lineâsimilarly with Scott and Yud
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12550?campaign=woletoc
-"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."
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089
-
-Robert Stadler
-
-----------
-
-In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
-
-> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. [TODO: continue the quote to the part about Verrez self-awareness]
-
-When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
-
-Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
-
-The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be realâjust as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
-
-The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selvesâand that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
-
-A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"âthere was a photo attached to the Tweetâ"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
-
-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understandâ
-
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. [TODO: echo the Verrez self-awareness phrasing]
-
-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
-
-In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
-
-But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
-
-And if that's too much to accept of the general publicâ
-
-And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their bettersâ
-
-Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
-
-[in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016â2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
-
-
-
-
-----------
-
-[TODO: David Xu's postrat]
-And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
-
-
------------
-
-Really, it's impressive how far we got in establishing a cult of Bayesians in a world where "discimination" is a transgression against the dominant ideology! I can't be the only one who got the joke
-
https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
prevaricate
@@ -428,31 +416,40 @@ back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as i
> [Anna] seemed to disapprove of our putting pressure on Scott, because the fact that Scott has done a lot of great work is exactly what made him a target for our pressure.
-> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused
-
> I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and MeanâI don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."
> He says he likes "monastic rationalism vs. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben is proposing.
> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.
-⢠at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinionsâyou should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568
-> Because it was you, I tried to read this when it came out. But you do not know how to come to a point, because you are too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with you if you don't write even more first; so then I started skimming, and then I gave up.
+
+
+
+
+Yudkowsky complainsânot entirely without justificationâthat I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)
+
+But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.
+
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words: "Men aren't women tho."
+
> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
+> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead. That's woke filter bubble thinking. I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787
+
+
But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
-> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
+> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
@@ -471,22 +468,6 @@ example of hero-worship, David Pearce writesâ
https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
> recursively cloning Scott Alexanderâwith promising allelic variations - and hothousing the âproductsâ could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-
-Or as Yudkowsky put itâ
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. Nullius in verba.
-
Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.
@@ -509,10 +490,6 @@ That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorizationâac
And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"),
-
-
-
-
when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
@@ -521,54 +498,6 @@ If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remember
-----
-I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-
-_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
-
-At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
-
-On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
-
-On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
-
-Note: being _on peaceful terms_ with the progressive _Zeitgeist_ isn't the same as kowtowing to it entirely. So, for example, Yudkowsky is _also_ on the record claiming thatâ
-
-> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
-
-> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
-
-There's a sense in which this could be read as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF _was_ the thing I was originally trying to talk about, before the philosophy-of-language derailing, and here Yudkowsky is backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology. So there's an intuition that I should be grateful for and satisfied with this concessionâthat it would be _greedy_ for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he's throwing me a bone here.
-
-But that intuition is _wrong_. The perception that there are "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an _illusion_ of the human cognitive architecture; it's not something that any sane cognitive process would think in the course of constructing a map that reflects the territory.
-
-As I explained in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), this argument that "gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties" is actually _wrong_. The _reason_ I believe in the two-type taxonomy of MtF is because of [the _empirical_ case that androphilic and non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexualism actually look like different things](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), enough so for the two-type clustering to [pay the rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) [for its complexity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length).
-
-But Yudkowsky can't afford to acknowledge the empirical case for the two-type taxonomyâthat really _would_ get him in trouble with progressives. So in order to throw me a bone while maintaining his above-it-all [pretending to be wise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise) centerist pose, he needs to come up with some other excuse that "exhibit[s] generally rationalist principles".
-
-The lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even when the political pressure is coming from _me_.
-
-If you "project" my work into the "subspace" of contemporary political conflicts, it usually _codes as_ favoring "anti-trans" faction more often than not, but [that's really not what I'm trying to do](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). From my perspective, it's just that the "pro-trans" faction happens to be very wrong about a lot of stuff that I care about. But being wrong about a lot of stuff isn't the same thing as being wrong about everything; it's _important_ that I spontaneously invent and publish pieces like ["On the Argumentative Form"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) and ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) that "favor" the "pro-trans" faction. That's how you know (and how I know) that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
-
-In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
-
-Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
-
-It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political-risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that's not what's going on, he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of _something_âbut at this point, I have no reason to care. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a _waste of everyone's time_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
-
-Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
-
-I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
-
-(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
-
-What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-
-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
-
-Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
-
-But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
-
Why does this matter?
[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
@@ -577,10 +506,6 @@ a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect ou
It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
-> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
->
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
https://www.readthesequences.com/
> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
@@ -594,23 +519,14 @@ It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly
congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
-> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
-the "It is sometimes personally prudent to be seen to agree with Stalin" attitude behaves like a conspiracy, even if
I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/
-> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
-
-playing on a different chessboardâI would be fine with it if he didn't shit on my chessboard. But my shitting on his chessboard
-
-I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard ("at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard ([TODO linky-quotey not standing in defense of truth]) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards ([TODO linky-quotey clarification]), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4. But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ([TODO linkey-quotey normative meaning of 'he']) ... at _that_ point, it's hard for me to consider him as neutrally playing on a different chessboard, rather than actively trying to shit on mine; the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio in favor of the latter hypothesis.
-
Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG8i7ZiqLxthACaBi/do-fandoms-need-awfulness
> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong isâaside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequencesâcommitted not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
@@ -618,18 +534,14 @@ Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/documen
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
-Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexanderâ
-https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
-> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard (supposedly for the benefit of people with your sexuality), you don't take it lying down
-contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard, you don't take it lying down
+Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!
Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
-Feb. 2016 happy price schedule https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228
-
one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
@@ -651,7 +563,7 @@ in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
Rubicesâ
> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
-gonna mostlky bite the bullet on this one
+gonna mostly bite the bullet on this one
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
@@ -661,7 +573,6 @@ The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels tellin
https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz
-"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
@@ -768,7 +679,9 @@ And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the
----
-Habryka's PalmCone memo mentions there being people whose top priority is to influence youâthat's totally what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c5DgfRyWgS2Sjgzmt/on-funding-trust-relationships-and-scaling-our-community
+> there will be someone in the world whose full-time job and top-priority it is to figure out how to write a proposal, or give you a pitch at a party, or write a blogpost, or strike up a conversation, that will cause you to give them money, or power, or status. For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question "how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of" or "how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?", and they will write long Google Docs to their colleagues about their models and theories of you, and spend dozens of hours thinking specifically about how to get you to do what they want, while drawing up flowcharts that will include your name, your preferences, and your interests.
+not totally unlike what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/
@@ -779,18 +692,25 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-
> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving themâwell, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?
the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
-> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
+> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
------
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
+> I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time.
+
+
+
If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-> "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me" I wish I had never written about LDT and just told people to vote for reasons they understand when they're older [TODO full direct quote]
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
+>
+> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
-Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theoryâwhat a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I calim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
+Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theoryâwhat a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I claim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
-To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once [TODO: linky] wrote to Judea Pearl to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matterâit didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
+To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, [the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once wrote to Judea Pearl](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKa9Lebyebf6a7P2o/the-rhythm-of-disagreement) to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matterâit didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
@@ -799,7 +719,11 @@ If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he shoul
[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq ]
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq
+
+> The condescension is _important information_ to help a reader figure out what is producing the outputs, and hiding it would make the task of 'extract the key insights' harder.
+
+]
------
@@ -837,8 +761,6 @@ So, because
-----
-Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
-
a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
@@ -847,21 +769,6 @@ https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
------
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)âI don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-
-If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to strategically say positive things about Republican candidates, and make sure to never, ever say negative things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_âeven if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-
-
------
-
comments to "Wilhelm", January 2019â
I got concessions on all the important parts (categories should make predictions, trans women differ from cis women in a masc direction), and these people just don't fucking CARE ... like, if I'm trying to be agreeable, I could agree that trans women resemble women if you restrict your vision to the subspace spanned by the "preferred pronouns" and "self-identified gender identity" dimensions ... but, but, WTF, be serious, guys
@@ -901,7 +808,7 @@ and Keltham tells Carissa (null action pg 39) to keep the Light alive as long as
> It, itâthe feâit, flameâflames. Flamesâon the side of my face. Breathingâbreathlâheaving breaths, heavingâ
-like a crazy ex-girlfriend (I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed)
+like a crazy ex-girlfriend (["I have no underlying issues to address / I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8))
But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732
@@ -926,22 +833,22 @@ The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor
âand would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
-... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal. But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that
-At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's
+Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal.
-Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
-[TODO: relevance of multivariateâ
+But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+
+At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's
-(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+
+Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
-]
-
[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
]
@@ -953,9 +860,11 @@ https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Z
]
-Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fineâa solidly above-average performance, really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it wasâconfusing.
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context.
-Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
+really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it wasâconfusing.
+
+Because of my hero worship,
> People probably change their mind more often than they explicitly concede arguments, which is fine because intellectual progress is more important than people who were wrong performing submission.
@@ -968,17 +877,12 @@ My 28 November 2018 text to Michaelâ
> just a thread reply to Eliezer that says "I trust Zack's rationality and think you should pay attention to what he has to say" (if and only if you actually believe that to be true, obviously)?
-(don't know how to summarize the part with Ianâ)
-I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democratânot just about the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole _thing_ of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was sympathetic.
-
-
-[TODO: paraphrase remaining interaction with Scott, or not worth the space?
-
-> 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.
helping Norton live in the real world
-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
+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]
@@ -1004,9 +908,6 @@ The McGongall turning into a cat parody may actually be worth fitting inâMcCon
Michael on EA suppressing credible criticism https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1559534045914177538
-"epistemic hero"
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-
zinger from 93â
> who present "this empirical claim is inconsistent with the basic tenets of my philosophy" as an argument against the _claim_
@@ -1020,4 +921,591 @@ https://unstableontology.com/2021/04/12/on-commitments-to-anti-normativity/
Sucking up the the Blue Egregore would make sense if you _knew_ that was the critical resource
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
-I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizing
\ No newline at end of file
+I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizingâactually I think it's OK
+
+This should be common sense, though
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3szWd8HwWccJb9z5L/the-ea-community-might-be-neglecting-the-value-of
+
+
+sorrow at putting on a bad performance with respect to the discourse norms of the people I'm trying to rescue/convert; I think my hostile shorthand (saying that censorship costs nothing implies some combination "speech isn't useful" and "other people aren't real" is pointing at real patterns, but people who aren't already on my side are not going to be sympathetic)
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
+> You could argue that a wise policy is that we should all be called by terms and pronouns we don't like, now and then, and that to do otherwise is coddling. You could argue that Twitter shouldn't try to enforce courtesy. You could accuse, that's not what Twitter is really doing.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880
+> But Twitter is at least not *ontologically confused* if they say that using preferred pronouns is courtesy, and claim that they're enforcing a courtesy standard. Replying "That's a lie! I will never lie!" is confused. It'd be sad if the #IDW died on that hill of all hills.
+
+> Acts aren't sentences, pronouns aren't lies, bathrooms aren't fundamental physical constants, and if you know what a motte-and-bailey is you're supposed to know that.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067287459589906432
+
+> I don't care whose point it is on this planet, the point I'm making would stand in any galaxy: You are not standing in noble defense of Truth when you ask who gets to use which bathroom. This is true across all possible worlds, including those with no sociologists in them.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067187363544059905
+
+------
+
+https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896
+
+
+
+
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Crux: "If you say that Stalin is a dictator, you'll be shot, therefore Stalin is not a dictator" has the same structure as "If you say that trans women are male, they'll take massive psych damage, therefore trans women are not male"; both arguments should get the same response.
+Zack M. Davis
+@zackmdavis
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Thoughts on your proposed cruxes: 1 (harmful inferences) is an unworkable AI design: you need correct beliefs first, in order to correctly tell which beliefs are harmful. 4 (non-public concepts) is unworkable for humans: how do you think about things you're not allowed words for?
+
+
+[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
+I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such Xes is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
+
+"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
+
+I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problemâor even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
+]
+
+> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
+
+> a gradual shift away from STEM nerd norms to fandom geek norms [...] the pathological insistence that you're not allowed to notice bad faith
+https://extropian.net/notice/A7rwtky5x3vPAedXZw
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+"When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+
+https://glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=83
+> A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.
+
+further post timelineâ
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
+"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
+"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+
+"Darkest Timeline" June 2020
+"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" Aug 2020
+"Unnatural Categories" Jan 2021
+"Differential Signal Costs" Mar 2021
+
+
+"Public Heretic" on "Where to Draw the Boundary?"â
+> But reality, in its full buzzing and blooming confusion, contains an infinite numbers of 'joints' along which it could be carved. It is not at all clear how we could say that focusing one some of those joints is "true" while focusing on other joints is "false," since all such choices are based on similarly arbitrary conventions.
+
+> Now, it is certainly true that certain modes of categorization (i.e. the selection of certain joints) have allowed us to make empirical generalizations that would not otherwise have been possible, whereas other modes of categorization have not yielded any substantial predictive power. But why does that mean that one categorization is "wrong" or "untrue"? Better would seem to be to say that the categorization is "unproductive" in a particular empirical domain.
+
+> Let me make my claim more clear (and thus probably easier to attack): categories do not have truth values. They can be neither true nor false. I would challenge Eliezer to give an example of a categorization which is false in and of itself (rather than simply a categorization which someone then used improperly to make a silly empirical inference).
+
+Yudkowsky's replyâ
+> PH, my reply is contained in Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2
+> I would have been surprised if she was. Joscelin Verreuil also strikes me as being a projection of some facets of a man that a woman most notices, and not a man as we exist from the inside.
+>
+> I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
+> Could you please [taboo](Could you please taboo these?) these?
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> Okay. Iâve never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetimeâs work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the otherâs deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs weâre talking about here.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b
+
+
+> Duly appreciated.
+
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY#comments 110 karma
+support from Oliâ
+> I think there is a question of whether current LessWrong is the right place for this discussion (there are topics that will attract unwanted attention, and when faced with substantial adversarial forces, I think it is OK for LessWrong to decide to avoid those topics as long as they don't seem of crucial importance for the future of humanity, or have those discussions in more obscure ways, or to limit visibility to just some subset of logged-in users, etc). But leaving that discussion aside, basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=cPunK8nFKuQRorcNG#comments
+icemanâ
+> I kinda disagree that this is a mere issue of Straussian reading: I suspect that in this (and other cases), you are seeing the raw output of Elizer's rationalizations and not some sort of instrumental coalition politics dark arts. If I was going for some sort of Straussian play, I wouldn't bring it up unprompted or make long public declarations like this.
+>
+> Zack is hypersensitive to this one issue because it interacts with his Something to Protect. But what I wonder about is where else Eliezer is trying to get away with things like this.
+
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1853001#reply-1853001
+> Another reason people go to Hell? Malediction! An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too! Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit! At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted. A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her _really giving a shit_.
+
+
+I furthermore claim that the following disjunction is true:
+
+> Either the quoted excerpt is a blatant lie on Scott's part because there are rules of rationality governing conceptual boundaries and Scott absolutely knows it, or
+> You have no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way.
+
+there needs to be _some_ way for _someone_ to invest a _finite_ amount of effort to _correct the mistake_
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404698587175350275
+> That Zack now imagines this to be a great trend [...] does seem like an avoidable error and a failure to take perspective on how much most people's lives are not about ourselves
+
+I have a _seflish_ interest in people making and sharing accurate probabilistic inferences about how sex and gender and transgenderedness work in reality, for many reasons, but in part because _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016â2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like
+
+[Dawkins can see it.](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) [Jerry Coyne can see it.](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/)]
+
+when I was near death from that salivary stone, I mumbled something to my father about "our people"
+
+If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
+
+[Is this the hill he wants to die on? The pronouns post mentions "while you can still get away with disclaimers", referring to sanction from the outside world, as if he won't receive any sanction from his people, because he owns us. That's wrong. Yudkowsky as a person doesn't own me; the Sequences-algorithm does
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228
+> I don't think it *should* preclude my posting on topics like these, which is something I get the impression Zack disagrees with me about. I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do *know* they're living in a half-Stalinist environment, even though it hugely bugs Zack that the exact degree of Stalinism and filtration can't be explicitly laid out the way they would be in the meta-Bayesian Should Universe... or something. I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+]
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1568338672499687425
+> I'm not interested in lying to the man in the street. It won't actually save the world, and is not part of a reasonable and probable plan for saving the world; so I'm not willing to cast aside my deontology for it; nor would the elites be immune from the epistemic ruin.
+
+The problem with uncritically validating an autodidactic's ego, is that a _successful_ autodidact needs to have an accurate model of how their studying process is working, and that's a lot harder when people are "benevolently" trying to _wirehead_ you.
+
+The man is so egregiously sexist in any other context, _except_ when I need the right answer to make extremely important medical decisions
+
+I don't need to be a mind-reader about how it feels because I can read, I can point to the text from 2010 and 2016+, and notice the differences
+
+Maybe he was following the same sucking-off-Stalin algorithm internally the whole time (just like Anna was), and I only noticed it in 2016+ because the environment changed, not the algorithm? I doubt it, though (rather, the environment changed the algorithm)
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/
+
+
+origins of the strawberry example
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155625884574228
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
+(Note: we can do this with images of strawberries! The hard problem is presumably inventing nanotech from scratch.)
+
+lack of trust as a reason nothing works: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ shouldn't the rats trust each other?
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way
+> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
+
+
+
+[TODO:
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)âI don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to got out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_âeven if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+]
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
+> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
+I'm totally still doing this
+
+> it's that it's hard to get that innocence back, once you even start thinking about whether you're _independent_ of someone
+
+If Scott's willing to link to A. Marinos, maybe he'd link to my memoir, too? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242
+My reaction to Marinos is probably similar to a lot of people's reaction to me: geez, putting in so much effort to correct Scott's mistake is lame, what a loser, who cares
+
+This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
+> journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
+
+--------
+
+23 June 2020: people are STILL citing "Categories Were Made", TWICE when people on the subreddit asked "What is Slate Star Codex"?
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvqv9av/
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvr47v1/
+> But the blog wasn't always on that 'side', either. Scott wrote one of the best analyses/defenses of trans identity and nonbiological definition of gender that I've ever read, and which ultimately convinced me.
+Yet again someone citing "Categories Were Made" as influential: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/he96rm/star_slate_codex_deleted_because_of_nyt_article/fvr7h7w/
+
+people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/status/1327730282703835137
+
+Even the enemies respect that post!
+https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208
+
+And using it for defense.
+
+Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/
+
+Another "Made for Man" cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwwxycr/
+
+More damage control: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hpohy5/what_are_some_of_scotts_posts_that_challenge_the/fxsu8p0/
+(Comment was deleted. Was I over the line in commenting at all, or just because of the "transparently political reasons" side-swipe? The fact that it got ~18 points suggests the readership was OK with it, even if the moderators weren't)
+
+People are still citing it! https://twitter.com/churrundo/status/1283578666425806851
+
+Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825
+
+Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/
+
+Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."
+
+Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739
+
+31 December
+"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/
+
+Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
+
+Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
+
+Still citing it (20 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qagtqk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_18/hhdiyd1/
+
+Still citing it (21 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qcrhc4/can_someone_provide_an_overview_ofintroduction_to/hhkf6kk/
+
+Still citing it (15 July 21) in a way that suggests it's ratsphere canon: https://twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1415754203293757445
+
+Still citing it (14 November 21): https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1459846336845697028
+
+Still citing it (December 21 podcast): https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2021/12/152-frame-control-with-aella/
+
+Still citing it (2 February 22): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4838964
+
+Still citing it (22 March 22): https://twitter.com/postpostpostr/status/1506480317351272450
+
+Still citing it (25 March 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tj525b/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_21_2022/i22z367/
+
+Still citing it (13 May 22): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkFTXKeFxwcGiBTwk/against-longtermist-as-an-identity
+
+Still citing it, in Eliezerfic Discord (18 Jul 22): https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/954750671280807968/998638253588631613
+
+Still citing it (31 Jul 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wbqtg3/rationality_irl/
+
+Still citing it (19 Sep 22): https://twitter.com/ingalala/status/1568391691064729603
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
+It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+
+------
+
+If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.
+
+If you _don't_ have intent-to-inform, but make sure to never, ever say false things (because you know that "lying" is wrong, and think that as long as you haven't "lied", you're in the clear), but you don't feel like you have an obligation to acknowledge criticisms (for example, because you think you and your flunkies are the only real people in the world, and anyone who doesn't want to become one of your flunkies can be disdained as a "post-rat"), that's potentially a much worse situation, because the errors don't cancel.
+
+----
+
+
+
+bitter comments about rationalistsâ
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7
+
+
+
+------
+
+Yudkowsky's hyper-arroganceâ
+> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
+
+* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
+Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
+
+"epistemic hero"
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
+
+Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+
+Or as Yudkowsky put itâ
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
+
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
+
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
+
+ [TODO: asking Anna to weigh in] (I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my recent habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
+
+https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
+> changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money
+
+when I talked to the Kaiser psychiatrist in January 2021, he said that the drugs that they gave me in 2017 were Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg, which actually seems a lot more reasonable in retrospect (Trazadone is on Scott's insomnia list), but it was a lot scarier in the context of not trusting the authorities
+
+I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) 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 could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventionsâand of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.
+
+http://archive.is/SXmol
+> "don't lie to someone if you wouldn't slash their tires" is actually a paraphrase of Steven Kaas.
+> ... ugh, I forgot that that was from the same Black Belt Bayesian post where one of the examples of bad behavior is from me that time when I aggro'd against Phil Goetz to the point were Michael threatened to get me banned. I was young and grew up in the feminist blogosphere, but as I remarked to Zvi recently, in 2008, we had a way to correct that. (Getting slapped down by Michael's ostracism threat was really painful for me at the time, but in retrospect, it needed to be done.) In the current year, we don't.
+
+
+_Less Wrong_ had recently been rebooted with a new codebase and a new dev/admin team. New-_Less Wrong_ had a system for post to be "Curated". Begging Yudkowsky and Anna to legitimize "... Boundaries?" with a comment hadn't worked, but maybe the mods would (They did end up curating [a post about mole rats](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness).)
+
+
+
+Yudkowsky did [quote-Tweet Colin Wright on the univariate fallacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124757043997372416)
+
+(which I got to [cite in a _Less Wrong_ post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)
+
+
+"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
+(which I got to cite in which I cited in "Schelling Categories")
+
+
+
+"Yes Requires the Possibility of No" 19 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+
+scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May
+
+"epistemic defense" meeting
+
+[TODO section on factional conflict:
+Michael on Anna as cult leader
+Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
+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.
+]
+
+8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining
+
+REACH panel
+
+(Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip")
+
+
+Scott said he liked "monastic rationalism _vs_. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben was proposing.
+
+(I wish I could use this line)
+I really really want to maintain my friendship with Anna despite the fact that we're de facto political enemies now. (And similarly with, e.g., Kelsey, who is like a sister-in-law to me (because she's Merlin Blume's third parent, and I'm Merlin's crazy racist uncle).)
+
+
+https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1164332124712738821
+> I unfortunately have had a policy for over a decade of not putting numbers on a few things, one of which is AGI timelines and one of which is *non-relative* doom probabilities. Among the reasons is that my estimates of those have been extremely unstable.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
+> You might even be justified in [refusing to use probabilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/sg/when_not_to_use_probabilities/) at this point. In all honesty, I really _don't_ know how to estimate the probability of solving an impossible problem that I have gone forth with intent to solve; in a case where I've previously solved some impossible problems, but the particular impossible problem is more difficult than anything I've yet solved, but I plan to work on it longer, etcetera.
+>
+> People ask me how likely it is that humankind will survive, or how likely it is that anyone can build a Friendly AI, or how likely it is that I can build one. I really _don't_ know how to answer. I'm not being evasive; I don't know how to put a probability estimate on my, or someone else, successfully shutting up and doing the impossible. Is it probability zero because it's impossible? Obviously not. But how likely is it that this problem, like previous ones, will give up its unyielding blankness when I understand it better? It's not truly impossible, I can see that much. But humanly impossible? Impossible to me in particular? I don't know how to guess. I can't even translate my intuitive feeling into a number, because the only intuitive feeling I have is that the "chance" depends heavily on my choices and unknown unknowns: a wildly unstable probability estimate.
+
+
+
+
+I don't, actually, know how to prevent the world from ending. Probably we were never going to survive. (The cis-human era of Earth-originating intelligent life wasn't going to last forever, and it's hard to exert detailed control over what comes next.) But if we're going to die either way, I think it would be _more dignified_ if Eliezer Yudkowsky were to behave as if he wanted his faithful students to be informed. Since it doesn't look like we're going to get that, I think it's _more dignified_ if his faithful students _know_ that he's not behaving like he wants us to be informed. And so one of my goals in telling you this long story about how I spent (wasted?) the last six years of my life, is to communicate the moral that
+
+and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.
+
+Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But he didn't create me to not say mean things. If it helpsâas far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007â9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+
+ReACT seems similar to Visible Thoughts Project: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway?commentId=HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt#HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt
+> I've noticed that none of my heroes, not even Douglas Hofstadter or Eric Drexler, seem to live up to my standard of perfection. Always sooner or later they fall short. It's annoying, you know, because it means _I_ have to do it.
+
+But he got it right in 2009; he only started to fall short _later_ for political reasons
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256
+> Your annual reminder that academically conventional decision theory, as taught everywhere on Earth except inside the MIRI-adjacent bubble, says to give in to threats in oneshot games. Only a very rare student is bright enough to deserve blame in place of the teacher.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
+> Atheism: Yes.
+> Many-worlds: Yes.
+> "P-zombies": No.
+>
+> These aren't necessarily simple or easy for contrarians to work through, but the correctness seems as reliable as it gets.
+>
+> Of course there are also slam-dunks like:
+>
+> Natural selection: Yes.
+> World Trade Center rigged with explosives: No.
+
+I wonder how the history of the site would have been different if this had included "Racial differences in cognitive abilities: Yes." (It's worse if he didn't think about it in the first place, rather than noticing and deciding not to say itâit doesn't even seem to show up in the comments!!)
+
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0tTk5VoLSxZ1hJKPRMdzpPzNaBR4eU5ufKEhvvowMFTjKTHykogFfwAZge9Kk5jFLl
+> Yeah, see, *my* equivalent of making ominous noises about the Second Amendment is to hint vaguely that there are all these geneticists around, and gene sequencing is pretty cheap now, and there's this thing called CRISPR, and they can probably figure out how to make a flu virus that cures Borderer culture by excising whatever genes are correlated with that and adding genes correlated with greater intelligence. Not that I'm saying anyone should try something like that if a certain person became US President. Just saying, you know, somebody might think of it.
+
+
+commenting policyâ
+> I will enforce the same standards here as I would on my personal Facebook garden. If it looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with you, I will ban you from commenting on my posts.
+>
+> Specific guidelines:
+>
+> Argue against ideas rather than people.
+> Don't accuse others of committing the Being Wrong Fallacy ("Wow, I can't believe you're so wrong! And you believe you're right! That's even more wrong!").
+> I consider tone-policing to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and will delete it.
+> If I think your own tone is counterproductive, I will try to remember to politely delete your comment instead of rudely saying so in a public reply.
+> If you have helpful personal advice to someone that could perhaps be taken as lowering their status, say it to them in private rather than in a public comment.
+> The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section.
+> The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead.
+
+I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism
+
+
+couldn't resist commenting even after I blocked Yudkowsky on Twitter (30 August 2021)
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02AGzw7EzeB6bDAwvXT8hm4jnC4Lh1te7tC3Q3h2u6QqBfJjp4HKvpCM3LqvcLuXSbl?comment_id=10159857276789228&reply_comment_id=10159858211759228
+Yudkowsky replies (10 September 2021)â
+> Zack, if you can see this, I think Twitter is worse for you than Facebook because of the short-reply constraint. I have a lot more ability to include nuance on Facebook and would not expect most of my statements here to set you off the same way, or for it to be impossible for me to reply effectively if something did come up.
+("impossible to me to reply effectively" implies that I have commenting permissions)
+
+
+"Noble Secrets" Discord threadâ
+> So, I agree that if you perform the experimental test of asking people, "Do you think truthseeking is virtuous?", then a strong supermajority will say "Yes", and that if you ask them, "And are you looking for memes about how to do actually do it?" they'll also say "Yes."
+>
+> But I also notice that in chat the other day, we saw this (in my opinion very revealing) paragraphâ
+>
+> I think of "not in other people" [in "Let the truth destroy what it canâbut in you, not in other people"] not as "infantilizing", but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological.
+>
+> My expectation of a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 in which people were _actually_ looking for memes about how to seek truth, is that the modal, obvious response to a paragraph like this would be something likeâ
+>
+>> Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)" (). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Your Rationality Is My Business" ().
+>
+> âor _something like that_. Obviously, it's not important that the reply use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone responds to this _very obvious_ anti-epistemology () with ... memes about how to actually do truthseeking.
+>
+> And what we _actually_ saw in response to this "You don't get to do harm to other people" message is ... it got 5 :plus_one: reactions.
+
+Yudkowsky repliesâ
+> the Doublethink page is specifically about how you yourself choosing not to know is Unwise
+> to the extent you can even do that rather than convincing yourself that you have
+> it specifically doesn't say "tell other people every truth you know"
+> the point is exactly that you couldn't reasonably end up in an epistemic position of knowing yourself that you ought to lie to yourself
+
+
+--------
+
+My last messages in late-November fight with Alicorner Discord was 4:44 a.m./4:47 am. (!) on 28 November; I mention needing more sleep. Butâthat would have been 6:44 a.m. Austin time? Did I actually not sleep that night? Flipping out and writing Yudkowsky was evening of the same calendar day.
+
+Sam had said professed gender was more predictive.
+
+Bobbi has claimed that "most people who speak the involved dialect of English agree that âwomanâ refers to âan individual who perceives themselves as a womanâ"
+
+Kelsey 27 November
+> I think you could read me as making the claim "it's desirable, for any social gender, for there to be non-medical-transition ways of signaling it"
+
+27 November
+> I don't think linta was saying "you should believe ozy doesn't have a uterus"
+that would be really weird
+
+> well, for one thing, "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" isn't directed at you, it's directed at the trans person
+My replyâ
+> that's almost worse; you're telling them that it's okay to gaslight _everyone else in their social circle_
+
+1702 27 November
+> Stepping back: the specific statement that prompted me to start this horrible discussion even though I usually try to keep my personal hobbyhorse out of this server because I don't want it to destroy my friendships, was @lintamande's suggestion that "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab". I think I have a thought experiment that might clarify why I react so strongly to this sort of thing
+> Suppose Brent Dill showed you this photograph and said, "This is a photograph of a dog. Your eyes may tell you that it's a cat, but you have to say it's a dog, or I'll be very unhappy and it'll be all your fault."
+> In that case, I think you would say, "This is a gaslighting attempt. You are attempting to use my sympathy for you to undermine my perception of reality."
+
+> Flight about to take off so can't explain, but destroying the ability to reason in public about biological sex as a predictive category seems very bad for general sanity, even if freedom and transhumanism is otherwise good
+
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/516744646034980904
+26 November 14:38 p.m.
+> I'm not sure what "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" is supposed to mean if it doesn't cash out to "it's okay to enforce social norms preventing other people from admitting out loud that they have correctly noticed your biological sex"
+
+In contrast to Yudkowsky's claim that you need to have invented something from scratch to make any real progress, this is a case where the people who _did_ invent something can't apply it anymore!!
+
+-----
+
+Examples of non-robot-cult authors using rationality skills that they visibly didn't get from being a robot-cult loyalistâ
+
+James C. Scott, _Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts_, Ch. 4, "False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?", 1990
+
+> The thick theory [of false consciousness] claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation. In its most subtle form, the thin theory is eminently plausible and, some would claim, true by definition. I believe, nevertheless, that it is fundamentally wrong and hope to show why in some detail after putting it in as persuasive a form as possible, so that it is no straw man I am criticizing.
+
+(Steelmanning! One of us!)
+
+Kathryn Paige Harden, _The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality_, Ch. 9, "Using Nature to Understand Nurture", 2021
+
+> [P]olicies that are built on a flawed understanding of which environments are truly causal are wasteful and potentially harmful. In this specific example, even if the state of Texas was successful at delaying teenagers' sexual activity, such a change would not actually improve their mental healthâand an emphasis on such programs potentially diverts investment away from educational programs that _would_ be helpful. (Proponents of teenage abstinence might argue that abstinence is a valuable end for its own sake, but that is a different justification for the policy than the empirical claim that abstinentce is a means toward increased adolencent well-being.)
+
+("Fake Optimization Critiera")
+
+John Snygg, _A New Approach to Differential Geometry Using Clifford's Geometric Algebra_ (§4.7.3) recounts the Arabic mathematician al-Biruni (973â1048).
+
+> More is known about al-Briruni than most Islamic mathematicians because he included bits of autobiographical writings in some of his academic publications. In one of these, _Shadows_, he relates an encounter with a hard-line orthodox cleric. The cleric admonished al-Biruni because he had used an astronomical instrument with Byzantine months engraved on it to determine the time of prayers. Al-Briuni replied:
+>> "The Byzantines also eat food. Then do not imitate them in this!"
+
+(Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence)
+
+-----
+
+I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, butâI _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance. This does not seem remotely credible to me any more.
+
+_It will never stop hurting until I write it down._ ("I've got a thick tongue / Brimming with the words that go unsung.")
+
+_My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter. What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.
+
+An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by peopleâI've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fansâall four of you!) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...
+
+And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.
+
+----
+
+imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bibleâor at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on.
+
+You _know_ this is wrong. Okay, maybe there's _some_ way that same-sex marriage could be compatible with the Church's teachings. But you would have to _argue_ for that; you _can't_ just say there's no arguments _against_ it and call that the end of the discussion! [1 Corinthians 6:9â10](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NKJV): "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators [...] nor homosexuals, nor sodomites [...] will inherit the kingdom of God." It's _right there_. There's [a bunch of passages like that](https://www.livingout.org/the-bible-and-ssa). You _can't possibly_ not see it.
+
+As a man of faith and loyal parishioner, you would _expect_ to be able to resolve the matter by bringing your concern to the priest, who would then see how the sermon had been accidentally misleading, and issue a clarification at next week's sermon, so that the people would not be led astray from the path of God.
+
+The priest doesn't agree; he insists on the contrived technically-not-heresy interpretation. This would be a shock, but it wouldn't, yet, shatter your trust in the Church as an institution. Even the priest is still a flawed mortal man.
+
+Then the Pope misinterets the Bible in the same way in his next encyclical. With the help of some connections, you appeal your case all the way to the Vaticanâand the Pope himself comes back with the same _bullshit_ technically-not-heresy.
+
+You realize that you _cannot take the Pope's words literally_.
+
+That would be _pretty upsetting_, right? To lose faith in, not your religion itselfâ_obviously_ the son of God still died for our sinsâbut the _institution_ that claims to faithfully implement your religion, but is actually doing something else. You can understand why recovering from that might take a year or so.
+
+Or maybe imagine an idealistic young lawyer working for the prosecution in the [Selective Draft Law Cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Draft_Law_Cases) challenging the World War I draft. Since 1865, the Constitution _says_, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If the words "involuntary servitude not as a punishment for a crime" _mean anything_, they surely include the draft. So the draft is unconstitutional. Right?
+
+----
+
+I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember Erin recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)
+
+It needs to either _rebrand_âor failing that, _disband_âor failing that, _be destroyed_.
+
+people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)â
+
+> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)
+
+That ended up being quite a lot of effort!âbut at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work.
+
+This is sort of what I was trying to do when solicitingâbegging forâengagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
+
+If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically expensive for me. Sorry," I can't say I'm not _disappointed_, but I can respect that they labor under different constraints from me.
+
+But we can't even have that, because saying "You're right, but I can't admit this in public" requires _trust_.
+
+_socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+
+I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+Alicorn writes (re Kelsey's anorexia): "man it must be so weird to have a delusion and know it's a delusion and still have it"
+what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true
+... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group
+
+you can't imagine contemporary Yudkowsky adhering to Crocker's rules (http://sl4.org/crocker.html)
+