Ben—What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you?
me—but the law does use mens rea, like the distinction between manslaughter and murder
me—call with Michael, the Pope surely knows that he doesn't really have a direct line to God (despite holding office based on this pretense), to how GiveWell must know that they're not really making decisions based on numbers (despite holding credibility based on this premise)
+16 Jul: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
17 Jul: Alyssa's false claim about my pseudonyms, HRT effects side note
18 Jul: my accusation of mis-citing Ozy was wrong
20 Jul: me to Anna and Steven about LW mods colluding to protect feelings; "basically uninterested in the mounting evidence that your entire life's work is a critical failure?"
I am worried that you said you learned from Moldbug, and now Yudkowsky needs to performatively denounce him
I am worried about Yudkowsky wireheading his fiction subreddit
I see a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes
-Vaniver mentions "sure, Eliezer doesn't post here anymore, but that's bad for Eliezer too."—look up this comment
-Sonya pointed out Scott's view of his legacy https://twitter.com/sonyasupposedly/status/1211789899260518402
-[bookmark]
-1 Jan: the red phone / state of Church leadership
+Vaniver mentions Said saying "sure, Eliezer doesn't post here anymore, but that's bad for Eliezer too."
+1 Jan 20: the red phone / state of Church leadership
+feeling more optimistic about not needing to finish the memoir—or giving it a happy ending
+"If that's all I have, then it's all I can honestly love"
+playing on a different chessboard
+he hasn't given up on his Wizard's art, but he has, after painful experience, like the Roko affair, given up on sharing it with the public
+me and Michael and Jessica were counting on him to uphold standards of discourse rather than chess
+we don't get to know the real Eliezer Yudkowsky; all we can ever know is what we can infer from the words you type—and if that's all we have, then it's all we can honestly love. If the algorithm that determines which subset of your thoughts reaches us changes—then as far as we or the rest of the world can tell, it's as if you've changed.
+2 Jan: Michael—I can't work with you if you are accepting Eliezer's schedule instead of ours. That's being political and on his side!
+my memoir as a decision-theoretic weapon
+my sense of opportunity perceives me playing a useful political role without me being unambiguously on this "side"?
+The reason I got wrapped up in this civil war was becuase of this one thing; therefore I'm now at peace with Scott
+I'm more trustworthy if I'm not perceived as Michael's pawn
+3 Jan: Michael—
+> I strongly prefer judge functions over coalition functions, so far as we can cause those to apply!!!
+> The challenge is to apply judge functions in a context where there is no recognition of a right to call the litigants into a court.
+now that Scott is legally in the clear, my recourse is polite blog posts, and not police actions like cussing him out in public
+Same thing about being complicit with psychiatry (morally suspect, but my only allowable recourse is to write polite critical blog posts).
+Jessica—being complicit with psychiatry
+I'm too submissive to psychologically maintain more than one vendetta at a time, so if I'm currently angry about the philosophy of language, then psychiatry must be OK because I don't have any anger resources left.
+4 Jan: Twitter fight with Ben
+a shouty equilibrium rather than the colluding-to-wirehead-each-other equilibrium that we see in Berkeley
+4 Jan: Ben thinks I'm no longer interested in creating clarity
+memoir is a nuke
+5 Jan: Ben—the fact that I think the memoir is an act of war, even privately (insofar as my motivation to work on it vanished when I got concessions) means I've ceded the inside of my own mind to the forces of anticlarity
+my reply: I've ceded the internal of my own mind to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular
+5 Jan: using "central" allows mis-definition by mobs of obfuscators
+5 Jan: I am confident that finishing writing it will be clarifying and cathartic for you even if you decide not to publish, and would be an excellent use of time
+5 Jan: me—vocabulary itself is a surprisingly expensive captial investment
+5-8 Jan: baiting Steven to talk to Jessica about global warming
+9 Jan: arguing with Jessica about "developmental sex" and natural categories
+10 Jan: binary vectors
+10 Jan: "isn't meant to force you into agreement here on pains of losing face"
+15 Jan: more Twitter/email fighting about "people's philosopher"
+15 Jan: the same _interest_ is being defended whether I'm speaking up for my own order or someone else's
+16 Jan: Without you, my smartest critic is Ozy, but my self-criticism is smarter than Ozy, so it was like having no critics at all.
+16 Jan: do you think you could explain this in a way Said would find satisfying?
+18 Jan: Yudkowsky on Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-on-mental-illness-a-belated-reply/#comment-237783
+21 Jan: still have this "Vassar Group vs. Corrupt Mainstream MIRI/CfAR/LW/EA rationalist civil war" framing in my head that I need to unwind, because it's the wrong frame, and it's ironically the wrong frame by our ("our") own standards. I already made the mistake of expecting a community once, but by now I should know that no Lord hath the champion, and no safe defense. There is no group; there is no community; there are just grown-ups who think for themselves (or ought to) and sometimes coordinate with their friends on those specific plans that actually require coordination.
+
+
+
+
+
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+
> When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
I'm more worried about elephant-in-the-brain scenarios where, for example, "rationalist" higher-ups who don't consciously think of themselves as corrupted by political power games nevertheless write superficially-plausible bullshit hit pieces denouncing their political rivals as "likely to lie or manipulate" that get highly upvoted based on the author's high status (rather than anyone having thought critically about the content of the charges) and later seemingly-positively cited by their colleagues as an example of the community immune system making an update.
- He ... flatters people? He ... didn't tell people to abandon their careers? What?!
-In summary, what I see is a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes, a culture where even our best and brightest are mostly focused on colluding to be nice to each other, minimizing social attack surface, and funneling money to branded EA institutions—even when their own fans can see that they're capable of so much more. In contrast, I want to work on asking interesting questions and then getting the right answer for the right reasons, in public (so that people who aren't already my closest trusted friends can learn, too). Under these circumstances, I don't want the main gravity well to award itself more authority to clear the neighborhood around its orbit, because I haven't been given sufficient reason not to expect that authority to be wielded against me and mine.
\ No newline at end of file
+In summary, what I see is a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes, a culture where even our best and brightest are mostly focused on colluding to be nice to each other, minimizing social attack surface, and funneling money to branded EA institutions—even when their own fans can see that they're capable of so much more. In contrast, I want to work on asking interesting questions and then getting the right answer for the right reasons, in public (so that people who aren't already my closest trusted friends can learn, too). Under these circumstances, I don't want the main gravity well to award itself more authority to clear the neighborhood around its orbit, because I haven't been given sufficient reason not to expect that authority to be wielded against me and mine.
+
+ * "losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I think Ben-and-Jessica would see as [...] angry about living in simulacrum level 3 and we're worried about everyone else."
+
+
+It seems to that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir privately feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create internal clarity around a thing.
+
+I think this has to mean either
+(a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated
+or
+(b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.
+
+This seems like a pretty important impasse to resolve. I don't think even Zack seriously thinks option (a) is sustainable long-run, which is some evidence for (b) but not decisive. I'm not sure (a) and (b) are actually separate hypotheses, rather than just different frames.
+
+or (c) I've ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular, and while I've made a lot of progress unwinding this, I'm still, still not done, and him seeming to respect me in person at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit ("Ooh, I wish you'd want me to stay / I'll be alright / Just not tonight")
+
+So a philosopher trying to recover a partially-destroyed word using ostensive definition needs to say, "You know all these specific examples (training data) of things we call 'X'? Okay, so, that training data has been mislabeled. Actually, these-and-such specific things are false-positives (your corrupt Society calls them 'X', but they're not) and these-and-such specific things are false-negatives (your corrupt Society doesn't call them 'X', but they are)—and that's the true meaning of 'X'."
+
+angels who timelessly perceive the universal wavefunction sub specie aeternitatis would have no motivation for a shorter encoding for "sex characteristics not changeable at tech level x". But mortal creatures who actually live in a Society with tech level x:=x₀ would, because they need it to compress their descriptions of the world they see (in which, e.g., trans men sometimes get pregnant).
+
+Oh, I think I see what you're getting at if I forget the "application" and just think about binary vectors. In the beginning, there are two kinds of vectors: [0, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], and [1, 1, 1, 1, ..., 1]. As technology gets better, we gain the ability to flip more coordinates from 0 to 1. First we learn how to make [1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then we learn how to make [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, ... 0].
+
+I think you're saying it's lame to make a classifier with a pretentious name that's like, "One 1, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, but then the classifier gets updated to "Two 1s, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, &c.
+
+What I'm saying is that, in any tech regime between the stone age and the Singularity, your population does in fact have three distinct clusters that you might want to use language to talk about: the "all 0's" cluster, the "some 1s, then 0s" cluster, and the "all 1s" cluster. In the very early and very late tech regimes, maybe you don't care about the middle category and just use a two-category system. I think that we live in an early regime that needs three categories.
+
+As far as the state ideology of California is concerned, people who learn math from textbooks rather than dutifully attending classes don't exist. As far as the ideology taught in those schools' social-science classes is concerned, males who wish they were shaped like you but think this is obviously not an intersex condition don't exist and merely having a word for to name them is harmful. I think it makes sense that I'm at war here! If I can avoid it, I don't want to cause collateral damage to you if you're at war with a strain non-progressive authoritarian collectivism which is lower on my enemy list than yours. But if I can't cheaply avoid it (in that I don't want to say silent in situations like this or pay a disclaimer tax), maybe we need to accept some small amount of collateral damage from each other???
+
+Let's add the "lawyer" structure back in. I'm sitting at a restaurant and someone else complains that they ordered a burger but got a veggie burger. Why is it trolling if I speak up in their defense, but not if I speak up about my own burger order? It seems to me that the same interest is being defended (the right to use unmarked "burger" to mean "meat(1)" and expect people to know what you meant rather than pretend not to in order to save animals), and that's what matters (rather than whose name gets listed as "defendant" or who has the philosophy skills to explain why they feel cheated by the veggie burger).
+
+
+> If you are rounding off "they're trying to make me say I'm one of these other things instead of 'autogynephile'" to "they're trying to kill me" then, uhh, stop trying to kill trans and nonbinary people who Blanchard's model fits poorly??? (Like, this is all really hyperbolic! Maybe we shouldn't do this silly exaggeration thing???)
+> - Like, if you can understand why being misrepresented even in this slight way is painful, can't you try to reduce the harm that would come from imposing an ill-fitting ontology on lots of socially vulnerable people???
+> - (Also some trans people don't think it's an intersex brain thing!! They might have a social constructionist view etc.)
+> So it seems like you're going about this "getting a short message length" thing in an overly zero-sum fashion (trying to gain representation at the expense of other people's representation).
+
+(zero-sum actors, e.g. neo nazis, are going to be pushing in various ways that make it easier to push along in their direction than it would if it were just you).
+
+I think this is how the political factions end up being "protect minorities and be incoherent" and "harm minorities and be locally coherent". Different respectability/violence tradeoffs (to get a mix of zero sum and non zero sum energy). And these define the Overton window, whereas many other Overton windows could be drawn instead.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff