Years later, when I actually needed grown-up banking services (a credit card to buy books, then groceries; a checking account for direct deposit of wages from my supermarket job), I stayed with Wells Fargo. I didn't even treat it as a decision: all banks were the same to me, so there was no particular reason not to get the credit card and checking account from the same institution where I had already had a savings account for as long as I could remember. (I can only assume this inertia was predicted decades in advance by the executives at Wells Fargo and similar institutions who decided that offering children's savings accounts was a good business decision.)
-I don't know why my father chose Wells Fargo in particular. Or I say, "My father chose," but I have no episodic memory of the event. It's clear that I wouldn't have independently asked for a bank account, but it's not too farfetched to imagine him offering me a choice between Wells Fargo or Bank of America or Chase or whatever other banks were around.
+I don't know why my father chose Wells Fargo in particular. Or I say, "My father chose," but I have no episodic memory of the event, and my father doesn't remember, either. It's clear that I wouldn't have independently asked for a bank account, but it's not too farfetched to imagine him offering me a choice between Wells Fargo or Bank of America or Chase or whatever other banks were around.
If he had offered me a choice, on what basis would I have made it? As a four-year-old, there's no way I could have meaningfully understood the differences between different banking plans and made a rational decision based on a cost–benefit analysis. If I had chosen, it would have been a choice based on information a small child could understand: maybe I liked the letter _W_, or the pony and wagon on the logo. And by the power of sticky defaults, that child's choice—or more likely, my father's—would go on to determine my banking future for three decades to come and more.
There was one time a few years ago when I had occasion to have low four figures in cash on hand during a trip
-[TODO: was Chase a thing in 1992? is there Bank of America on the East Coast? Does my father remember anything about this?]
+[TODO: was Chase a thing in 1992? is there Bank of America on the East Coast?]
Paul Christiano, who has a much more optimistic picture of humanity's chances, nevertheless said that he liked the "dignity" heuristic. I like it, too. It—takes some of the pressure off. I [made an analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg): your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll probably make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
-
-
### Under the Circumstances, I've Been Shockingly Nice (April–June 2025)
\ No newline at end of file
[^instinct]: All sorts of other instinctual behaviors exist in animals; I don't see why skills humans have to study for years as a "martial art" couldn't be coded into the genome.
-Maybe it was okay for Superman's fighting skills to be fake from a literary perspective (because realism along that dimension is not what Superman is _about_), but if the Yudkowskian ethos exulted intelligence as ["the power that cannot be removed without removing you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic), readers had grounds to demand that the dath ilani's thinking skills be real, and a world that's claimed by authorial fiat to be super-great at epistemic rationality, but where the people don't have a will-to-truth stronger than their will-to-happiness, felt fake to me. I couldn't _prove_ that it was fake. I agreed with Harmless's case that, technically, as far as the Law went, you could build a Civilization or a Friendly AI to see all the ugly things that you preferred not to see.
+Maybe it was okay for Superman's fighting skills to be fake from a literary perspective (because realism along that dimension is not what Superman is _about_), but if the Yudkowskian ethos exulted intelligence as ["the power that cannot be removed without removing you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic), readers had grounds to demand that the dath ilani's thinking skills be real, and a world that's claimed by authorial fiat to be super-great at epistemic rationality, but where the people don't have a will-to-truth stronger than their will-to-happiness, felt fake to me. I couldn't _prove_ that it was fake. I agreed with Harmless's case that, technically, the Law itself did not prohibit building a Civilization or a Friendly AI to see all the ugly things that you preferred not to see.
But if you could—would you? And more importantly, if you would—could you?
More moderation drama from 2019 with me and Said vs. Turner: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/e3Db4w52hz3NSyYqt/how-i-do-research
-woah, thinking more about the moderation drama, https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/ _called it in advance_
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+woah, thinking more about the moderation drama, https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/ _called it in advance_
+
+October 2021
+> "OpenAI" launch trashed humanity's chances of survival
+https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1446562238848847877
+
+Yudkowsky retweeted this on small lies—
+https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1953788534763975061
+
+Said's comment on "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" is precient!! (and _he's_ criticizing people for reflexive contrarianism?!?)
+
+13 August, he retweets Hunter on "A good test of intellectual integrity is whether someone ever criticizes bad arguments for positions they broadly support."; I feel angry and consider arming my Twitter strike, but I'm not sure I have the drama budget ... but, like, the corollary is that someone who can't even recognize the criticism _after it's been presented to them_ is even worse
+https://x.com/ArtemisConsort/status/1955316905415209457
+
+https://x.com/realityspammer/status/1955430576262947295
+> MIRI never had a dogma or leader that no one was allowed to go against, people countersignaled Yudkowsky all the time, but it still has this toxic insularity due to being oriented around reading and re-rearding lengthy texts the leader wrote, so even if you could disagree with the leader's ideas, the disagreement would be forgotten against the text that remains the focus of the group project
+
+----
+
+30 August 2025
+
+https://lightbrd.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1961782023573709003
+
+https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1961782023573709003
+> Interesting how there's such a total lack of corresponding panic about FtM trans. Remove breasts, take enough testosterone to grow a beard, go down to the shooting range, and I think most bros would shrug and say "good enough".
+
+includes
+
+> One thing that all of these theories have in common: They do not appeal to the generic hardness of ontological categories producing alarm about generic boundary violations. They do not appeal to a deep generic horror of things being described as other than what they are.
+
+uh, this might be worth a response, actually—but I'm busy now
+
+I agree with that as a descriptive account of mass sentiment; my complaint about the generalized category anti-epistemology was related, but niche
+
+I have some minor disagreements with this thread, but overall, it's not that bad; nothing for me to get angry about
+
+Maybe my May anger flare-up looks more unreasonable in light of this coming unprompted (being info about Yudkowsky's hidden corruption latent)? But my May anger flare-up looked reasonable based on his Oct. 2024 behavior.
+
+... maybe he was in a different mood today.
+
+the GCs saying FtMs with beards can use the women's restroom do deserve criticism
+
+What makes it better is that it seriously discusses multiple theories about what's driving popular anti-trans reactions, and treating some specific anti-trans concerns as legitimate; it's not just playing a "weak men are superweapon" game trying to paint all anti-trans sentiment as due to confusion (at least not very intensely)
+
+The "humans don't care about reality; if they did, they'd demand better food labels" isn't as much of a gotcha as he thinks; you could just demand sex realism and accurate labels
+
+And—okay, this is what might be worth a response (in time, it's not time-critical, but would also grow stale on the timescale of months) there's also the angle that the ontological categories are useful specifically because they make predictions across many different situations that aren't easy to enumerate in advance, even if, in some particular situation, you might want a "cis women only" category.
+
+----
https://reduxx.info/exclusive-transgender-pedophile-who-hoarded-videos-of-babies-being-raped-sentenced-to-30-years-in-federal-prison/
FTM self-hate (I don't even remember where I found this): "But I just can't reconcile with being a woman. It's such a disgusting, miserable existence. The knowledge that my body is grown entirely for procreation. The whole purpose of my biology is to bring some tumour into the world. I'm covered in disgusting fat tumours. I feel like I was born with a deformity. I feel the same as if I was brutally disfigured. My hips have expanded just to make me an egg incubator. How can anyone want this? How is this not disgusting and repulsive to anyone else? How is this normal, and nobody else is throwing fits about it? And when you reach menopause and you're no longer useful for bearing spawn, your body is designed to fucking crumble and break because it's not useful for anything. It's so fucking vile. It's such a sick joke of an existence. There is no possible way anyone wants this. Women only have protections because society sees them as helpless retard breeders."
+
+-----
+https://x.com/webdevMason/status/1957128232546799770
+> I think if you said "I want to discard all the embryos with IQs under 120, thank you very much," you will have shaped yourself in the process, and that will not be a neutral fact if your child sustains a brain injury at age 3.
+
+She's right, but I kind of want to bite this bullet
+----
+
+https://x.com/aliceisplaying/status/1960419357898526844
+> major tpot milestone at london office hours: we have achieved an equal gender ratio (7 cîs men, 6 trans women, 1 cĩs woman)
_ Still The Dump Stat (vibe shift didn't last, Hanania)
_ Gaines https://goldengatexpress.org/111139/campus/riley-gaines-return-to-sfsu-draws-minor-protest/
+_ Hannah Cairo https://www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah-cairo-solved-a-major-math-mystery-20250801/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-teen-mathematician-hannah-cairo-disproved-a-major-conjecture-in-harmonic/
_ A Proud Wells Fargo Customer
_ I Support Morphological Freedom
_ I Support Morphological Freedom, But
big—
_ Guess I'll Die
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (with coda)
-_ No Match
+_ No Match (look up the WSJ embryo selection article)
-----
-wc -w 2023/* 2022/* 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
+ wc -w 2025/* 2024/* 2023/* 2022/* 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
1005 2017/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan.md
1044 2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
2322 2022/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md
2657 2023/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md
2774 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
+ 3332 2024/prediction-markets-are-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md
3684 2022/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md
- 3760 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
+ 3758 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
4049 2022/context-is-for-queens.md
4221 2023/fake-deeply.md
6525 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
11015 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
12012 2022/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
+ 12138 2024/transcript-agp-and-epistemic-despair.md
15738 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+ 17339 2024/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md
21530 2023/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
- 22315 2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
- 25997 2023/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
- 214265 total
+ 22317 2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+ 25999 2023/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
+ 247222 total
-------
words per year—
2024: 31010 (total); 17320 (UUT), 10710 (LW), 2980 (aAL)
+----
2023: 96370 (total); 72200 (UUT), 24170 (LW), 0 (aAL)
2022: 31900 (total); 29600 (UUT), 2300 (LW), 100 (aAL)
2021: 43300 (total); 21600 (UUT), 21700 (LW), 400 (aAL)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff