The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky assumes that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.
-I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as [Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock) or [Corinna Cohn](https://corinnacohn.substack.com/) or [Aaron Terrell](https://aaronterrell.substack.com/)—or for that matter [Steve Sailer](https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/)—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without [the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
+I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as [Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock) or [Corinna Cohn](https://corinnacohn.substack.com/) or [Aaron Terrell](https://aaronterrell.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-my-agp-normalization)—or for that matter [Steve Sailer](https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/)—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without [the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be applied to everything you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in the community didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students wouldn't be able to hear it, would have been rightfully seen as absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's [resentment of the tyranny of schools](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) by [selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users).) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his faithful students _don't read Steve Sailer_, he should notice that he's running a cult or a fandom rather than an intellectual community.
He [later clarified on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403), "It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy."
-But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you _shouldn't_ mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic. He's playing on a different chessboard.
+But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you _shouldn't_ mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic; he's not going to tell us about reasons not to transition. He's playing on a different chessboard.
### A Fire of Inner Life
> though i suspect there's something subtle going on where he's reluctant to believe when trans women tell him they differ from how how he describes his agp. a "it wouldn't be fair if it were so" playing out underneath the "i was so tempted to lie just like that and im demonstrably a better rationalist than they are"
> and i do think zd is a better rationalist than 95% of the transfems i know. at the hard parts, like having a reflexive aversion to self-deceit, evidenced by stuff unrelated to all this, even
> and a distinct level of care in his thought. i think he's wrong about some important things, but never bc of oversights
+
+https://twitter.com/sesquimundist/status/1750889751807131731
+> it's guys like zack m davis that deserve to have a high religious role
-Said revisions—
-
-"deliberately ambiguous" → "ambiguous for a reason"
-923 words about bad faith
time-sensitive globals TODOs—
-✓ apply pro edit pt. 4
-✓ section headers for pt. 4
-✓ apply red team pt. 4
_ rewrite pt. 4
_ consult Anna
_ consult Said
_ publish pt. 4
+--------
_ finish pt. 5
_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
pt. 4 edit tier—
-✓ "Ideology Is Not the Movement" mentions not misgendering
-✓ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
-✓ explain why he could think of some relevant differences
-✓ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
-✓ honesty and humility, HEXACO
-✓ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
-✓ ending qualifications on "fraud" and whether it might be a good idea
-✓ selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine
-✓ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
-✓ he used to be worthy of trust
----
+_ say that explicitly, up front, at the start of that … chunk.
+_ edit post to clarify "nudging the cognition"
_ 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"
> "arguing about metaphysics is boring; letting people chose pronouns as part of self-expression seems like a thing a free society should allow for the same reason we should let people choose clothes; for many social purposes trans women are in fact empirically women"
(If your "moderately serious" plan for survival is ["AI research journals banned, people violating that ban hunted down with partial effectiveness"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1739705063768232070), that might be your least-bad option as a consequentialist, but one of the things your consequentialist calculation should take into account is that you've declared war on people who want to do AI science on Earth.)
+
+public intellectual death
+https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
\ No newline at end of file
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff