-----
-[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019
-pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone]
+I had a pretty productive blogging spree in late 2019.
-[TODO: "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans]
+[TODO: "The Legend of the Extortion War"]
+
+I polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.
+
+I also published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), a critique of Yudkowsky's [code of "meta-honesty"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), on the occasion of the latter's nomination for a Best-of-2018 Review. (The ungainly title of my post was "softened" from an earlier draft, which said "... Surprisingly Useless".)
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But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is not a particularly deep or informative one.
-A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government.
-
-In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
+A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
"[The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues) ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy," just didn't have the same ring to it. Neither did "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy"—even if you stipulated by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing.
-Attempting to illustrate the mood I thought dath ilan was missing, I quoted the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness and get shut down by Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him. (I put Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around plot-relevant sentences—that'll be important in a few moments.)
+Attempting to illustrate the mood I thought dath ilan was missing, I quoted the scene from _Atlas Shrugged_ where our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness and gets shut down by Galt—and Dagny _thanks_ him. (I put Discord's click-to-reveal spoiler blocks around plot-relevant sentences—that'll be important in a few moments.)
> "[...] Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it! If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
>
Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse informed people.
-What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's "heritage optimization" (eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
+What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's heritage optimization (read: eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
A user called RationalMoron asked if I was appealing to a terminal value. Did I think people should have accurate self-models even if they don't want to?
[TODO conclusion, cont'd—
* Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
* even young smart AGPs who can appreciate my work have still gotten pinkpilled
+ * Jonah had told me that my planning horizon was too short—like the future past a year wasn't real to me. (This plausibly also explains my impatience with college.) My horizon is starting to broaden as AI timelines shorten
* less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
]
_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
-_ December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
+- December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
_ plan to reach out to Rick [pt. 4]
_ Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
it was actually "wander onto the AGI mailing list wanting to build a really big semantic net" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9HGR5qatMGoz4GhKj/above-average-ai-scientists)
With internet available—
+_ comments on "The Legend of the Extortion War"
+_ "pretty productive blogging spree" should be links to minor posts
_ comment on "Timelines Scam" re "The Two-Party Swindle"
_ "they had to know at some level": link to "why we can't take expected values literally"
_ publication date of "The AI Timelines Scam"
_ backlink "(again) whether he accepted the Cheerful Price"
_ backlink "alter the beacon"
_ backlink only seen an escort once before (#confided-to-wilhelm)
+_ backlink Yudkowsky's implicit political concession
terms to explain on first mention—
_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
03/09/2023,95148\r
03/10/2023,96107\r
03/11/2023,96547\r
-03/12/2023,
\ No newline at end of file
+03/12/2023,96562\r
+03/13/2023,97284\r
+03/14/2023,97285\r
+03/15/2023,
\ No newline at end of file
testimony of female AGP
https://discord.com/channels/745684950417932323/803338278492307518/1047261753177813034
+
+"Isn't it messed up, how I'm just dying to be him"—evidence for Serano-ism
pre-memoir—
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality (short version)
-_ Escort (cut §, needs title)?
_ Book Review: Nevada (time permitting)
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress (time permitting)
_ I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
memoir—
-_ (pt. 2) Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-_ (pt. 3) A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-_ (pt. 4) If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-_ (pt. 5) Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-_ (pt. 6) Standing Under the Same Sky
+_ (pt. 2) Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer (March 2016–April 2017)
+_ (pt. 3) A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning (November 2018–April 2019)
+_ (pt. 4) If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them (April 2019–January 2021)
+_ (pt. 5) Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles (February 2021)
+_ (pt. 6) Standing Under the Same Sky (April 2021–April 2023)
Minor camera-ready—
_ Janet Mock on Late Transitioners
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (with coda)
-
+_ Escort (cut §, needs title)?
_ Biological Sex Actually Exists
_ Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty https://archive.ph/ZxVYk
_ Never Going to Find You Faking
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff