From 27077d4dd86f03b2f39f83799489f8271258cb86 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2022 23:30:48 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] check in --- ...-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md | 20 +++++++++---------- notes/notes.txt | 2 ++ notes/post_ideas.txt | 10 +--------- 3 files changed, 13 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-) 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 f845457..cd9411f 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I w Just that month, I had started a Twitter account in my own name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous/established in the that world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the Blanchard retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in the Code of Conduct wars. -So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by \@ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521): +So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521): > Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that! > @@ -46,11 +46,11 @@ So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the r > > I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions. -Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand— +Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)— > Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. -—repeatedly: +—[repeatedly](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048): > You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome > @@ -147,9 +147,9 @@ If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake d Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which the obviously-absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized, and claim that that difference destroys the relevence of the joke. But on the off-chance that it might help _illustrate_ my concern, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
-

Bob: "Look at this [adorable cat picture](https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656)!"

+

Bob: "Look at this adorable cat picture!"

Alice: "Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually."

-

Bob: "[You're not standing](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. [Now, maybe as a matter of policy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297), you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then."

+

Bob: "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then."

If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context. @@ -184,7 +184,7 @@ Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the e As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—well, [again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint), I don't think I should say whether he replied to Michael's and my emails, or whether he accepted the money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529): -> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/. Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING." +> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING." Look at that! The great _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ said that my position is not ontologically confused. That's _probably_ high praise coming from him! You might think that should be the end of the matter. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion; I already had a related objection written up; and he acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right? @@ -214,7 +214,7 @@ Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the func But I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again. If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture. -There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously." +There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously." Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is _not a counterargument_. @@ -242,7 +242,7 @@ Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronge -[TODO: RIP Culture War thread, defense against alt-right categorization +[TODO SECTION: RIP Culture War thread, defense against alt-right categorization I wasn't the only one going through some behind-the-scenes political drama during early 2019. @@ -253,6 +253,7 @@ On 22 February, Scott Alexander revealed that * "the degree to which category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion": it's a problem when category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion as an isolated-demand-for-rigor because people can't get the conclusion they want on the merits; I only started focusing on the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition part after the autogynephilia discussions kept getting derailed ] + [TODO: relying on Michael too much; I'm not crazy * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; I _remembered_ Michael as being high-status * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently." @@ -261,8 +262,7 @@ On 22 February, Scott Alexander revealed that ] -[TODO: on private universes -] + [TODO: ... continue translating email analysis into prose] diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt index 4e10eb6..21b345e 100644 --- a/notes/notes.txt +++ b/notes/notes.txt @@ -1892,6 +1892,8 @@ Still citing it (13 May 22): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkFTXKeFx Still citing it, in Eliezerfic Discord (18 Jul 22): https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/954750671280807968/998638253588631613 +Still citing it (31 Jul 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wbqtg3/rationality_irl/ + The correctness of this post has been disputed at length: [object-level reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), [meta-level reply (part 1)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [meta-level reply (part 2)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), [supplementary material on dolphins/whales](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) Object-level reply: http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/ diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt index 9eaf517..0a5f298 100644 --- a/notes/post_ideas.txt +++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt @@ -1,12 +1,3 @@ -Let's think step by step— -- finish "Friendship Practices" -✓ fix the sports discussion -✓ fill in the Muhammad comparison -_ email timeline compilation -_ press forward in the ms. - - - Urgent/needed for healing— _ The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ... _ I Am Not Great With Secrets (aAL) @@ -23,6 +14,7 @@ _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America Minor— +_ Xpression Camera Is the Uniquely Best Piece of Software in the World _ my medianworld: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639 _ Happy Meal _ Rebecca Romijin -- 2.17.1