Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was _creating clarity about behavioral patterns_. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
-Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone: for example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient for you is a threat to your marketing story and therefore a threat to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up power gradients: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Eliezer Yudkowsky's narcissistic delusions.
+Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone: for example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient for you is a threat to your marketing story and therefore a threat to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up power gradients: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky's narcissistic delusions.
But _selectively_ creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—just like how selectively criticizing arguments with politically unfavorable conclusions only reinforces your current political beliefs. I shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that [calling non-exclusively-androphilic trans women delusional perverts](/2017/Mar/smart/) is okay on the grounds that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but that calling out Alexander and Yudkowsky would be unjustified on the grounds of starting a war or whatever. If I was being cowardly or otherwise unprincipled, I should own that instead of generating spurious justifications. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not on board with a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, but then emits spurious excuses for not following that effort where it leads.
]
-
In November, I received an interesting reply on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifer for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, it's very important for evolved prey animals to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an epistemically legitimate clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
+[TODO: Ziz's protest]
+
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
-Here I again need to make a digression about privacy norms. Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint, and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message.
+Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint, and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message.
If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information, but also wants to comply with privacy norms, has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm, that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the info-revealer has an incentive to stay _just_ shy of being that egregious.
-Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without technically "lying", I should not debase myself by thinking myself innocent for not having "really said it."
+Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he mostly managed to do it without technically "lying", I should not be so debased as to think myself innocent for not having "really said it."
+
+Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent many hours in the first half of 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occured to me.
+
+Previously, I had _already_ thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence the rearing of gender-non-conforming children, that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very feminine boys. Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at _d_ ≈ 1.31 for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).) A solid supermajority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would get affirmed into a cross-sex identity (and being a lifelong medical patient) much earlier, even though most of them would have otherwise (under a "watchful waiting" protocol) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
-Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent a number of hours in the first half of 2020 working on a private Document about a hypothesis that had occured to me.
+What made this crazy, in my view, was not just that it was a dubious treatment decision, but that it was a dubious treatment decision made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though the vast supermajority of trans adults were in the AGP taxon and therefore _had never resembled_ these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions of _guys like me_.
-Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that the culture of trans ideology was exerting influence the rearing of gender-non-conforming children.
-claims that children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex—very tomboyish girls and very feminine boys
[TODO: pandemic starts]
This is a _rationality_ skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she _revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence_. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)
-(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michaell Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
+(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michalle Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
This also isn't a particularly _advanced_ rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
_ Let's recap
_ If he's reading this ...
_ Perhaps if the world were at stake
+_ ¶ about social justice and defying threats
_ ¶ about body odors
_ regrets and wasted time
_ excerpt 2nd "out of patience" email
with internet available—
+_ "watchful waiting"
_ in "especially galling" §: from "Changing Emotions"—"somehow it's always about sex when men are involved"—he even correctly pinpointing AGP in ordinary men (as was obvious back then), just without the part that AGP _is_ "trans"
_ "look at what ended up happening"—look up whether that exact quote from from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47 or https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
_ Discord history with Scott (leading up to 2019 Christmas party, and deferring to Tailcalled on SSC survey question wording)
_ explain "court ruling" earlier
_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ first appearance of "Caliphate"
_ explain the adversarial pressure on privacy norms
_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ explain first use of "rationalist"
-_ explain first use of Center for Applied Rationality
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
_ when to use first _vs. last names
_ January 2019 meeting with Ziz and Gwen
_ better summary of Littman
_ explain Rob
-_ explain or omit first mention of "egregore"
+
+
+terms to explain on first mention—
+_ "Caliphate"
+_ "rationalist"
+_ Center for Applied Rationality
+_ MIRI
+_ "egregore"
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff