Sunday memoir confrontation: review emails through 19 December 2018

There's a lot of good content in these emails! For the email-dense
parts of the story, I'm thinking that an easy and high-quality way to
write this memoir is to just—summarize the emails!

I guess I had been thinking that this wasn't an option, because I'm
not allowed to talk about Yudkowsky's responses to us because of
privacy constraints? But our coordination group also had a lot of
interesting "What is wrong with our thoughts" discussion; it's more
interesting to be in the mode of telling the Whole Dumb Story as a
story, rather being hyperfocused on brining a fraud case against
Yudkowsky. (It's a story _about_ bringing a fraud case, but a story
first and foremost.)

Paraphrasing emails also solves a couple other writing problems. I
wasn't sure how to balance between "narrating what happened" and
"talking about ideas". (Theorizing about the state of "the community"
needs to be part of the memoir, but it's not bound to a particular
time as something that happened.) But if all the important ideas were
talked about in emails, that naturally binds them to an event in the
narrative. Or commentary on the Emperor Norton example—where would
that fit, exactly, if it's a little too chunky for my initial
discussion of the categories issue? It fits where I told Scott about
it.

I also don't like my current characterization of the "Hill of Meaning"
thread: partially because my anger at Yudkowsky's dishonesty is
leaking through in an anachronistic way, and partially because I'm so
sick of explaining this over and over again that I can't even muster
up the energy for precise criticism. I think if I rewrite that whole
section based on my January 2019 re-salvo email, it'll be much better.

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 9d70c3a..a84b68b 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the r
 
 Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and Yudkowsky kept doubling down:
 
-[TODO: '(chromosomes?)' comment]
+[TODO: '(chromosomes?)' comment, parent of https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792 ]
 
 > You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
@@ -136,16 +136,42 @@ Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore.
 
 Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
 
-I was physically shaking. I remember going downstairs to confide in a senior engineer about the situation. I had to do _something_. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help 
+I was physically shaking. I remember going downstairs to confide in a senior engineer about the situation. I had to do _something_. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help.
 
+[TODO: I had his email address, and I didn't think I had the right to demand his attention, so I threw in another $1000 cheerful price (and cc'd Michael and "Erin Burr") just to read it—]
 
+[TODO: Michael called me up and we talked about how the "rationalists" were over]
 
+[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession. You might think that should be the end of the matter—but this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder? https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529 ]
 
-[TODO: I had his email address, and I didn't think I had the right to demand his attention, so I threw in another $1000 cheerful price (and cc'd Michael and "Erin Burr") just to read it—]
+[TODO: email Scott 1 December (cc Anna Jonah Sarah Michael) "is there any chance of getting an explicit and loud clarification and/or partial-retraction of "The Categories Were Made for Man"?"—writing to him because marketing is a more powerful force than argument;
 
-[TODO: Michael called me up and we talked about how the "rationalists" were over]
+> Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't win the talent lottery but think they see a flaw in the Zeitgeist, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
+> So, what do you say, Scott? Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we don't.
+> "No, the Emperor isn't naked—oh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garments—it would be pretty weird if we were claiming that!—it's just that utilitarianism implies that the social property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" gaslighting maneuver needs to die. You alone can kill it. My model of you assigns more than 20% probability that you will.
+
+> I don't have a simple, mistake-theoretic characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I can do is try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of conflicts over possible conventions.
+
+helping Norton live in the real world
+]
+
+[TODO: re Ben's involvement—I shared Scott thread with Ben and Katie; Michael said "could you share this with Ben?  I think he is ready to try & help." on 17 December
+19 December
+> talk more with Ben Hoffman, he will be more helpful in solidifying your claims about IP defense etc. You are ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer matters more for your claims than the equivalent of a scientist.]
+[TOOD: Sarah's involvement: I cc'd her on the 1 December Scott thread, and 16 December draft to Michael]
+
+To Anna—
+> I agree that "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" is psychologically coercive (I'm even willing to say "violent") in the sense that it's trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information. But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad.
+
+> If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits.
+
+> What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
+
+commentary to Michael—
+> I don't feel like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
 
-[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession. You might think that should be the end of the matter—but this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder?]
+to Sarah—
+> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?"
 
 [TODO: getting support from Michael + Ben + Sarah, harrassing Scott and Eliezer]
 

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index e8a889a..9482c65 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -1020,3 +1020,14 @@ subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"
 4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
 > Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)
 
+Scathing rhetoric to Scott—
+> (I've been told that I'm not using the word "gaslighting" correctly. Somehow no one seems to think I have the right to define that category boundary however I want.)
+
+> If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that the person in this photograph isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about naïve Bayes models and high-dimensional configuration spaces and defensible Schelling points for social norms), then our techniques are worse than useless.
+
+> But at the same time, if Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a very similar long and important discussion to be had about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in 2014, but in retrospect, maybe it was a bad idea to build a memetic superweapon that says the number of epicycles doesn't matter.
+
+> It's gotten the point where Nature (!!!) has an editorial proclaiming ["US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8). And if otherkin started becoming sufficiently popular, I have no doubt that they could write an equally sober editorial denouncing species classification as having no basis in science. (Have you heard of ring species? Checkmate, cisspeciesists!)
+
+> I don't care about the social right to call Sam "he", because I wasn't going to do that anyway. What I do care about is the right to say "That's not what I meant by 'woman' in this context, and you fucking know it" when I think that my interloctuor does, in fact, fucking know it.
+