From this, Jessica derived the moral that when people are doing something that seems obviously terrible and in bad faith, it could help to publicly explain why the abstract thing is bad, without accusing anyone. This made sense because people didn't want to be held to standards that other people aren't being held to: a call-out directed at oneself personally could be selective enforcement, but a call-out of the abstract pattern invited changing one's behavior if the new equilibrium looked better.
-Michael said that part of the reason this worked was because it represented a clear threat to skapegoat, while also _not_ skapegoating, and not surrendering the option to do so later; it was significant that Jessica's choice of example positioned her on the side of the powerful social-justice coalition.
+Michael said that part of the reason this worked was because it represented a clear threat to scapegoat, while also _not_ scapegoating, and not surrendering the option to do so later; it was significant that Jessica's choice of example positioned her on the side of the powerful social-justice coalition.
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I had an interesting interaction with Somni, one of the "Meeker Four"—presumably out on bail at this time?—on 12 December 2019.
-I told her, from a certain perspective, it's surprising that you spend so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, _&c._, but _I_ seemed to get along fine with her—because "naïvely", one would think that my views were _so much worse_. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
+I told her, from a certain perspective, it's surprising that you spend so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, _&c._, but _I_ seemed to get along fine with her—because "naïvely", one would think that my views were so much worse. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
-To be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally-ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have intrinsic moral patiency of women), but _can_ get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so, and no one was allowed to notice this except me, because everyone prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
+In order to be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally-ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have intrinsic moral patiency of women), but _can_ get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so, and no one was allowed to notice this except me, because everyone prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
Somni said that it was because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting, and that I wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she _should_ be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.
-I would later remark to Anna (Subject: "a peek behind the fog of war; and, [redacted]", 6 February 2020) that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior.
-
-Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from _them_. It was as if the mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.
+I would later remark to Anna that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from _them_. It was as if the mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.
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Scott said he might agree with me if he thought the world-model-clarity _vs._ utilitarian benefit tradeoff was unfavorable—or if he thought it had the chance of snowballing like in his "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lighting".
-... I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.
+I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.
I had technical reasons to be very skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs ... doesn't seem like a nice place to live, right? Doesn't seem like a culture that can solve AI alignment, right?
If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous U.S. states. It may be inconvenient that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, and we have to deal with the consequences of that, but there's no sense in which it's _wrong_ that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.
-But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is not a particularly deep or informative one.
+But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is shallow.
A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
-The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people _do_ with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be _illustrated_ similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're very different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to explain why gerrymandered categories were allegedly okay, showed that he Didn't Get It.
+The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people do with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be _illustrated_ similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to explain why gerrymandered categories were allegedly okay, showed that he Didn't Get It.
-I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone _want_ a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign _higher utility_ to doing it this way", had to be messing with you. Where would such a utility function come from? Intuitively, it had to be precisely _because_ squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would _realistically_ want to do that would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold."
+I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone _want_ a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign higher utility to doing it this way", had to be messing with you. Where would such a utility function come from? Intuitively, it had to be precisely _because_ squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would realistically want to do that would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold."
That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of _closeness_ that made some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
✓ recap of crimes, cont'd
✓ Dolphin War finish
✓ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation
+- out of patience email
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
_ plan to reach out to Rick / Michael on creepy men/crazy men
_ reaction to Ziz
_ State of Steven
_ complicity and friendship
-_ out of patience email
+_ repair pt. 5 dath ilan transition
- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
blocks to fit somewhere—
_ choice quotes in "end of the Category War" thank you note
_ 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
+_ mention "Darkest Timeline" and Skyrms somewhere
pt. 4 edit tier—
_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
_ Caliphate / craft and the community
_ colony ship happiness lie in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWaJvBMb9HGBwtNqd/qualitative-strategies-of-friendliness
_ re being fair to abusers: thinking about what behavior pattern you would like to see, generally, by people in your situation, instead of privileging the perspective and feelings of people who've made themselves vulnerable to you by transgressing against you
Friend of the blog Ninety-Three has been nagging me about my pathetic pacing—looking at the diffs of my wordcount spreadsheet, I have four thousand-word days in January, two in February, and two in March (which is half-over). He ... has a point. With no dayjob and no responsibilities, four-figure wordcount days should be normal, something that happens four times a week, not four times a month.
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-It might actually make sense for this to get split into eight parts??—I'm going to finish the five-part draft first before doing any more splitting. But—
-
-Here's where we stand now—
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-24K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-21K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-31K Standing Under the Same Sky
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-115K
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-What if that became something more like—
-19K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-10K My Recent Madness (working title)
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-18K Dignity (working title)
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
- 3K Epilogue (working title)
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-139K
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-If I did this, I would need three more good (non-working) titles and epigraph quotes. For epigraphs, I'm thinking—
-My Recent Madness—Zoolander "crazy pills" quote
-Dignity—it has all been said before, but you must say it again
-Epilogue—the truth is great and shall prevail
-
-... I don't think I want to go to eight parts, though—that's way too self-indulgent! (I think I can go to six, because the dath ilan discussion actually is long and separable; I probably don't need a separate epilogue-post.) If one of my existing parts runs over 30K words, that's strong evidence that it can be cut.
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-30K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-20K Dignity (working title)
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
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-139K
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-—which implies that I'm 25 double-digit writing days away, such that finishing a gapless ms. in April is at least thinkable ... but only if I stop daydreaming and get to work.
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-17K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-13K People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-20K Zevi's Choice
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
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-139K
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The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff