>
> —Laura Barrett, ["Deception Island Optimists Club"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U)
-Six or sixteen or twenty-one or forty-seven months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more long blog posts to write—one for the robot-cult blog re-stating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with somewhat more math this time and then using it to give an account of _mimickry_, and one here doing some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding—and then I'll be _done_.
+Six or sixteen or twenty-one or forty-seven months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more long blog posts to write—one for the robot-cult blog restating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with somewhat more math this time and then using it to give an account of _mimickry_, and one here doing some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding—and then I'll be _done_.
-Not done writing. Done _grieving_. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense).
+Not done writing. Done _grieving_. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense). Maybe I'll start studying math again.
Last week, I "e-ttended" the conference associated with this open-source scene I've been into for a while—although I've been so distracted by the Category War that I've landed [exactly one commit](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/d1cdb02e4d4) in master in the last 13 months. (I think I'm still allowed to say "in master", although ["whitelist" is out](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/74127).)
Only if I'm serious about exiting my grief loop, I need to stop being so profoundly alienated by how thoroughly the finest technical minds of my generation are wholly owned by Blue Egregore. _I fear the successor ideology_—the righteous glee with which they proclaim that everything is political, that anyone with reservations about the Code of Conduct is _ipso facto_ a bigot, how empathy is as important if not more so than technical excellence ...
-I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the _same people_. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same [beautiful moral ideal](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) as everyone else. I just—stopped receiving updates a few years back. From their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date with the Current Year consensus, which everyone wants to be [corrigible](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility) to.
+I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the _same people_. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same [beautiful moral ideal](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) as everyone else. I just—stopped receiving updates a few years back. From their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date with the Current Year's nexus of [ideological coordination](https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/), which everyone wants to be [corrigible](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility) to.
-Or maybe I'm not _even_ running unpatched Liberalism 2009? I'm still loyal to the beau—to _my interpretation of_ the beautiful moral ideal. But I've done a lot of off-curriculum reading—[it usually begins with Ayn Rand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Usually_Begins_with_Ayn_Rand), but it gets [much](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) [worse](/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/#goldberg). It ... leaves a mark.
+Or maybe I'm not _even_ running unpatched Liberalism 2009? I'm still loyal to the beau—to _my interpretation of_ the beautiful moral ideal. But I've done a lot of off-curriculum reading—[it usually begins with Ayn Rand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Usually_Begins_with_Ayn_Rand), but it [gets](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) [much](/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/#goldberg) [worse](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/). It ... leaves a mark. It's _supposed to_ leave a mark on the world-model without touching the utility function.
One of the remote conference talks was about using our software for computational biology. There was something I wanted to say in the Discord channel, related to how I might want to redirect my energies after I'm done grieving. I typed it out in my Emacs `*scratch*` buffer, but, after weighing the risks for a few seconds, deleted a parenthetical at the end.
> (_e.g._ if someone in the world is working on <https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection> and needs programmers)
-It probably wouldn't have mattered either way. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter.
+It probably wouldn't have mattered either way, with so many messages flying by in the chat. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter: you can get surprisingly fair into discussing the actual substance of ideas as long as no _says a Bad word_ like "eugenics".
+The [GPT-3 demos](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3) have been tickling my neuroticism.
+My robot cult as currently
-The GPT-3 demos have been tickling my neuroticism.
-
-
-
-https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam
There's more that I could say here, but I'm not sure that I should
"I use she/her pronouns"
-
-> The best thing about the Rust community is that we are a community where empathy and personal maturity are as important. If not more important than technical excellence, and I've certainly seen that today.
—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation. But it was a different time, then. Of course I had _heard of_ transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life.
-At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender identity". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman. It's roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
+At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
This brings me to the other thing I need to explain about my teenage years, which is that I became very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_.
So, you know, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_.
+(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from some practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends—I mean, to the extent that I had friends and not just books.)
+
It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred self-identity things. True, the blank slate doctrine has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been likened to a nontheistic state religion, I was a _very_ religious teenager. But there was presumably a _reason_ I cared so much about being a good pro-feminist, and hardly spent any time at all thinking about, _e.g._, racial justice.
So, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ Eliezer Yudkowsky rewrote my personality over the internet.
For example, as part of [an early explanation of why the values we would want to program into an artificial superintelligence don't reduce to any one simple principle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions), Yudkowsky remarks that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value."
-From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism, this assertion is at least somewhat cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?
+From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?
+
+Thinking about it from my current perspective ... I mean, probably not? So, for the most part, all humans are extremely similar: [complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind).
+
-Well ... think about it.
> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?
(To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! But more on this later.)
-
-
NYT—"Who Should Compete in Women's Sports? There Are 'Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions'": https://archive.is/Ckygw
https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/677z/the_clothesstealing_lesbianobsessed_agp/
+
+https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff