My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. Then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
+One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
+
+I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
+
+But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. As Ben pointed out, if someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I probably _would_ put some serious thought into it.
+
I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the 60+-comment trainwreck on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
-On 13 April, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could _either_ publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong; and, that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of spoons, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive? [...] (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing")
+On 13 April, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could _either_ publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong; and, that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of spoons, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive? (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing")
-One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
-I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
-But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. As Ben pointed out, if someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I probably _would_ put some serious thought into it.
-Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right.
+Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing.
+
+
+
+that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right.
"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."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff