>
> —Neven Sesardic, _Making Sense of Heritability_
-... except, I would be remiss to condemn Yudkowsky without discussing—potentially mitigating factors. (I don't want to say that whether someone is a fraud should depend on whether there are mitigating factors—rather, I should discuss potential reasons why being a fraud might be the least-bad choice, when faced with a sufficiently desperate situation.)
+In a previous post, ["Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles"](/2023/Dec/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/) (the culmination of [three](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [previous](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [posts](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) relating the Whole Dumb Story of my disillusionment with the so-called "rationalist" community), I wrote, "If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_."
+
+But I would be remiss to condemn Yudkowsky without discussing potentially mitigating factors. (I don't want to say that whether someone is a fraud should depend on whether there are mitigating factors—rather, I should discuss potential reasons why being a fraud might be the least-bad choice, when faced with a sufficiently desperate situation.)
So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to make sense, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-I understand, of course, that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Yudkowsky or Alexander because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I had just spent more than three and a half years of my life[^years-of-my-life] [explaining in](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), with math, how Alexander was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Yudkowsky was still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seemed egregiously unfair, in a way that wasn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+I understand, of course, that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Yudkowsky or Alexander because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I had just spent more than three and a half years of my life[^years-of-my-life] [explaining in](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), with math, how Alexander was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagreed, and Yudkowsky was still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seemed egregiously unfair, in a way that wasn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
[^years-of-my-life]: I started outlining ["The Categories Where Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) in January 2018. I would finally finish ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), following up on the "dolphins are fish" claim later that month of September 2021.
> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+I could understand wanting to avoid politically contentious topics because existential risk reduction is astronomically more important, but that rationale couldn't justify this kind of cartel behavior.[^cartel-rationale]
+
+[^cartel-rationale]: Unless the idea was to reduce existential risk by drawing more people into our cult, suggesting an instrumental strategy of puffing up Scott Alexander's reputation, since he was the primary intake funnel now that _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ was completed?
An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Irene says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Jonas says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Irene says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Irene is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Irene was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]
But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be completely mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a crazy idea; I think something of value has been lost when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior, in a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior.
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior, in a way that deferring to [Julia Galef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Galef) or [John S. Wentworth](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/johnswentworth) is not expected behavior.
I don't think the motte-and-bailey concern is hypothetical. When I [indignantly protested](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435059595228053505) the "we're both always right" remark, one David Xu [commented](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482): "speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat"—as if my criticism of Yudkowsky's self-serving bluster itself marked me as siding with the "post-rats"!
-Concerning my philosophy of language grievance, [Xu wrote](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
+Concerning my philosophy-of-language grievance, [Xu wrote](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is [to] proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
>
After everything I've been through over the past seven years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
-It's a conflict. I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop). The Caliphate doesn't want to facilitate people publicly making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit—for example, by putatively causing massive psychological damage to some subset of people. This isn't a disagreement about rationality. Telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+It's a conflict. I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop). The Caliphate doesn't want to facilitate people publicly making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit—for example, by putatively causing massive psychological damage to some subset of people. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth isn't rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
-I anticipate this being construed as me doubling down on failing to properly Other-model, because I'm associating my side of the conflict with "telling the truth", which is a positive-valence description. But what am I getting wrong substantively, as a matter of fact rather than mere tone? It seems to me that declining to "facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit" (Xu's words, verbatim) is a form of not wanting people to know things.
+I anticipate this being construed as me doubling down on failing to properly Other-model, because I'm associating my side of the conflict with "telling the truth", which is a positive-valence description. But ... what am I getting wrong, substantively, as a matter of fact rather than mere tone? It seems to me that declining to "facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit" (Xu's words, verbatim) is a form of not wanting people to know things.
It's not like my side of the conflict isn't biting any bullets, either. I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_. Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
I claim that "Changing Emotions" and the 2016 Facebook post effectively contradict each other, even if I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one that includes the word _not_. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are not only out of luck given forseeable technology, but also that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, already be women in some unspecified psychological sense. One could try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing—or simply that Yudkowsky changed his mind.
-But when people change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even acknowledge the change, that feels like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
+But when people change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to acknowledge the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even acknowledge the change, that's like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
Likewise, ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is still up and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
-[TODO: clincher sentence? Explain why "Doublethink" being directed at oneself doesn't really solve the problem]
+Here again, given the flexibility of natural language and the fact that the 2021 text does not assert the logical negation of any sentence in the 2007 text, you could totally come up with some clever casuistry for why the two texts are compatible. One could argue: "Doublethink" is narrowly about avoiding, as an individual, the specific form of self-deception in which an individual tries to avoid drawing their own attention to unpleasant facts; [that's a different issue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDfxTj9TKYsYiWH5o/the-virtue-of-narrowness) from whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit, especially in public discourse.
+
+But _realistically_—how dumb do you think we are? I would expect someone who's not desperately fixated on splitting whatever hairs are necessary to protect the Caliphate's reputation to notice the obvious generalization from "sane individuals shouldn't hide from facts to save themselves psychological pain, because you need the facts to compute plans that achieve outcomes" to "sane societies shouldn't hide from concepts to save their members psychological pain, because we need concepts to compute plans that acheive outcomes." If Xu and Yudkowsky claim not to see it even after I've called their bluff, how dumb should _I_ think _they_ are? Let me know in the comments.
------
In October 2021, Jessica Taylor [published a post about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of her time at Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
-Scott Alexander posted [a comment claiming to add important context](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs), essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!). Alexander accused Vassar of trying "'jailbreak'" people from normal social reality, which "involve[d] making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs". Yudkowsky posted [a comment that uncritically validated Scott's reliability as a narrator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8).
-
-To me, this looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders moved in to discredit her by association. Quite effectively, as it turned out: the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma. (The fact that Scott said ["it's fair for the community to try to defend itself"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=qsEMmdo6DKscvBvDr) in ensuing back-and-forth suggests that he also saw the conversation as an adversarial one, even if he thought Jessica shot first.)
-
-I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy) (and [offered textual evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=yKo2uuCcwJxbwwyBw) against the silly claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy).
+A 950-comment mega-trainwreck erupted, sparked by a comment by Scott Alexander [claiming to add important context](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs), essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!).
-Scott [disagreed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] wasn't harmful to me. He revealed that during my March 2019 problems, he had emailed my posse:
+I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy). Scott [contended](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that my joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] had been harmful to me, and revealed a new-to-me detail about [the dramatic events of March 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#overheating). He said he had emailed my posse at the time:
> accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am _I_ crazy, or is _everyone else_ crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just _an_ ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious.
-But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, bluntly, can be kind of an asshole. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
+But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, bluntly, is kind of an asshole. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
To assess whether joining the "Vassarites" had been harmful to me, one would need to answer: as compared to what? In the counterfactual where Michael vanished from the world in 2016, I think I would have been just as upset about the same things for the same reasons, but with fewer allies and fewer ideas to make sense of what was going on in my social environment.
-Additionally, it was really obnoxious when people had tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, didn't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself wasn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
+Additionally, it was really obnoxious when people had tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://archive.is/o2gDb#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, didn't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself wasn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with [the November 2018–April 2019 thing](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an enormous favor for me and my agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That was absurd. Had he no shame?
-I did, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since the December 2020 psychiatric disaster, with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
+I did, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since [the December 2020 psychiatric disaster](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically), with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
[TODO— straighten this out—
> Jessica called me transphobic scum; Michael said that I should have never been born, that I should be contemplating suicide, that I could barely begin to make up what I owe to Sasha if I gave her everything I own; Jack said that I'm only useful as an example of how bad other people should feel, if they knew what I knew. At midnight, I actually was on the edge of psychosis—there's this very distinct fear-of-Hell sensation—but because I had been there before and knew what was happening to me, and because I already knew not to take Michael literally, I was able to force myself to lie down and get some sleep and not immediately go crazy, although I did struggle for the next month. (I ended up taking a week off of my dayjob and got a Seroquel perscription from Kaiser.)
-]
-
In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of the everyone-yelling thing. I briefly described the December 2020 disaster, and in particular the part where Michael/Jessica/Jack yelled at me.
+]
+
Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the Vassarites were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
Great, I said, I was happy to provide information to help hold people (including Michael as a particular instance of "people") accountable for the specific bad things that they're actually guilty of, rather than scapegoated as a Bad Man with mysterious witch powers.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff