2 1 Dec 2018: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph" to Scott cc Anna Jonah Sarah Michael
3 ... discussion with Scott runs to 3 Dec
4 3 Dec: forward Scott thread to Ben and Katie, privacy leak
5 4 Dec: Ben—bullshit nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat
6 5 Dec: Ben—the interesting part is your model of the "rationalists" is wrong
7 6 Dec: Michael—this is important, share with Aurora?
8 10 Dec: asking Anna for her take
9 11 Dec: social proof from Sarah to Scott
10 11 Dec: Michael—argument should be compelling unless Craft Is Not the Community
11 12 Dec: emailing Harmanas after running into him at the train
12 16 Dec: to Sarah and Michael, "I still owe you" first draft
13 16 Dec: Michael—I want EY to respond to arguments, but wait a few weeks?
14 18–19 Dec: to Anna and Michael, on conversational violence and self-defense
16 21 Dec: to Sarah, something to protect
17 21 Dec: Sarah—Let's Get This Gender Thing Over With (unpublished)
18 24 Dec: ... further discussion with Ben/Sarah/Michael
19 26 Dec: my intelligence notes on Ziz
20 30 Dec: Ben—phatic declaration of respect makes me feel less safe
21 1 Jan: final draft of "I still owe you money"
22 1 Jan: Eliezer has taken initiative to spend Eliezerself's time, Rob as police
23 3 Jan: meatspace met with Michael/Sarah/Auora/Ben/Andrew
24 5 Jan: met with Ziz and Gwen with Michael and Aurora, lawsuits
25 6 Jan: backchannel to Anna about Ziz
26 6 Jan: EY thread cont'd
27 9 Jan: I want to see you be brave (was: Re: I still owe you money; and, discourse on categories and the fourth virtue)
28 11 Jan: me—What do think submitting to social pressure looks like?!
29 15 Jan: unsent "thunder comes before gaslighting" draft
30 16 Jan: Ben to me/Anna on old thread: esotericism is less of a problem if flagged
31 18 Jan: gender refugees, moral patiency, and BBL
32 29 Jan: me to Kay Brown: have you noticed LGBTQ/queer culture getting worse?
33 8 Feb: me to Katie about Rust All-Hands
34 8 Feb: me to Ben and Michael about social competence
35 20 Feb: impulsive email to Scott (subject: a howl of despair which is nameless)
36 20 Feb: cold outreach to Ben Landau-Taylor
37 21 Feb: telling Marcus, I'm out of cards: we created a monster
44 > A deluge of nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat, or at least a marginalization threat. The game is that the nitpicks force you to choose between infinite interpretive labor, and "never answered these construed-as-reasonable objections" (in which case you lose standing to make the claim, and if people call you on that, they get to start talking about you as a bad rationalist, likely think of you as unreasonable, stop inviting you to things, etc.).
45 > It's a bit less direct than how "this is crazy talk" can be an implied imprisonment threat, but it's still strong (distributed) social aggression.
48 > if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen
49 (I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
51 > Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
54 > If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
56 > There have been times during the last few weeks where it's felt like my mind has shut down with the only thought, "What the hell am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? I don't want to be one of the Bad Guys. Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
58 > Except that I was raised to believe that you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind. And I can't actually point to such a counterargument. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is not a counterargument. When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
60 > And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
62 > But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_—where a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
64 > But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
66 > I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
68 > I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture."
70 > So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
72 > I want to emphasize this, because I don't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
74 > My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
76 > I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute
78 > Imagine your friends got a new front porch installed on your house, and you noticed that the boards were smoother and shinier than you expected. A question you might then ask your friend is, "Oh, is this real wood, or one of those wood-plastic composites?"
80 > In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
82 The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/)
85 Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening.
87 Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
89 When I told Michael about this, he said that I was ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer mattered more for my claims than the equivalent of a scientist, and that Ben Hoffman (who I had already shared the thread with Scott with) would be helpful in solidifying my claims to IP defense. I said that I didn't _feel_ like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
92 > Ben once told me that conversation with me works like this. I try to say things that are literally true and people bend over backwards to pretend to agree but to think that I am being metaphorical.
95 > Yes, exactly. I'm still framing it as "appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on higher standards" rather than appealing to a standard a court or a community could enforce. Eliezer reportedly didn't think much of Atlas Shrugged ... I assume Andrew has read it? I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute:
97 > I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
99 You see the problem, right? I'm kind of at my wits' end here, because I thought the point of this whole "rationality" project was to carve out one place in the entire world where good arguments would eventually triumph over bad arguments, even when the good arguments happen to be mildly politically inconvenient.
101 appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halter
102 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
104 (I _want_ to confidently predict that everything I've just said is completely obvious to you, because I learned it all specifically from you! A 130 IQ _nobody_ like me shouldn't have to say _any_ of this to the _author_ of "A Human's Guide to Words"! But then I don't know how to reconcile that with your recent public statement about [not seeing "how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). Hence this desperate and [_confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) email plea.)
106 And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the
110 Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
112 In a functioning rationalist community, there should never be any occasion in which "appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal authority" seems like a good strategy: the way this is supposed to work is that I should just make my arguments with the understanding that good arguments will be accepted and bad arguments will be rejected. But I've been trying that, and it's mostly not working. On any other topic, I probably would have just given up and accepted the social consensus by now: "Sure, OK, whatever, trans women are women by definition; who am I to think I've seen into the Bayes-structure?" I still think this from time to time, and feel really guilty about arguing for the Bad Guys (because in my native Blue Tribe culture, only Bad people want to talk about sexual dimorphism). But then I can't stop seeing the Bayes-structure that says that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept even when it's ideologically unfashionable—and I've got Something to Protect. What am I supposed to do?
114 I agree that this is the only reason you should care.
116 ut if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
118 > I don't think it's as clear as that. The trans community has never been solely focused on people who believe they've always been of x gender. It's just that it's such a freeing and helpful explanation when trying to get people to accept that you in fact are of that gender. The x in a body of y explanation has always been a shortcut to get cis people to leave us alone more than a real feeling, honestly.
119 > And then the thread did not explode into acrimony.
121 My paraphrase: "Oh, it's not actually true; it's a non-true thing that we tell cis people to get them to model us the way we want to be modeled"!?
123 Isn't that at least kind of like lying? (Or if these authors get to choose their preferred category boundary for "woman", do I get to choose my preferred category boundary for "lie"?)
126 f you want people to use your preferred categories, you're going to need to convince them with some sort of argument that those categories are predictively useful. I don't see the point of saying "There's no epistemic issue here, although maybe there's a policy debate about how to use language; end-of-discussion" if it's not to justify the mind games? Why can't we get a clear ex cathedra statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule that categories are nonarbitrary? Isn't it true, and important, and something that people who ought to know better are getting wrong? Surely there's some way for "not alt-right" signaling to be purchased separately?
132 > I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
134 I assumed he was talking about Katie's institutionalization, not SRS
136 > where gaslighting escalated into more tangible harm in a way that people wouldn't know about by default. In contrast, people already know that bottom surgery is a thing; you just have reasons to think it's Actually Bad—reasons that your friends can't engage with if we don't know what you're talking about. It's already bad enough that Eliezer is being so pointlessly cagey; if everyone does it, then we're really doomed.
139 > "saying the wrong keywords causes people in this conversation to start talking about me using the wrong keywords in ways that cause me illegible, hard-to-trace damage."
141 > marginalization happens through processes designed to be hard for the "rider" in the horse-rider system to see. This makes the threat model hard to communicate, which puts the rider in a double-bind with respect to things like courage, because it's dependent on the horse for most of its information.
143 I thought the conjunction of the "mere worm" rhetoric and the thousands of words of "Here's why your own writing proves that you're wrong, you coward" and the context of Eliezer's own arrogant writing style, should have implied a certain level of conceit/tongue-in-cheekness? (I wouldn't write like this—or, um, pay someone $1000 to read my blog post—for anyone else in the world, but Eliezer is really special to me.)
145 I already tried to say this in my message of the seventh, but let me try again more explicitly: I agree that the rationalists are very good at free speech norms. Ozy is writing in good faith! There is no concealed blade! I can totally do my thing without getting shouted down for heresy! I am not a victim of anything!
147 I do, however, think there's a subtler failure mode than "heretics get shouted down", namely, "heretics have to put up with spurious isolated demands for rigor, logical rudeness, conversation-halters, &c., such that the community doesn't update or updates slower than it could have."
149 This is, of course, a much harder problem to solve, because "Speaker gets shouted down" is easy for third parties to detect as a discourse-norm violation, whereas "Speaker's (polite!) interlocutors are engaging in [motivated continuation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L32LHWzy9FzSDazEg/motivated-stopping-and-motivated-continuation)" is a subtle judgment call that a lot of third-parties are going to get wrong. But if and to the extent that such a thing does happen in our community—and you shouldn't take my word for it—I think it's causally downstream of silencing going on elsewhere in the trash fire that is Society (which we're not isolated from).
152 > It seems like for the socioeconomic class likely to become Rationalists, employability increasingly requires the kind of sensitivity to social threat and opportunity that makes people easily silenceable in the absence of a clear distinct threat, even in the Bay, even for programmers (though not 100% yet), since workplaces have become more politicized and less about getting something specific done
154 Except people are actually super hypocritical about this: everyone knows to say that men are Bad, but only weird nerds who Take Ideas Seriously (e.g., me, Scott Aaronson, Jessica, Ziz), take the idea seriously. In a world where we know that men are Bad, but women are Good, and that women are people who identify as women ... well, for normal, well-adjusted men, it makes no difference. But for the nerds who live in a world made out of words, there's a natural incentive to cross the border between a lonely straight man with no intersectionality points, and a thrice-oppressed lesbian trans woman with three intersectionality points—and thus, a seat at the Blue table.
156 The gender-refugees story is story is the extra ingredient we need to make sense of the new and crazier thing that's going on in Current Year Berkeley: the escaping-Bad-man-status incentive gradient, and decreasing stigma (or even a status boost in sufficiently social-justice-converged subcultures), make for a much lower threshold of required AGPness before transitioning starts to look like a good idea—and potentially none at all (see Ziz again).
158 I really did not anticipate that the controversial part of "men who fantasize about being actual women for sexual reasons" would be the phrase "actual women"!
160 I've got some exciting open-source events coming up (first the Rust team all-hands, then I'm giving a talk at !!Con West) where I want to make friends and impress people, and I'm a little bit worried about being revealed as a thought-criminal earlier than I intended. Among the ~30 !!Con speakers (they're lightning talks), I count 3 trans women, three obvious men who prefer they/them pronouns, and one obvious woman who prefers they/them pronouns.
162 Karaoke night was fun, but social-justice culture has me on edge (the little things; like, Manish showed me this funny Tweet on his phone, and my uncontrolled facial reaction was probably more disdainful than mirthful, and I don't know how to calculate if or how much I'm being socially penalized these little things)
164 I've lived in the "rationalist" cult-bubble my entire adult life, and I don't know the rules for forming cross-cult alliances. If some of the social-justicey open-source people seem like they're starting to Accept me and invite me to things, can I say to one of them, "Look, I'm worried about being socially rejected for ideological reasons; maybe we should talk about this privately now rather than risking Drama later"? If that doesn't work (and it works with my "rationalist" friends, for all their other faults), then what do people do??
166 My original fantasy-plan was to strive for Acceptance, then suddenly stop preference-falsifying on Twitter (rough draft) at an opportune moment (after securing compiler-team membership or another conference speaker slot) as a calculated bid for glorious Damore- or Lindsay-Shepherd-like free-speech martyrdom. (If you don't preference-falsify at first when you're a nobody, then you can be quietly frozen out, but if you get Accepted first, then getting kicked out is a loud event that forces the bastards to make their ideological litmus test visible.)
168 But I'm pretty sure the martyrdom-seeking intuition is Actually Bad. (They're not bastards; they're people exactly like me who read different books in a different order.)
170 After more private discussion with Eliezer (after rounding up Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin for social proof), and fighting Alicorn's Discord server three times, at this point I'm leaning towards just giving up on the so-called "rationalist" community. We had an entire goddamned Sequence about the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition and why "I can define a word/category any way I want" is generalized anti-epistemology.
172 I think something got derailed in our last discussion. I begged you to remind your readers about the meta-level epistemology-insight about hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing, and somehow we ended up in an object-level discussion about which categories to use, with you appealing to "mental health benefits to trans people."
174 I'm not upset about the object-level. What I care about is this: as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, seeking out the map that reflects the territory, to cut through to the correct answer in a single movement, I have a moral duty to not care about people's feelings when forming my world-model. I can certainly not-talk about unpleasant ideas or concepts when they're not too relevant when in the presence of non-rationalists who might feel hurt. But when I'm being serious? With people who call themselves fucking aspiring rationalists? Trying to make sense of the world? The correct amount of "mild inconveniences and slight cognitive friction" to accept for utilitarian reasons is zero.
176 Like, I want to be fair and give credit where credit is due. Like, rationalists are very good at free speech norms. The Alicorner discussion actually made some progress! But ... not enough progress?
178 You wrote, "some compromise solution like always using 'sex: male/female' to mean 'biological sex' and 'gender: man/woman' to mean 'self-identified gender' would, if it were universally understood and agreed upon, be pretty fair and optimal."
180 But have you fucking tried trying to talk about biological sex with Berkeley psuedo-rationalists? They won't fucking acknowledge it.
182 I said, "I need language that asymmetrically distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology."
184 Kelsey said, "[T]he people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
186 Elena said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" ... and gets 4 "+1" emoji.
188 And like ... I don't know, these motherfuckers talk a good game about "charity", but when I'm clearly trying to talk about the 'biological sex' thing, and I get a response about women who don't like their own bodies ... I don't think the principle of charity is being applied?! I haven't sent you the whole transcript; you could argue that maybe I'm taking too much out of context and that the full context would be mitigating? I want to be fair and make sure that I'm not strawmanning, but I can't make sense of this; I don't know how to perform the mental contortions to make it look like people are speaking in good faith; I don't trust that these people are trying to help me reason about reality
190 I'm still pretty horrified that the sticking point in discussions seems to have been not the AGP etiology itself (which is what I was focusing on in 2016/2017), but the category-boundaries-are-arbitrary "insight." So it's not just that we failed to break the irrationalist trans ideology: we actually invented something arguably worse! (Ordinary trans activists at least try to make (confused) truth claims; we invented a fully general counteragument against truth claims that's all the more dangerous thanks to the virtue of a very narrow kind of technical correctness.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob