Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, _e.g._, racial IQ differences?
-I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
+<a id="tragedy-of-recursive-silencing"></a>I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor, and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves being pushed to the "Say Nothing" attractor.
It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:[^linkrot]
-[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but Yudkowsky's comment was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d)
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but Yudkowsky's comment was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d).
> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
>
So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because ... it wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, suddenly escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor was horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html); carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
-A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts that didn't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about without making it personal (even if, secretly, it was personal).
+A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts that didn't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about without making it personal, even if, secretly ("secretly"), it was personal.
Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abuser. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would reduce the perceived complexity of the problem.
>
> The problem with "it's a policy debate about how to use language" is that it completely elides the issue that some ways of using language _perform better_ at communicating information, such that **attempts to define new words or new senses of _existing_ words should come with a justification for why the new sense is _useful for conveying information_, and that _is_ a matter of Truth.** Without such a justification, it's hard to see why you would _want_ to redefine a word _except_ to mislead people with strategic equivocation.
>
-> It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
+> <a id="literally-a-white-supremacist"></a>It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
>
> It is _literally true_ that 2 + 2 = 6 (if I'm allowed to define '2' as •••-many).
>
My poor performance during this incident [weighs on my conscience](/2020/Dec/liability/) particularly because I had previously been in the position of being crazy and benefitting from the help of my friends (including many of the same people involved in this incident) rather than getting sent back to psychiatric prison ("hospital", they call it a "hospital"). Of all people, I had a special debt to "pay it forward", and one might have hoped that I would also have special skills, that remembering being on the receiving end of a psychiatric tripsitting operation would help me know what to do on the giving end. Neither of those panned out.
-Some might appeal to the proverb, "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up being okay, and that, while the stress contributed to me having a relapse of some of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up being okay, too. I am instead inclined to dwell on [another proverb](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
+Some might appeal to the proverb, "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up recovering, and that, while the stress contributed to me having a somewhat serious relapse of some of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up recovering, too. I am instead inclined to dwell on [another proverb](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
-----
_ FTX validated Ben's view of EA!! ("systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done")
_ "your failure to model social reality is believing people when they claim noble motives"
_ hint at Vanessa being trans
+_ quote Jack on timelines anxiety
_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
pt. 4 edit tier—
_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
_ revise and cut words from "bad faith" section since can link to "Assume Bad Faith"
-_ cut words from January 2020 Twitter exchange (after war criminal defenses)
+
_ everyone *who matters* prefers to stay on the good side
_ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
_ clarify that Keltham infers there are no mascochists, vs. Word of God
_ "Doublethink" ref in Xu discussion should mention that Word of God Eliezerfic clarification that it's not about telling others
_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray/comment/git7xaE2aHfSZyLzL
+_ cut words from January 2020 Twitter exchange (after war criminal defenses)
things to discuss with Michael/Ben/Jessica—
_ Anna on Paul Graham
_ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+_ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight this)
_ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
_ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
_ elided Sasha disaster (new)
_ lc on elves and Sparashki
_ Michael Bailey's new AGP in women study
_ footnote "said that he wishes he'd never published"
-_ replace "Oh man oh jeez" Rick & Morty link
-_ Nevada bona fides
_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
_ double-check correctness of Keltham-on-paternalism link
_ Arbital TDT explanation
_ find Sequences cite "if you don't know how your AI works, that's bad"
_ cover reply to my initial conspiracy complaint about dath ilan?
-_ "not hard to find": link to more /r/itsafetish-like anecdotes
-_ compile ancillary KP doctor's notes page and linky
_ acknowledging Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's decision theory contributions
_ go back and read all the masochism tags: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
-_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
_ footnote about Scott writing six times faster than me
_ include Eric Weinstein in archive.is spree
_ explain mods protect-feelings
_ explain MOPs better
_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
-_ probably give Amelia as pseudonym?
+
_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
-_ clarify Sarah dropping out of the coordination group
_ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not
_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
_ re "EY is a fraud": it's a _conditional_ that he can modus tollens if he wants
_ NRx point about HBD being more than IQ, ties in with how I think the focus on IQ is distasteful, but I have political incentives to bring it up
_ "arguing for a duty to self-censorship"—contrast to my "closing thoughts" email
-_ explain Amelia Davis Ford ref
-_ New York NRx conversation, flesh out "mostly guys"; I was acknowleding diversity as unrealistic and hypocritical; he outright doesn't believe in "people" as opposed to men/women
_ fold in observations from "trapped priors—at home"
-_ earlier reference the children's books?! "And the Methods of Pre-Rationality"
_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
_ "typographical attack surface" isn't clear
_ voting reputation section is weak, needs revision
_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
_ when to use first _vs. last names
> I'm also afraid of the failure mode where I get frame-controlled by the Michael/Ben/Jessica mini-egregore (while we tell ourselves a story that we're the real rationalist coordination group and not an egregore at all). Michael says that the worldview he's articulating would be the one that would be obvious to me if I felt that I was in danger. Insofar as I trust that my friends' mini-egregore is seeing something but I don't trust the details, the obvious path forward is to try to do original seeing while leaning into fear—trusting Michael's meta level advice, but not his detailed story.
Weird tribalist praise for Scott: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions/comment/ez8xrquaXmmvbsYPi
+
+https://hpmor.com/chapter/97
+> "Or tricks," Harry said evenly. "Statements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false. I think it's worth making that distinction.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards/comment/TcsXh44pB9xRziGgt
+> A bunch of people we respected and worked with had decided the world was going to end, very soon, uncomfortably soon, and they were making it extremely difficult for us to check their work.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff