memoir: a little more guidance on "he could think of differences if he wanted"

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md

Title: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
Status: draft

> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.
>
> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand

Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: [ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky which taught me (amongst many, many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was.](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) [So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [A couple years later, after having put some effort into arguing against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word _woman_ (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join up with a handful of allies to attempt to persuade him to clarify.](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy of lanugage issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/)

Really, that should have been the end of the story—and it would have had a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).

That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.

On 13 February 2021, ["Silicon Valley's Safe Space"](https://archive.ph/zW6oX), the _New York Times_ piece on _Slate Star Codex_ came out. It was ... pretty lame? (_Just_ lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while [pushing hard on the subtext](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310) to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of _Slate Star Codex_. ["Nominally"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally)?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed to me more like a critique of the "many"'s reading comprehension, rather than Alexander's writing.

Although the many's poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context, can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that the mob can't read. The _Times_ article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:

> In one post, [Alexander] [aligned himself with Charles Murray](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[^sloppy]

[^sloppy]: It was unevenly sloppy of the _Times_ to link the first post, ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), but not the second, ["Against Murderism"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/)—especially since "Against Murderism" is specifically about Alexander's reasons for being skeptical of "racism" as an explanatory concept, and therefore contains "objectively" more damning sentences to quote out of context than a passing reference to Charles Murray. Apparently, the _Times_ couldn't even be bothered to smear Scott with misconstruals of his actual ideas, if guilt-by-association did the trick with less effort on behalf of both journalist and reader.

But the sense in which Alexander "aligned himself with Murray" in ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/) in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty, doesn't automatically imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity. (A couple of years earlier, Alexander had written that ["Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/): pessimism about our Society's ability to intervene to alleviate poverty, does not amount to the claim that poverty is "genetic.")

[Alexander's reply statement](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article) pointed out the _Times_'s obvious chicanery, but (I claim) introduced a distortion of its own—

> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray's offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.

It _is_ a weirdly brazen invalid _inference_. But by calling it a "falsehood", Alexander heavily implies this means he disagrees with Murray's offensive views on race: in invalidating the _Times_'s charge of guilt-by-association with Murray, Alexander validates Murray's guilt.

But anyone who's read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically-mediated ancestry-group differences in socially-relevant traits (as a value-free matter of empirical science with no particular normative implications): for example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#twin-studies) for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III. of his ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) indicates that he accepts genetics as an explantion for group differences in the particular case of cognitive ability in Ashkenazi Jews.[^murray-alignment]

[^murray-alignment]: And as far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, it's notable that Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in [a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post](https://archive.vn/xu7PX).

There are a lot of standard caveats that go here which Scott would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: [the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't itself imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats). It is without a doubt entirely conceivable that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white IQ gap is fake and environmental.[^bet] Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.

[^bet]: It's just—how much do you want to bet on that? How much do you think _Scott_ wants to bet?

But anyone who's read _and understood_ Charles Murray's work, knows that [Murray also includes the standard caveats](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average)![^murray-caveat] (Even though the one about group differences not implying anything about individuals is [actually wrong](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/).) The _Times_'s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist _like Charles Murray_ seems like a "[Gettier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted _New York Times_ readers is completely bogus.

[^murray-caveat]: For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of _The Bell Curve_, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other."

Why do I [keep](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#tragedy-of-recursive-silencing) [bringing](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#literally-a-white-supremacist) up the claim that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ readers)?

It's because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalists" and mainstream progressives, the "rationalists"' defensive strategy is one of deception.

Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our object-level beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much most of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit it's an empirical question, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).

I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).[^logical-induction]

[^logical-induction]: I wonder how hard it would have been to come up with MIRI's [logical induction result](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543) (which describes an asymptotic algorithm for estimating the probabilities of mathematical truths in terms of a betting market composed of increasingly complex traders) in the Soviet Union.

Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful about what they say in public. (I am not smart.)

So the _New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]

[^deny-everything]: In January 2023, when Nick Bostrom [preemptively apologized for a 26-year-old email to the Extropians mailing list](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) that referenced the IQ gap and mentioned a slur, he had [some](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi) [detractors](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old) and a [few](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi?commentId=h9gdA4snagQf7bPDv) [defenders](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NniTsDNQQo58hnxkr/my-thoughts-on-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old-email), but I don't recall seeing anyone defending the 1997 email itself.

    But if you're [familiar with the literature](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad) and understand the [use–mention distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction), the literal claims in [the original email](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) are entirely reasonable. (There are additional things one could say about [what pro-social functions are being served by](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts) the taboos against what the younger Bostrom called "the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity", which would make for fine mailing-list replies, but the original email can't be abhorrent simply for failing to anticipate all possible counterarguments.)

    I didn't speak up at the time of the old-email scandal, either. I had other things to do with my attention and Overton budget.

It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the coverup.

As it happens, in our world, the defensive coverup consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (We think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a handful of East and South Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Altruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.[^survey-data]

[^survey-data]: We go from 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results) to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)—although the [2020 EA survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics) says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we."

But _trans!_ We have plenty of those! In [the same blog post in which Scott Alexander characterized rationalism as the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), he also named "don’t misgender trans people" as one of the group's distinguishing norms. Two years later, he joked that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).

Having plenty of trans people means having plenty of high-ranking [progressive stack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack) members to trot out as a shield to prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys. Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" should have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.

Even the haters grudgingly give Alexander credit for ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong"](https://archive.is/SlJo1), wrote one.

<a id="dump-stats"></a>Under these circumstances, dethroning the supremacy of gender identity ideology is politically impossible. All our [Overton margin](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) is already being spent somewhere else; sanity on this topic is our [dump stat](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat).

But this being the case, _I have no reason to participate in the cover-up_. What's in it for me? Why should I defend my native subculture from external attack, if the defense preparations themselves have already rendered it uninhabitable to me?

On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/), on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.

I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. In the email, he said that biologically-mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's collective epistemology is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. (In contrast, [RationalWiki](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) didn't generate garbage, but by hewing so closely to the mainstream, it also didn't say much that Alexander didn't already know.) The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't already blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing _vis á vis_ the neoreactionaries and his own popularity—but again, none of it is really surprising if you know Scott from his writing.

I think the main reason someone _would_ consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read _Slate Star Codex_ that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was, "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse that he [wrote up an explanation of what _reactionaries_ (of all people) believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)—and then, of course, [turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're totally wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/)." As a first approximation, it's not a terrible picture. But what it misses—what _Scott_ knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent, before concluding (of course) that they were wrong and you were right all along in every detail. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting _right_.

The same day, Yudkowsky published [a Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl) which said[^brennan-condemnation-edits]:

> I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)

[^brennan-condemnation-edits]: The post was subsequently edited a number of times in ways that I don't think are relevant to my discussion here.

I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote [a comment](/images/davis-why_they_say_they_hate_us.png) (which ended up yielding 49 Like and Heart reactions): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving.

If you listened to why _they_ said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seemed to be trending towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."

But if "sexism" included "it's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's ["Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)), then the "_Slate Star Codex_ _et al._ are crypto-sexists" charge was absolutely correct. (Crypto-racist, cypto-fascist, _&c._ left as an exercise to the reader.)

You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've already been trained in the "use empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes" tradition; the people with a California-public-school-social-studies-plus-Tumblr education didn't already know that. ([I didn't know this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".

Indeed, it seems important to notice (though I didn't at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott _unilaterally_ said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.

To see why the lack of a promise is significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or [stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy)) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance, but added, "never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge". In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the whistleblower and against "privacy".

In the Brennan–Alexander case, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's _because_ I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our actual problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because [the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)", but we thought our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!

Yudkowsky [replied that](/images/yudkowsky-we_need_to_exclude_evil_bullies.png) everyone (including, for example, organizers of science fiction conventions) had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable [Kolmogorov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.

To this, I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. Psychology is complicated, and people have more than one reason for doing things: I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.

But I think it's also important to notice both problems, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy. It's one thing to believe that people should keep promises that they, themselves, explicitly made. But instructing commenters not to link to the email seems to imply not just that Brennan should keep _his_ promises, but that everyone else is obligated to participate in a conspiracy to conceal information that Alexander would prefer concealed. I can see an ethical case for it, analogous to returning stolen property after it's already been sold, and expecting buyers not to buy items that they know have been stolen. (If Brennan had obeyed Alexander's confidentiality demand, we wouldn't have an email to link to, so if we wish Brennan had obeyed, we can just _act as if_ we don't have an email to link to.)

But there's also a non-evil-bully case for wanting to reveal information, rather than participate in a cover-up to protect the image of the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the progressive egregore. If the orchestrators of the cover-up can't even acknowledge to themselves that they're orchestrating a cover-up, they're liable to be confusing themselves about other things, too.

As it happened, I ended up having another social media interaction with Yudkowsky that same day, 18 February 2021. Concerning the psychology of people who hate on "rationalists" for alleged sins that don't particularly resmemble anything we do or believe, [he wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608):

> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.

In reply, Michael Vassar tagged me. "Michael, I thought you weren't talking to me (after my failures of 18–19 December)?" [I said](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362549606538641413). "But yeah, I wrote a couple blog posts about this thing", linking to ["Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) and ["Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)

After a few moments, I decided it was better if I [explained the significance of Michael tagging me](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113):

> Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!

And I think I _would_ have been over it, except ...

—except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation four days later on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions, and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."

(Why!? Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention, despite the fact that I'm generally not that important?)

I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title] but that post focused on the object-level arguments; I have more to say here (that I decided to cut from "Challenges") about the meta-level political context. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a fascinating document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.

[^challenges-title]: The form of the title is an allusion to Yudkowsky's ["Challenges to Christiano's Capability Amplification Proposal"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal).

Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.

But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was _because_ the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were in the position of defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).

In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological of sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size."

But I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We only infer whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing [a variety of correlated characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic). Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to, one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.

Thus, Yudkowsky's "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flailing attempt to gesture at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex, without having to admit that that's what's going on.

One could argue that this is hostile nitpicking on my part: that the use of "gamete size" as a metonym for sex here is either an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition (because if you said _sex_, _female_, or _male_, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision that can be usefully critiqued.

But the post seems to suggest that the motive isn't simply to avoid ambiguity. Yudkowsky writes:

> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
>
> And I'm not happy that the very language I use, would try to force me to take a position on that; not a complicated nuanced position, but a binarized position, _simply in order to talk grammatically about people at all_.

What does the "tossed into a bucket" metaphor refer to, though? I can think of many things that might be summarized that way, and my sympathy for the one who does not like to be tossed into a bucket depends on exactly what real-world situation is being mapped to the bucket.

If we're talking about overt gender role enforcement attempts—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband", or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.

(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt out of the default buckets without causing too much trouble.)

But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that having genuine merit—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is [only _d_ ≈ 0.4](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/); your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the individuating information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I don't think people have a general right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.

When piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not have merit. The post continues (bolding mine):

> In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
>
> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.

So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.

But taking as given the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be referred to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems outrageous to me!

It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of genuine nuance brought on by a genuine complication to a system that _falsely_ assumes discrete hair colors.

But "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? There's nothing ambiguous about these cases: if you haven't, in fact, changed your hair color, then your hair is, in fact, its original color. The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer are, today, going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.

Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.

But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is absurd. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive for insisting on complication and nuance is as an obfuscation tactic—

Unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?

Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. [My previous hopeless ideological war—before this one—was against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I hated being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.

I sometimes describe myself as mildly "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely-understood vocabulary for my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity), but if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was vastly worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.

(I remember being particularly distraught one day at the end of community college physics class, and stumbling to the guidance counselor to inquire urgently what my options were for just escaping this place with an Associate's degree, rather than transferring to a university to finish my Bachelor's as planned. I burst into tears again when the counselor mentioned that there would be a physical education requirement. It wasn't that a semester of P.E. would be difficult; it was the indignity of being subject such meaningless requirements before Society would see me as a person.)

But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that I didn't like it, but that the bucket was wrong on the empirical merits: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition; the system was _actually in the wrong_ for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".

And because my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to update to the extent that the empirical merits showed that _I_ was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.

In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a _C_. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts", and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.

_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a less reflective person in this situation doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related, in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.

I knew better than to behave like that—and to the extent that I was tempted, I retained my ability to notice and snap out of it. My failure didn't mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it did mean that I must have been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory or unreal about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the differential equations textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this), while also [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)

Someone who uncritically validated my not liking to be tossed into the Student Bucket, instead of assessing my _reasons_ for not liking to be tossed into the Bucket and whether those reasons had merit, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, not a map that reflects my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than trying to deny it or claim that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism _could_ match the standard set by schools, even if it hadn't that time. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When interviewing for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on being given the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)

If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the right solution to "student dysphoria", it should be obvious why the same is true of gender dysphoria. There's a general underlying principle, that it matters whether someone's current self-image is actually true.

In an article titled ["Actually, I Was Just Crazy the Whole Time"](https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole), FtMtF detransitioner Michelle Alleva contrasts her beliefs at the time of deciding to transition with her current beliefs. While transitioning, she accounted for many pieces of evidence about herself ("dislikes attention as a female", "obsessive thinking about gender", "doesn't fit in with the girls", _&c_.) in terms of the theory "It's because I'm trans." But now, Alleva writes, she thinks she has a variety of better explanations that, all together, cover all the pieces of evidence on the original list: "It's because I'm autistic", "It's because I have unresolved trauma", "It's because women are often treated poorly" ... including "That wasn't entirely true" (!!).

This is a rationality skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)

(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about themself, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some specific objective sense on the empirical merits, that would also be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-atypical same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michelle Alleva, the story doesn't [pay rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).)

This also isn't a particularly advanced rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.

Back in 2009, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I hadn't yet grown out of [my teenage ideological fever dream of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was a poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."

[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):

> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—**or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is [not _necessarily_ something to integrate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me).**

_I knew_. Even then, _I knew_ I had to qualify my not liking to be tossed into a Male Bucket. I could object to Yudkowsky speaking as if men were a collective with shared normative ideals ("a lifetime's work to integrate"), but I couldn't claim to somehow not be male, or even that people couldn't make probabilistic predictions about me given the fact that I'm male ("the fact of masculinity"), _because that would be crazy_. The culture of early _Less Wrong_ wouldn't have let me get away with that.

It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or at least, if it does have any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.

At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post also explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?

I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just too talented of a writer for me to excuse his words as an artifact of accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about at the risk of offending someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous.

When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."

On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky ... does not obviously _disagree_ with this interpetation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png):

> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
>
> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
>
> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
>
> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.

So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is laughable. My point (articulated at length in ["Challenges"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/)) that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are exactly what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is obvious.

Really, it would be less embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't that bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just didn't put any effort whatsoever into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and still ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as mentioning any of its obvious costs, that's discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is that bad, why would you trust his opinion about anything?

Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If the community is so bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one who can talk about any of the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual Culture War, why would you pay attention to the community _at all_? Insofar as the community is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the entire world for reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that's optimized to move resources to itself): it needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.

The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky takes it as an unexamined and unproblematic assumption 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.

But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be applied to everything else 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 therefore 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 anything one should want to dignify by calling it an intellectual community.

Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue as to what's going on here](/images/yudkowsky-people_might_be_able_to_speak_that.png):

> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.

(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is very interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community is, in fact, a partisan institution. An intellectual community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality would not have an _other side_.)

I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some similar hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?

Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf).[^motivatedly-inaccurate]

[^motivatedly-inaccurate]: The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!

And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular subcultures (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans if they lived in a different subculture.

I claim that (a′) and (b′) are overwhelmingly likely to be true. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story [I've](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [been](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [telling](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) you about how I wasted the last seven years of my life on this, I'm going to guess that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that. (I can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)

But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in his [November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](/images/yudkowsky-wrong_place_to_pack_it.png):

> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
>
> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.

Sure, if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is understood as a contested social construct, rather than their sex being an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their already existing native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when by your own admission, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_

(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is much better than not-admitting it, so huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)

Again, [as discussed in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#t-v-distinction), there's an instructive comparison to languages that have formality-based second person pronouns, like [_tú_ and _usted_ in Spanish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted). It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.

It's another thing altogether to simultaneously try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist) while also refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining why they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just psychologically abusive.

If Yudkowsky actually possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be obvious to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be overjoyed to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy of pronouns is because they suspect, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.

Having analyzed the ways in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is why. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?

Of course, presumably he doesn't think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png):

> I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you get get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.

Ah, _prudence_! He continues:

> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.

The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in a line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to others after the fact.

The best explanation of this I know of was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:

> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
>
> Sorry. It can't be done.
>
> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
>
> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.

The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to others, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):

> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
>
> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
>
> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.

The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of illogical argument, even though both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) and the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises; the reason all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general form "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.

Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:

> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
>
> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
> * Process the checklist.
> * Go to the winning candidate.
> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
>
> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.

I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset, that you somehow "can't" argue for something! It's a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the existence of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.

... which is why it's so bizarre that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your actual bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.

"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a generic metaphor for any undesirable consequence, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation. And any other partisan hack could say exactly the same, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.

Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low." If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is so terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job or your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price.

I just—would have hoped that abandoning the intellectual legacy of his Sequences, would be a price too high for such a paltry benefit?

Michael Vassar [said](https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098), "Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments." By accepting that soldiers are arguments ("I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), Yudkowsky is accepting the end of rationalism in this sense. If the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.

I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means, which is one of [the reasons I tend to be hesitant to use the term](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e4GBj6jxRZcsHFSvP/assume-bad-faith), but I think it fits here. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).

For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it, might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to make it look like you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually inert: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim, in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is sometimes personally prudent.

With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless dismissal, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will [take care not to consciously tell an explicit "lie"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), while going through the motions to make it look like he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.

To his credit, he will admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while simultaneously blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)

Counterarguments aren't completely causally inert: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity (Such That Some People Perceive an Interest in Using Language Accordingly), Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation with progressives, as is sometimes personally prudent.

<a id="concern-trolling"></a>Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I occasionally engage in a bit of what could be called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with my interlocutor than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the minimal amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavio. There _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.

That is, my bad faith concern-trolling gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that improves the accuracy of our collective beliefs about the topic being argued about. (And the topic is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)

In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.

Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the reason censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.

Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the rationalization goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.

But if everybody knew, then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the appeal of censorship is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to keep it that way.

For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be convenient if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).

[Policy debates should not appear one-sided.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really were no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.

But if you cared about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be sure that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore politically unfavorable counteraguments_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion". I think he's playing dumb here. In other contexts, he's written about ["attack[s] performed by selectively reporting true information"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824) and ["[s]tatements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false"](https://hpmor.com/chapter/97). I think that _if he wanted to_, Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences between "2 + 2 = 4" and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'".

"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is enacting that policy the right thing to do?

Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I've been telling you this 100,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.

<a id="thellim-vs-jane-austen"></a>In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):

> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.

When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"

Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about "trans" culture in the current year. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into a gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful and hurtful.

The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with fantasizing about being the other sex, and wanting the fantasy to become real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.

The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way that involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves—and that's not possible in a culture that tries to ban as heresy the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.

A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"

It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand—

_It was a compliment!_ That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment, and _done something to pass better next time_. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's [hostile](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) [stereotype](/2022/Feb/link-never-smile-at-an-autogynephile/) of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.

I want a shared cultural understanding that the correct way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like better and cheaper facial feminization surgery, not [emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me.

In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://web.archive.org/web/20210513192331/http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.

But I would have expected people with an inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution, [whatever that turns out to be](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)?

And if that's too much to expect of the general public—

And if it's too much to expect garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their superiors—

Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to take actions _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_? I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character_.

This is the part where Yudkowsky or his flunkies accuse me of being uncharitable, of [failing at perspective-taking](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435617576495714304) and [embracing conspiracy theories](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242). Obviously, Yudkowsky doesn't _think of himself_ as trying to transform his faithful students into Jane Austen characters. One might then ask if it does not therefore follow that I have failed to understand his position? [As Yudkowsky put it](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):

> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing` instead.

But the substance of my complaints is [not about Yudkowsky's conscious subjective narrative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie). I don't have a lot of uncertainty about Yudkowsky's theory of himself, because he told us that, very clearly: "it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment." I don't doubt that that's [how the algorithm feels from the inside](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside).

But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is _doing_ in Stalin's service, not about how it feels; I'm talking about a pattern of publicly visible _behavior_ stretching over years, not claiming to be a mind-reader. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but it does not therefore follow that no one ever does anything terrible.

I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing`. (People get very invested in their own stories.) But if you have the _receipts_ of the Other repeatedly doing the thing in public from 2016 to 2021, maybe yelling about it to _everyone else_ might help _them_ stop getting suckered by the Other's empty posturing.

Let's recap.

In January 2009, Yudkowsky published ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), essentially a revision of [a 2004 mailing list post responding to a man who said that after the Singularity, he'd like to make a female but "otherwise identical" copy of himself](https://archive.is/En6qW). "Changing Emotions" insightfully points out [the deep technical reasons why](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard) men who sexually fantasize about being women can't achieve their dream with forseeable technology—and not only that, but that the dream itself is conceptually confused: a man's fantasy-about-it-being-fun-to-be-a-woman isn't part of the female distribution; there's a sense in which it _can't_ be fulfilled.

It was a good post! Though Yudkowsky was merely using the sex change example to illustrate [a more general point about the difficulties of applied transhumanism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), "Changing Emotions" was hugely influential on me; I count myself much better off for having understood the argument.

But seven years later, in a March 2016 Facebook post, Yudkowsky [proclaimed that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women." 

This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in "Changing Emotions". The two posts weren't _necessarily_ inconsistent, if you assumed gender identity is a real property synonymous with "brain sex", and that the harsh (almost mocking) skepticism of the idea of true male-to-female sex change in "Changing Emotions" was directed at the erotic sex-change fantasies of _cis_ men (with a male gender-identity/brain-sex), whereas the 2016 Facebook post was about _trans women_ (with a female gender-identity/brain-sex), which are a different thing.

But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially if trans women were purported to be "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!!) in some population. After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_. So in October 2016, [I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occured.

Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning". But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). After attempts to clarify via email failed, I eventually wrote ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the relevant error in general terms, and Yudkowsky would eventually go on to [clarify his position in Septembmer 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).

But then in February 2021, he reopened the discussion to proclaim that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition", the problems with which post I explained in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) and above.

End recap.

At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of [not writing any sentences he knows to be false](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#2__The_law_of_no_literal_falsehood_). Meanwhile, I want to make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards to sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.

On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."

On "my turn", I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously false atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was substantively misleading compared to what any serious person would say if they were trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.

At the start, I never expected to end up arguing about something so trivial as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was trying to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.

In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for broadly similar reasons.

Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._

It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that his own pre–[Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) writings [explain why that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that his earlier writings also explain why [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that [that's not what's going on](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/), he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of something—but at this point, _I have no reason to care_. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a waste of everyone's time; he has a [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) that doesn't involve trying to inform you.

Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.

Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be allowed to notice the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is obviously happening if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's some number of years and some number of thousands of words[^wordcounts] of litigating the object level (about gender) and the meta level (about the philosophy of categorization) after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level of politics and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been empirically falsified.[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]

[^wordcounts]: ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (2018), ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (2019), and ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) (2021) total to over 20,000 words.

[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]: Obviously, if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a pretty good job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly mendaciously arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.

What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing or forseeable technology because of how complicated humans (and therefore human sex differences) are? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was in the Sequences as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries [compress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) your [anticipated experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)

Seriously, do you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year, are almost entirely things he already said, that anyone could just look up!

I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009?

Does ... does he expect the rest of us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?

But I don't think that everybody knows. And I'm not giving up that easily. Not on an entire subculture full of people.

Yudkowsky [defended his behavior in February 2021](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176):

> I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.

There are a number of things that could be said to this,[^number-of-things] but most importantly: the battle that matters—the battle with a Right Side and a Wrong Side—isn't "pro-trans" _vs._ "anti-trans". (The central tendency of the contemporary trans rights movement is firmly on the Wrong Side, but that's not the same thing as all trans people as individuals.) That's why Jessica Taylor [joined our posse to try to argue with Yudkowsky in early 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#jessica-joins). (She wouldn't have, if my objection had been, "trans is Wrong; trans people Bad.") That's why Somni—one of the trans women who [infamously protested the 2019 CfAR reunion](https://www.ksro.com/2019/11/18/new-details-in-arrests-of-masked-camp-meeker-protesters/) for (among other things) CfAR allegedly discriminating against trans women—[understands what I've been saying](https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind).

[^number-of-things]: Note the striking contrast between ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument), in which the Yudkowsky of 2007 wrote that a campaign manager "crossed the line [between rationality and rationalization] at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it"; and these 2021 Tweets, in which Yudkowsky seems completely nonchalant about "not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping" one side of a cultural dispute, because "this battle just isn't that close to the top of [his] priority list". Well, sure! Any hired campaign manager could say the same: helping the electorate make an optimally informed decision just isn't that close to the top of their priority list, compared to getting paid.

    Yudkowsky's claim to have been focused on nudging people's cognition towards sanity seems dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors in both political camps. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make proportionately more errors on the "pro-Stalin" side.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", judging by local demographics, it seems much more likely to apply to trans women themselves, than their critics!

The battle that matters—and I've been very explicit about this, for years—is over this proposition eloquently [stated by Scott Alexander in November 2014](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (redacting the irrelevant object-level example):

> I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.

This is a battle between Feelings and Truth, between Politics and Truth.

In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to [tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him)](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton).

You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class, is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him).

And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female with respect to a concept of binary sex that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).

If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.

Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is [very explicit about only speaking in the capacity of some guy with a blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). You can tell from his writings that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is alright. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.

Eliezer Yudkowsky did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he consciously knows to be unambiguously false. And the reason I can hold it against _him_ is because Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself as a master of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition, who ["aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608). 

In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't claim to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.

If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, and refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign) and keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising. His marketing bluster was optimized to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.

Because, I did, actually, trust him. Back in 'aught-nine when _Less Wrong_ was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic ["Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) (in the style of [Chuck Norris facts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts)). And of course, it was a joke, but the hero-worship that make the joke funny was real. (You wouldn't make those jokes for your community college physics teacher, even if he was a good teacher.)

["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.

[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):

> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.

I notice that this advice leaves out a possibility: that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show (judged to be personally prudent and not community-harmful), rather than a misperception on your part. I am left in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) shaking my head sadly about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and shaking my head in disgust at his craven duplicity. If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.