[I pointed out that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120) the people who smear him as a right-wing Bad Guy do so _in order to_ extract these kinds of statements of political alignment as concessions; his own timeless decision theory would seem to recommend ignoring them rather than paying even this small [Danegeld](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-When I emailed the posse about it begging for Likes (Subject: "can't leave well enough alone"), Jessica said she didn't get my point. If people are falsely accusing you of something (in this case, of being a right-wing Bad Guy), isn't it helpful to point out that the accusation is actually false? It seemed like I was advocating for self-censorship on the grounds that speaking up helps the false accusers. But it also helps bystanders (by correcting the misapprehension), and hurts the false accusers (by demonstrating to bystanders that the accusers are making things up). By linking to ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), I seemed to be insinuating that Yudkowsky was under some sort of duress, but this wasn't spelled out: if Yudkowsky would face social punishment for advancing right-wing opinions, did that mean he was under such duress that saying anything at all would be helping the oppressors?
+When I emailed the posse about it begging for Likes (Subject: "can't leave well enough alone"), Jessica said she didn't get my point. If people are falsely accusing you of something (in this case, of being a right-wing Bad Guy), isn't it helpful to point out that the accusation is actually false? It seemed like I was advocating for self-censorship on the grounds that speaking up helps the false accusers. But it also helps bystanders (by correcting the misapprehension), and hurts the false accusers (by demonstrating to bystanders that the accusers are making things up). By linking to ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) in my replies, I seemed to be insinuating that Yudkowsky was under some sort of duress, but this wasn't spelled out: if Yudkowsky would face social punishment for advancing right-wing opinions, did that mean he was under such duress that saying anything at all would be helping the oppressors?
The paragraph from "Kolmogorov Complicity" that I was thinking of was (bolding mine):
> Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, "If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?" **Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won't be very convincing.** Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
-I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing _other_ heretics: not just _disagreeing_ with the other heretics _because those other heresies are in fact mistaken_, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
+I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing _other_ heretics: not just disagreeing with the other heretics _because those other heresies are in fact mistaken_, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though he'd [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) [exhaustively](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) about the correct way, and he and I have a common enemy in the social-justice egregore): _he couldn't afford to_. He'd already [spent his Overton budget on anti-feminism](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/).
[^them-supporting-me]: Humans with very different views on politics nevertheless have a common interest in not being transformed into paperclips!
-Did Yudkowsky get new information about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter, or did moral coercion on him from the left intensify (because Trump and [because Berkeley](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/))? My bet was on the latter.
+Did Yudkowsky get _new information_ about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter, or did moral coercion on him from the left intensify (because Trump and [because Berkeley](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/))? My bet was on the latter.
+
+However it happened, I didn't think the brain damage was limited to "political" topics. In November, we saw an example of Yudkowsky engaging in more destruction of language for the sake of politeness, but in the non-Culture-War context of him [trying to wirehead his fiction subreddit by suppressing criticism-in-general](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/).
+
+That's _my_ characterization, of course: the post itself talks about "reducing negativity". [In a comment, Yudkowsky wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/) (bolding mine):
+
+> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. **Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."**
+
+But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me" and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from an algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try). [If my character is actually quite stupid, I want to believe that my character is actually quite stupid.](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski)
+
+It might seem like a little thing (requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training), but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudwkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ made a pattern click. If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby "threaten" them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work, like good literary criticism. A rationalist space _needs to be able to talk about the territory_.
+
+I understand that Yudkowsky wouldn't agree with
+
+[the comment claims that "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced, but this is lip service; Ruby also paid lip service]
+
+"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors"
+
+"Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" (I agree that the purpose of public criticism is not solely to help the authors)
+
+Crocker's rules
+
-----
Also in November 2019, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possibly to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly call them intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
-The reason it _should_ be safe to write is because Explaining Things is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
+The reason it _should_ have been safe to write was because Explaining Things is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
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's 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 is 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.
With internet available—
+_ "linking to K-complicity in my replies", link the specific reply
_ Wentworth on mutual information being on the right track?
_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
_ "not taking into account considerations" → rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
13 November 2019
-The recent thing that was most helpful in making my memoir seem like just a challenging writing project, rather than treason/heresy, was actually Eliezer doing more destroying-language-for-the-sake-of-politeness but in a non-Culture-War context:
+The recent thing that was most helpful in making my memoir seem like just a challenging writing project, rather than treason/heresy, was actually Eliezer
+
+doing more destroying-language-for-the-sake-of-politeness but in a non-Culture-War context:
comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."
-[the comment claims that "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced, but this is lip service; Ruby also paid lip service]
-
-But "I thought X seemed Y to me" and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from an algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try).
-
-It's a little thing (requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and non-violent communication), but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudwkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ makes a pattern click.
-
-If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby "threaten" them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work like good literary criticism.
-
-"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors"
-
-"Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" (I agree that the purpose of public criticism is not solely to help the authors)
]
messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May
-Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity
\ No newline at end of file
+Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity
+
+Greg Egan's "Closer" (1992) predicted language models, and seemed wild at the time
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff