I got offended. I felt like a devout Catholic watching the Pope say, "Jesus sucks; I hate God; I never should have told people about God."
-Later, I felt the need to clarify exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
+Later, I felt the need to write another message clarifying exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
[He put a check-mark emoji on it](/images/davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png), indicating agreement or approval.
I asked my boss to temporarily assign me some easier tasks that I could make steady progress on. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired, it was better to be up-front about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping the boss wouldn't notice.
-My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on "... Boundaries?" despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, Anna was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, then concluding that he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance, introducing a threat into a context where he had a right to be safe.
+My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, Anna was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, then concluding that he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance, introducing a threat into a context where he had a right to be safe.
I complained that I had believed our own [marketing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFEsqd6ofwnkNqaXo/go-forth-and-create-the-art) [material](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP583FwKepjiWbeoQ/epistle-to-the-new-york-less-wrongians) about the "rationalists" remaking the world by wielding a hidden Bayesian structure of Science and Reason that applies [outside the laboratory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). Was that all a lie? Were we not trying to do the thing anymore? Anna was dismissive: she thought that the idea I had gotten about "the thing" was never actually part of the original vision. She kept repeating that she had tried to warn me, and I didn't listen. (Back in the late 'aughts, she had often recommended Paul Graham's essay ["What You Can't Say"](http://paulgraham.com/say.html) to people, summarizing Graham's moral that you should figure out the things you can't say in your culture and then not say them, in order to avoid getting drawn into pointless conflicts.)
-first edit pass bookmark: "I got a chance to talk to"
-
time-sensitive globals TODOs—
✓ address red team objections to pt. 3
✓ schedule Friendship Day at Valinor
✓ revise FTX footnote
✓ clear with Ray
✓ finish and ship "Reply to Scott on Autogenderphilia"
+✓ clear with Ruby
+✓ section headers for pt. 3
+✓ revise gender section!!
-- revise gender section
- consult Anna
- consult Said
-- clear with Ruby
-_ clear with Mike
-
+_ clear with Mike/re-clear with Alicorn
_ SHIP PT. 3!!
-
------------
-_ finish pt. 5
-
+✓ apply pro edit pt. 4
+_ section headers for pt. 4
_ apply red team pt. 4
-_ apply pro edit pt. 4
+
+_ finish pt. 5
_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
_ solicit red team pt. 5
_ solicit pro edit pt. 5
_ being friends with dogs (it's good, but do I have the wordcount budget?)
_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
-_ meeting with Ray (maybe?)
+_ meeting with Ray (6/29)
_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
✓ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
✓ he used to be worthy of trust
---
+_ look for a place to link "Faction formation"
+_ Tail's objection to FFS example
_ the mailing list post noted it as a "common sexual fantasy"
_ Sept. 2020 clarification noted that a distinction should be made between
_ emphasize that 2018 thread was policing TERF-like pronoun usage, not just disapproving of gender-based pronouns
-----
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology?commentId=Z7kyiPAfmtztueFFJ
+
+----
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff