Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about put a Like on my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl", I explained, then elaborated, "well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
+Having already started to argue with people in my community under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep"/"may as well be hung for a pound as a penny" started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:
+
+> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
+
+I followed it up the next morning with a post addressed to "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends", pointing out that [...
+
+[TODO: brief summary of "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"; don't want to spend wordcount quoting the whole thing]
+
+It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen."
+
+[TODO: summarize comments on "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"]
+
+Somewhat awkwardly, I had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook on 7 Feburary, I had said that [...]
+
[TODO public meltdown—
* I ended up escalating into a full-on public meltdown on my own Facebook wall. First posts, 11 Feb "some of you may have noticed" and 12 Feb "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends; summarize discussion
- * My terrible, terrible date with "Noreen" was on Sunday 12 February. We saw _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theater. We walked around the Castro and debated the gender thing beforehand. I was so distracted!!
+ * My terrible, terrible date with "Noreen" was on Sunday 12 February (comment exchange was on 7 February, initial planning PM was 9 February) We saw _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theater. We walked around the Castro and debated the gender thing beforehand. I was so distracted!!
* Elsewhere on Facebook, "Noreen" complained about the difficulty of dating, I used the opportunity to ask her for a date. (I later commented to "Chaya", "I wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I'm going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things like try to spin a complaint ("As if only guys have trouble getting dates") into a date")
Also in early July 2019, Jessica published ["The AI Timelines Scam"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam), arguing that the recent popularity of "short" (_e.g._, 2030) AI timelines was better explained by political factors, rather than any technical arguments: just as in previous decades, people had incentives to bluff and exaggerate about the imminence of AGI in order to attract resources to their own project.
-(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3/PaLM/DALL-E/_&c._ could do during the "long May 2020", it's now looking to me like the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for. I won't say, "How could I have known?", but at the time, I didn't, actually, know.)
+(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3/PaLM/DALL-E/_&c._ could do during the ["long May 2020"](https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi/status/1635871679133130752), it's now looking to me like the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for. I won't say, "How could I have known?", but at the time, I didn't, actually, know.)
I still sympathized with the "mainstream" pushback against using "scam"/"fraud"/"lie"/_&c._ language to include motivated [elephant-in-the-brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain)-like distortions. I conceded that this was a _boring_ semantic argument, but I feared that until we invented better linguistic technology, the _boring_ semantic argument was going to _continue_ sucking up discussion bandwidth with others when it didn't need to.
That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of _closeness_ that made some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
-Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I _wanted_ to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's _more useful_ than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`—but that would require the numbers in Y to be _numbers_ rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from lg 8 = 3 to lg 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter "which" three states they were.
+Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I _wanted_ to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's _more useful_ than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`—but that would require the numbers in Y to be _numbers_ rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from log<sub>2</sub> 8 = 3 to log<sub>2</sub> 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter "which" three states they were.
How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the _variance_ of my features conditional on category-membership? Was "connectedness" intrinsically the what I wanted, or was connectedness only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness _was_ intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are _similar enough to make similar decisions about_.
I pointed out that that's exactly what one would expect if the Vassar/breakdown correlation was mostly a selection effect rather than causal—that is, if the causal graph was the fork "prone-to-psychosis ← underlying-bipolar-ish-condition → gets-along-with-Michael".
-I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people autistic?
+I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people [autistic](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633396201427984384)?
Concerning the lightning parable, Scott said that from his perspective, the point of "Kolmogorov Complicity" was that, yes, people can be crazy, but that we have to live in Society without spending all our time freaking out about it. If, back in the days of my ideological anti-sexism, the first ten Yudkowsky posts I had read had said that men and women are psychologically different for biological reasons and that anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot—which Scott assumed Yudkowsky did think—he could imagine me being turned off. It was probably good for me and the world that that wasn't my first ten experiences of the rationalist community.
Robby's comment: https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D
-https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199 (some of you may have noticed, 0719 11 Feb)
+https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199 (some of you may have noticed, 1919 11 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154808888680199 (Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends, 0743 12 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154810042700199 (model clicked, causality goes the other way, 1625 12 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154811044280199 (PC is just respect, 0038 13 Feb)
> I have had the strength to live through it, I shall have the strength to write it down.
>
> —"The Husband I Bought" by Ayn Rand
+
+> _Can we all start over
+> After the final chapter's end?
+> When it all starts over
+> How do these scars begin to mend?_
+>
+> —_Centaurworld_
✓ touch up Persongen explanation [pt. 2]
✓ touch up "Helen" key photo explanation
_ explain date with "Noreen"
+_ summarize "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"
+_ summarize comments on "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"
_ October 11th posts
_ explain fight with "Noreen" et al.
With internet available—
✓ matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
✓ download Weisberg et al.
-✓ https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633396201427984384 "As somebody who's sane but not autistic, it's been very odd to watch the meaning of the formerly technical term 'autistic' expand and mutate to mean 'sane'."
✓ Nate would later admit that this was a mistake: https://intelligence.org/2015/12/11/openai-and-other-news/
✓ my October 11th? https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154424272680199
✓ Sophia's October 11?
✓ "Helen" key photo
-✓ heliocentrism tag
_ "pretty productive blogging spree" should be links to minor posts
_ look back at all the Facebook posts I cite in my outline
-----
_ backlink Yudkowsky's implicit political concession
terms to explain on first mention—
+_ TERF?
_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
_ Valinor (probably don't name it, actually)
_ "Caliphate"
_ "Wilhelm"
_ Scott
_ Anna
+_ "Noreen"
_ secret posse member
-_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
+_ "Chaya" (pseudonym choice)
_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
_ Kelsey
> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
> Because we are already enduring it.
Too subtle? (40 Likes, one comment from my half-brother)
+
+
+https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199
+> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
+
+
+
+> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
+> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
+> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
+> This is not an advanced rationality skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! I realize that explaining this in clear language has the potential to hurt some people's feelings! Unfortunately, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist (epistemic rationality is the only kind of rationality; "instrumental rationality" is a phrase someone made up in order to make themselves feel better about lying), I have a GODDAMNED MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to hurt that person's feelings!
+> People should get what they want. We should have social norms that are carefully designed to help people get what they want. Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important to have a meta-norm of not socially punishing people for clearly describing a hypothesis about the nature of the problem people are trying to solve, even if the hypothesis hurts someone's feelings, and even if there would probably be genuinely bad consequences if the hypothesis were to be believed by the masses of ordinary dumb people who hate our guts anyway.
+> I'm proud of my history of fantasizing about having the property, and I'm proud of my rationalist community, and I don't want either of them taken over by CRAZY PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY CAN EDIT THE PAST.
+(170 comments)
+
+
+> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf
+> The technically-not-lying version: http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
+> The long version: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/
+(180 comments)
+
+the other week, "Chaya" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males. "Noreen" complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I said she shouldn't apologize
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff