make sure to include Twitter links in recap

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / a-hill-email-review.md

Email timeline—
1 Dec 2018: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph" to Scott cc Anna Jonah Sarah Michael
... discussion with Scott runs to 3 Dec
3 Dec: forward Scott thread to Ben and Katie, privacy leak
4 Dec: Ben—bullshit nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat
5 Dec: Ben—the interesting part is your model of the "rationalists" is wrong
6 Dec: Michael—this is important, share with Aurora?
10 Dec: asking Anna for her take
11 Dec: social proof from Sarah to Scott
11 Dec: Michael—argument should be compelling unless Craft Is Not the Community
12 Dec: emailing Harmanas after running into him at the train
16 Dec: to Sarah and Michael, "I still owe you" first draft
16 Dec: Michael—I want EY to respond to arguments, but wait a few weeks?
18–19 Dec: to Anna and Michael, on conversational violence and self-defense
19 Dec: met Aurora
21 Dec: to Sarah, something to protect
21 Dec: Sarah—Let's Get This Gender Thing Over With (unpublished)
24 Dec: ... further discussion with Ben/Sarah/Michael
26 Dec: my intelligence notes on Ziz
30 Dec: Ben—phatic declaration of respect makes me feel less safe
1 Jan: final draft of "I still owe you money"
1 Jan: Eliezer has taken initiative to spend Eliezerself's time, Rob as police
3 Jan: meatspace met with Michael/Sarah/Auora/Ben/Andrew
5 Jan: met with Ziz and Gwen with Michael and Aurora, lawsuits 
6 Jan: backchannel to Anna about Ziz
6 Jan: EY thread cont'd
9 Jan: I want to see you be brave (was: Re: I still owe you money; and, discourse on categories and the fourth virtue)
11 Jan: me—What do think submitting to social pressure looks like?!
15 Jan: unsent "thunder comes before gaslighting" draft
16 Jan: Ben to me/Anna on old thread: esotericism is less of a problem if flagged
18 Jan: gender refugees, moral patiency, and BBL
29 Jan: me to Kay Brown: have you noticed LGBTQ/queer culture getting worse?
8 Feb: me to Katie about Rust All-Hands
8 Feb: me to Ben and Michael about social competence
20 Feb: impulsive email to Scott (subject: a howl of despair which is nameless)
20 Feb: cold outreach to Ben Landau-Taylor
21 Feb: telling Marcus, I'm out of cards: we created a monster
22 Feb: "RIP Culture War" thread
22 Feb: Michael offers advice; I forward with Scott; Michael calls it a destructive move
25 Feb: first draft of defending against "alt-right" categorization
27 Feb: more support from the gang
27-28 Feb: on private universes
1 Mar: intra-group disagreement re "ambient epistemic violence"
2 Mar: Michael—independence of perspectives vs. failure to present an united front
2 Mar: I saw the new Rebel Wilson movie last night, went to Simon's birthday (I remember seeing Scott there), then met Anna
2 Mar: Anna's comment about Michael
3 Mar: "Apologies are always intrinsically worthless, but that fact that we are able to legitimately demand an apology means that we can legitimately demand that he look at something."
3 Mar: I heard Anna say my desire for good arugments to win was "selfish"; what she actually said was "self-centered", "it seems less important than what happens on topics that we don't all know there isn't free speech about."
3 Mar: "told them that the thing that would most help AI risk from them anyhow was for them to continue on their present career," is that if I try to only focus on "important" things, I'll probably just come up with something fake
3 Mar: more draft, more thanks for social proof
5 Mar: Scott gets back to me
5 Mar: 12 short stories about language (and, expressing regret that I only email Scott when I need something from him)
6 Mar: SJWs without guns doing this than you are about mostly white men with money, gavels and guns doing it? ...  SJW agenda is to play by the same rules as the legal system plays by, and they do it with less support from tradition and from ritual, so it's more obvious,
6 Mar: much better draft to EY (defending against alt-right)
10 Mar: send revised draft to EY
14 Mar: meeting with Ben/Sarah/Marie/Jessica; Ben assist on "Blegg Mode"
17 Mar: me to Scott, bringing up idea that in-person ideas were better
17 Mar: Michael characterizing EY as choosing to be a cult leader
18 Mar: starting to overheat (subject: "strategy huddle II")—
I referred to Sarah and Ben at Sunday conversation saying in-person meetings were better
Scott says "I try to avoid in-person meetings in general, and this is probably in my bottom 1% of things that I would enjoy talking about in person"
I write to my team wondering if I should propose a $4000 happy price
then I say, maybe don't reply before Friday
6 p.m.: really angry at Scott for not understanding the difference between cluster in a value-dependent subspace (as with the dagim/fish example), and value-dependent to not make my friends sad. But my boss was expecting code by noon tomorrow
7 p.m.: let go of the anger somehow and just do my job this week and then write up the mathy version
8:44 p.m.: fantasizing about recruiting Buck or Duncan to our coalition; never sure how to interpret my self-reports; even when crying, shaking, randomly yelling, &c. I think I'm still noticeably incentivizable: I think that if someone were to present a credible threat (e.g., slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be tolerated
10:27 p.m.: I tweeted a Sequences quote that summarizes how I'm feeling (mention is to attribute credit; Eliezer has so many followers that he probably won't even see the mention notification), except it's not quite appropriate, because the quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I was taught are great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just can't cope with everyone else having forgotten!
11:01 p.m.: OK, the dayjob situation is really bad right now (it's almost 2300), so let's try one of those commitment-contract things. I hereby pledge not to check my personal email, Facebook, or Twitter until 1700 Pacific Daylight time on Friday the twenty-second of March. (I have an /etc/hosts manipulation script and I can turn off my home computer to help.) If I fail in this pledge, then ... um, I'm having trouble thinking of a good incentive here. (Traditionally you use money, but unfortunately, I'm only 78% Ashkenazi and my brain doesn't believe money is real.) So, um, "or else"!
2:47-3:55 a.m.: some replies from Michael
4:01 a.m.: I got the unit test passing; why do I keeping lying about email hiatus?
4:15 a.m.: "predictably bad ideas" email to Anna/Michael/Ben/Sarah/Zvi/Scott/Alicorn/Mike
5:26 a.m.: five impulsive points
5:58 a.m.: everyone's first priority should be to make sure Zack can sleep
6:14 a.m.: I'm really sorry about this. I don't need Scott's help and I think Michael is being a little aggressive about that, but I guess that's also kind of Michael's style?
6:18 a.m.: Michael's response: What the FUCK Zack!?!
7:27 a.m.: Home now. Going to get in bed. I could say more, but that would be high-variance, and we don't want variance right now
19 Mar: Michael seems disappointed with me for what he perceived as me escalating and then deescalating just after he came to help, but which from my perspective felt like me just trying to communicate that I don't want to impose too many costs on my friends just because I felt upset today. (Subject: "yet another strategy huddle (III)")
19 Mar: Ben writes off Scott and ignores a boundary; nominates Jessica for helping me
19 Mar: maybe there's a reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity, because my vocabulary has been trained really hard on this subculture; theistic evolution Church analogy
20 Mar: planning to meet Zvi in person for first time
20 Mar: Ben asks Scott to alter the beacon (I think this became https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/ )
20 Mar: super-proton concession (why now? maybe he saw my "tools shattered" Tweet, or maybe the Quillette article just happened to be timely)
21 Mar: I think of the proton criticism; nominate Ben as mission commander
21 Mar: I suggest to Anna that chiming in would be a movement towards peace with Michael's gang
21 Mar: Ben and Michael don't think the techincal quibble makes any progress
22 Mar: I literally ran into Scott on the train
22 Mar: Scott does understand the gerrymandering/unnaturalness problem, but it sort of seems like he doesn't understand that this is about cognitive algorithms rather than verbal behavior ("someone tells you that classifying a burrito as a sandwich will actually save ten million lives and ensure friendly AI in our lifetime, would you still refuse to classify a burrito as a sandwich?"—well, it doesn't matter what I say), whereas Eliezer definitely understands
24 Mar: Michael to me on Anna as cult leader
24 Mar: I tell Michael that I might be better at taking his feedback if he's gentler
30 Mar: hang out with Jessica (previous week was Zvi and Nick and anti-fascist Purim)
30 Mar: Michael—we need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
30 Mar: wrapping up drafts
me to Scott: _what_ post about transgender
conceptual gerrymandering is not unique
it's fine if you don't help; you've suffered enough
Kelsey agreeing on the object level for a different reason
crippling the orcs' general ability to reason
early draft of what became "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
31 Mar: the real issue is whether we want to destroy everyone's 
31 Mar: Sarah—isn't the math overkill?
31 Mar: Ben thinks I'm reading Kelsey wrong, that she's counting happiness as part of usability
31 Mar: I think that math is important for principle—and intimidation (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/)
31 Mar: "a very vague understanding of what you're trying to do with the second email but it seems kind of sketchy to me, like you're writing an email to Scott meant to look persuasive to Eliezer"
31 Mar: I want a court ruling; I'm betting that it's psychologically harder for someone who knows the Rules to continue being dishonest against someone who has the correct answer and isn't willing to give up on good-faith argument.
31 Mar: Ben— this just seemed like the kind of bank shot where, given the track record of Zack's intuitions, I expect it to fail unless he's explicitly modeling what he's doing
31 Mar: email prosecution not useful, explicitly asking for a writ of certiorari is better than sending "cc in case you're interested" mail and delusionally hoping for it to function as an appeal.
31 Mar: I recount to Michael Jessica's account of her time at MIRI
31 Mar: Michael—"since there is absolutely no plausible narrative in which I was bringing them into a cult, there is no symmetry in our narratives." this didn't age well
31 Mar: Ben—the most important thing for LessWrong readers to know about - a similarly careful explanation of why you've written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "Rationalists"
31 Mar: I'm reluctant, because I don't want to attack my friends in public (and don't want to leak info from private conversations)
31 Mar: Ben—self-promotion imposes a cost on others
1 Apr: fantasizing Susan the Senior sorter parable turing violent
1 Apr: Avoiding politically-expensive topics is fine! Fabricating bad epistemology to support a politically-convenient position and then not retracting it after someone puts a lot of effort into explaining the problem is not OK. Some of the things you said on the phone call made it sound like you didn't understand that I'm making that distinction?
2 Apr: me to Anna cc Ben—"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is less damaging when there's some sort of recruiting pipeline from the public into the monasteries
2 Apr: Ben: I do not consider the claim that intact monasteries exist to be plausible at all right now.
2 Apr: Twitter poll about dropping pseudonymity
3 Apr: I don't see any advantage to speaking non-anonymously when people are persecuting you. I also find it REALLY DIFFICULT to deal with the fact that you are cooperating with people who are openly defecting against you and against me. 
6 Apr: "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" draft, Putting It Together epigraph; plan to beg Anna and Eliezer for endorsement afterwards
8 Apr: Jessica—creating clarity about behavioral patterns, and specifically ones that people claim not to have.  What you're saying here implies that you believe creating such clarity is an attack on someone.  If so, your blog is attacking trans people.
8 Apr: the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and named individuals still seems very significant to me
8 Apr: Michael—less precise is more violent
"Boundaries" discussion ...
9 Apr: "VP" is also political
10 Apr: Ben and Jessica coin four simulacra levels
10 Apr: Ben—Eliezer's in denial about whether he's making decisions out of fear. / Scott's only unevenly in denial about this.
me—Anna claims to be calculating rather than fearful. I don't have any particular evidence to dispute her self-report, but I would asphyxiate under that level of risk aversion.
12 Apr: Ben again on, " to trying to explain why Eliezer seems to you like the court of last resort, what he's done that leads you to expect him to play this role, etc."; more money seems wrong
12 Apr: I'm still too cowardly
Sarah explaining how to ask things of people in general
Ben reiterating, "You don't want either an overtly paid endorsement, or to ask Eliezer to lie about whether it's a paid endorsement."
12 Apr: Sarah—what would you do if Eliezer never follows up?
13 Apr: me—I don't know, what would there be left to do?—I don't have any particular claim over Eliezer.
13 Apr: pull the trigger on "Boundaries?" (for this reason it is written: don't hate the player, hate the game-theoretic nature of all life.)
ask Anna
direct marketing to Nick T.
direct marketing and/or conspiracy invitation
court filing with Yudkowsky (Subj: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing")
Ben: So, um, this _is_ politics, and we _aren't_ safe, so how about not lying?
Michael: We are safe to understand arguments and logic, and it is Not politics to try to pin understanding down. It is politics to try to pin down the understanding of people as part of credit allocation, and we should be doing politics to try to motivate engagement here, but so far, Zack has been doing a mix of friendship, supplication and economics.  
me: Is ... is there a good place for me to _practice_ politics against someone who isn't Eliezer Yudkowsky? The guy rewrote my personality over the internet. I want more credit-allocation for how relatively well I'm performing under constrained cognition!
me: Like, okay, I see the case that I'm doing a sneaky evil deceptive thing (bad faith is a disposition, not a feeling!) by including subtext and expecting people to only engage with the text, but if we're not going to get into full-on gender-politics on Less Wrong, but gender politics is motivating an epistemology error, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do! I'm pretty constrained here!
Michael: Once people think they know what the political sides are, the political thing to do is (trivially, I am annoyed at you pretending not to know this) to be completely unprincipled and partisan in any anonymous situation.
15 Apr: me—concern about bad faith nitpicking, Jessica says I'm not
15 Apr: Jessica's comment, the lesson of Funk-tunul
15 Apr: trying to recruit Steven Kaas
16 Apr: I feel sad and gaslighted 
16 Apr: Jessica sparks engagement by appealing to anti-lying
Ben— I think a commitment to lying is always wrong just straightforwardly leads to deciding that anything power demands you say is true.
16 Apr:  If it were just a matter of my own pain, I wouldn't bother making a fuss about this. But there's a principle here that's way bigger than any of us: that's why Michael and Ben and Sarah and Zvi and Jessica are here with me.
we're in favor of Jessica's existence
17 Apr: plantiff/pawn/puppydog
17 Apr: Jessica— This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right).  Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
18 Apr: Ben on our epistemic state
18 Apr: me—I'd rather say "Actually, I don't think I'm saner than Jessica, because ..." rather than "You owe Jessica an apology."
18 Apr: Ben to me—"It’s sketchy to accept insults leveled at you, but it’s actually a betrayal of trust if you ask friends to back you up and then don’t back them up"
me— You're right; I hereby retract the phrase "or my friends" from the prior email. I was trying to convey a "turn the other cheek"/"social reality is fake, anyway" attitude, but I agree that everyone can only turn her own cheek.
18 Apr: Ben—STAY IN FORMATION
me— I've been struggling with how to "chime in" for hours, but it looks like Eliezer just shut the door on us at 10:12 p.m. / Mission failed?
This closure actually makes me feel a little bit less heartbroken and cognitively-dissonant about the "rationalists" already. If Scott doesn't want to talk, and Eliezer doesn't want to talk, and I'm unambiguously right ... then I guess that's that?
Michael—common knowledge achieved
19 Apr: Zack, that's not what a war looks like. That was ... trying to educate people who were trying not to be educated, by arguing in good faith.
me: Ben, I mean, you're right, but if my "Category War" metaphorical name is bad, does that also mean we have to give up on the "guided by the beauty of our weapons" metaphorical catchphrase? (Good-faith arguments aren't weapons!)
19 Apr: Ben and Jack "sadism and tactics" chat transcript
20 Apr: my closing thoughts 
20 Apr: Michael on Anna as an enemy
30 Apr: me—I don't know how to tell the story without (as I perceive it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.
30 Apr: If we're in a war, can I apply for psych leave for like, at least a month? (Michael implied that this was OK earlier.) Or does asking get me shot for desertion? It's fair for Ben to ask for an accounting of why I'm stuck, but the fact that I'm sitting at my desk crying at 5:45 p.m. suggests a reordering of priorities for my own health.
30 Apr: No urgency on that timescale. Just don't buy a nerf gun and make shooting noises to pretend you're fighting. On leave means on leave.
3 May: dayjob workplace dynamics
6 May: multivariate clarification https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922
7 May: angry at Anna for thinking I was delusional for expecting the basics
8 May: Anna doesn't want money from me—it'll appear in some Ben Hoffman essay as "using you" or some similar such thing
17 May: Jessica points out that Yudkowsky's pro-infanticide isn't really edgier than Peter Singer
21 May:
If someone claims, as someone did, that saying that words having meanings matters is politically loaded and is code for something, that can really be seen as [...] their problem.
I mean, ordinarily yes, but when the person saying that is a MIRI Research Associate, then it's the light cone's problem.
22 May: to Anna cc Sarah Steven—Viaweb and CfAR have importantly different missions (Sarah is Nice, unlike people like Ben or Michael or Jessica, who are Mean)
31 May: "Categories Were Made" LessWrong FAQ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining
8 Jun: maybe "EA Has a Lying Problem" seemed like a similarly pointless hit piece to you? And you have as much invested in the "Effective Altruism" brand name as I have in the "Michael Vassar" brand name?
17 Jun: "It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not." basically sums up how I feel about Ozy
22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
23 Jun: Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests
25 Jun: scuffle with Ruby
26 Jun: Ben trying to talk to the Less Wrong team
29 Jun: I talked with Ray from 7 to 10:30 tonight. My intellectual performance was not so great and I did a lot of yelling and crying.
29 Jun: talked to Buck (who's working at MIRI these days) at the Asgard (Will and Divia's house) party tonight. He was broadly sympathetic to my plight, thinks EA leaders have it together (saying people like Holden had thought through more plies than him when he talks to them about the Issues), thinks public reason is hopeless, doesn't think much/well of Ben or Michael or Zvi.
1 Jul: I think we can avoid getting unnecessarily frustrated/angry at these people if we can be clear to ourselves and each other that they're MOPs, and could not possibly succeed in being geeks even if they tried
2 Jul: "Everyone Knows", pinging Anna about it
4 Jul:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/ published
11 Jul: AI timelines scam
11 Jul: me—I'm sympathetic to tone-policing on "scam"
Ben—What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you?
me—but the law does use mens rea, like the distinction between manslaughter and murder
me—call with Michael,  the Pope surely knows that he doesn't really have a direct line to God (despite holding office based on this pretense), to how GiveWell must know that they're not really making decisions based on numbers (despite holding credibility based on this premise)
17 Jul: Alyssa's false claim about my pseudonyms, HRT effects side note
18 Jul: my accusation of mis-citing Ozy was wrong
20 Jul: me to Anna and Steven about LW mods colluding to protect feelings
23 Jul: "epistemic defense" meeting
24 Jul: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip





> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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

> 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

> 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?"

> 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.

The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/) 


Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening. 


Michael—
> 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.


> 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:

> 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.)

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.

appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halter
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters

(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.)

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 



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??

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?

I agree that this is the only reason you should care.

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??

> 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.
> And then the thread did not explode into acrimony. 

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"!?

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"?)


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?




[TODO: Ben—
> 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.

I assumed he was talking about Katie's institutionalization, not SRS

> 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.

Ben's actual worry—
> "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."

> 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.

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.) 

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!

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."

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).

Ben—
> 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

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.

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).

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"!

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.

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)

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??

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.)

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.)

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.

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."

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.

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?

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."

But have you fucking tried trying to talk about biological sex with Berkeley psuedo-rationalists? They won't fucking acknowledge it.

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."

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."

Elena said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" ... and gets 4 "+1" emoji.

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

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.)

> point out to him your sympathies regarding his mental breakdown under soft political persecution and silencing, make it clear that you are not requesting that he now or at any time in the future do anything in public regarding gender issues, and ask him to remember that you have recently been mentally incarcerated more than under similar political pressure (applied in the name of the mental health needs of non-specific people many of whom are in the same natural category as yourself) that he is totally forgiven for participating in it, but that you would like to discuss the shared aspect of your circumstances  face to face, and maybe both consider not posting anything online for a couple weeks.

> That was a fairly destructive move to pull without consulting me, but OK, you played it and I will run with it.

(Notwithstanding how it's bad that I've been leaning on you for social proof way too much, I've been writing with the assumption that the author of the Sequences still cares about the common interest of many causes. I can see the "MIRI exists, that was all the raising-the-sanity-waterline project turned out to be good for; I don't have any teaching duties besides my not-explicitly-lying Wizard's Oath" CDT logic, but ... ugh, really? I can't be the one to suggest it.)



You write:

    



How would you begin to respond to this? That's not a rhetorical question: I'm actually curious.

My model of Sequences-era 2009!Eliezer says, "This is an attempt to sneak in connotations by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter. Go read 'A Human's Guide to Words,' and if you've already read it, then you're being incredibly intellectually dishonest and not worth my time to interact with."

But I have no idea what 2019!Eliezer says.

You wrote to me on 28 November:

    The notion of a lie is as sancrosanct as the notion of a truth, and you do not get to say 'lie' when somebody is doing something that you think might tempt somebody to add on a lie as an additional act. [...] 'Lying' is for per se direct falsehoods.


> If the statement "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as "Scott Alexander is a racist" or "Slate Star Codex is an alt-right blog" then

Wait! That's not the analogy I'm trying to make!

What I'm trying to say is, whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense as a response to "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y.

Your behavior the other month made it look like you think that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." is a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman."

I'm saying that whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of local validity, apply the same standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist."

The preceding three paragraphs are glossing over some details, and I totally understand if you want to disagree with the exact way I've formulated them! (Like, maybe you think it's inappropriate that I'm focusing on category-membership even though your explicit statement was about pronouns. It's important to notice that! We may be living in different mental universes with respect to how Gricean implicature works!)

But ... I'm not claiming that Eliezer's statement that "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as Sneer Club's statement that "Scott Alexander is a racist." That's just not what the analogy was trying to do!


But like, does anyone understand what the fuck could possibly be going on in Eliezer's head? I've spent thousands of words with lots of direct links and quotes to his own writings from ten years ago trying to explain that there's a problem where people who call themselves "rationalists" are somehow very intent on playing clever definition-hacking mind games to make it artificially expensive to express the idea that humans cannot change sex (given current technology), and that I think he could fix the problem because people might listen to him when they don't listen to me. I agree that trans issues aren't important, but I also think that if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should get the right answer even when the issue isn't important.

I think I've been pretty explicit! And today Eliezer is chastising me and Ben for not having enough empathy to realize that people live in different mental universes. And like—I agree that people live in different mental universes! But—that seems bizarrely nonresponsive to the thousands of words I wrote explaining the problem! You see it, right?! What is there left for me to say?

Michael—
> I think that if Zack is having difficulties it would be ideal if we could move this ahead without him. Needless to say, he doesn't need to feel any responsibility and has done all that could be asked of him and more to cause this project to survive unanticipated difficulties.  Right now, I don't think there's much help he can offer except for periodic pushes, like the current one, for the rest of us to keep at it. 



> On my model, it's good to send this because there are two possibilities
> 1) that this demonstrates the independence of our perspectives, which causes them to count as additional evidence for a proposition, and that means that this makes us more convincing
> 2) that this shows a lack of unity, a failure to present a United Front, which is bad, because Arguments are Soldiers, and thus we are making ourselves less convincing. 
> In the latter case, Eliezer is dead to us and it would probably help if we were to bury something in a funeral. In the former case, our friends are still in there, and the way to reach them isn't by balancing the social forces arrayed against them.

I'm pretty sure I can directly link to Ozy and Kelsey speaking favorably of literal self-identity, not gating on hormones or social passability. And just ... I keep rereading this stuff trying to check that I'm not misreading, because I can't take it seriously. They're just fucking with me, right???? I don't harbor ill will against any individual people, but I just can't share a rationalist community with this level of mindfuckery.

I mean, okay, if that's what you want to do. (If the outcome of these hopefully-not-too-annoying emails is that Eliezer Yudkowsky feels more social/political constraints on what he can say rather than less, then this horribly backfired and you should forget we said anything.)

"How would you feel if someone else tried to get away with the 'hill of meaning in defense of validity' appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter against you when you were trying to use language to reason about something you actually cared about (like defending Scott, who is great)? If it would be logically rude in that context, maybe it was also logically rude the first time?"

Michael
> We have all been essentially trained to believe that we are not entitled to voice our complaints. When someone backs off, we are prone to loosing confidence and to think that maybe we shouldn't be talking with them, yet function institutions have existed in the past, and if people aren't adhering to the normal of functional institutions, we have to not allow that to cause us to stop adhering to those norms. Therefore, we should keep doubling down with reminders regarding the rules for discussion. If he decides to not play, we should establish that to ourselves with no plausible deniability and move on. 


 "An alternative categorization system is not an error", like all appeals-to-arbitrariness, is necessarily what you called a symmetric weapon: the same form of argument works just as well for being mean to our friends as it does for being nice to our friends. The best the good guys can hope for is to win by coincidence. (Assuming there's any way to distinguish who the "good guys" are, if alternative systems that draw the "good guys" category boundary differently aren't in error, assuming there's any way to distinguish what "winning" is, if alternative systems that draw the "winning" category boundary differently aren't in error, &c.)

If someone showed up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that they had an invisible dragon, I would expect ordinary meetup attendees to exert social pushback against the dragon-claimant: "Dude, that doesn't make sense. Beliefs need to be falsifiable! You should read the Sequences!" I would even expect the social pushback to be strong enough such that the claimant would eventually either internalize the "Beliefs need to be falsifiable" idea or get the fuck out of my rationalist community.

If I show up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that people don't have invisible genders, and I get social pushback ... then I'm not really sure what my options are other than writing off the entire community.

     

I'm not extremely troubled by my minor disagreements with you. All the actually-smart high-status old-timers I've talked to (you, Eliezer, Anna, Michael Vassar, Sarah Constantin, Ben Hoffman, Steve Rayhawk, &c.) clearly see the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing I'm trying to point at. Even if you say it's mere awkwardness and not a serious epistemology problem, at least you acknowledge the awkwardness, which is more than I've gotten out of Kelsey.

The thing I find extremely troubling is that none of the old-timers who clearly understand the thing are willing to say so loudly and in public where other people can learn from it, with the exceptions of Ben and Vassar—and Vassar's in-community status is getting debased. (Sarah drafted a post supporting me on the categories thing, but decided not to publish it.)

You wrote about the "inevitable" forces pointing towards a future guided by the beauty of our weapons, where good arguments eventually win out over bad arguments. What if you were too optimistic? What if good arguments don't win—not even in the so-called "rationalist" community?

I think "Categories should carve reality at the joints to help us make efficient probabilistic predictions" is a better argument than "Categories capture tradeoffs you care about; they don't have to carve reality at the joints if that makes people sad." Right now, the better argument is losing. Unless something changes, the better argument will continue to lose. In other words, we live in a world where reason doesn't work. If we live in a world where reason doesn't work, then we're dead. If we can't get consensus on easy problems (Q: Can men become women by means of saying so? A: No. Why would you think that?), then how are we supposed to solve AI alignment?



> I don't know if you read the glowfic that Alicorn and Kelsey write. There was a scene in one of their LoTR things where some elves capture some orcs. They learn that the orcs are nice people deep down, evil god Melkor has forced the orcs to swear an oath to serve him and do evil all the time and kill people. And for complicated magic reasons, orcs cannot break oaths, or else they are tormented by unbearable pain. So even though the orcs are nice, they are compelled to serve Melkor, who usually wants them to kill people and stuff.

> After a while, our hero comes up with a solution. She founds a religion on the spot devoted to a Deist-style omnipotent observer God, who just so happens to also be named Melkor. Deist-Melkor just wants people to live their lives and be happy and help others. She claims that the orcs did swear an oath to follow Melkor, but they didn't specify *which* Melkor, and since her Melkor is omnipotent he takes preference over evil-Melkor. The orcs (who are all kind of dumb, and also incentivized toward highly motivated reasoning) agree this makes sense, this seems to satisfy whatever magic enforces their oath, and so they go off and live their lives and be happy and help others.

> Part of this story is that occasionally some people will approach the orcs and be like "This is kind of dumb, right, on some level you know you're supposed to be following evil Melkor", and this information is infohazardous to orcs and can put them in unbearable pain (or compel them to kill people and stuff) until they're able to talk themselves out of it.

> I asked Alicorn whether this was an intentional metaphor for this discussion, since I know you've been talking to her about it. She says no. But it captures a lot of how I think about this. Are the *real rationalists!!!* the ones who go to the orcs and tell them that they obviously meant to serve evil Melkor and so should be in constant pain all the time? Are those the people who are """winning"""?  Or would saying that just be pointlessly harming them for no reason?

> I couldn't care less about transgender.

Michael—
> I agree that he isn't, but it seems Important to me that if we think he isn't interested we actually establish common knowledge that we consider him at this point to be choosing to try to be a cult leader. 


I was kind of considering replying, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day."

But, maybe I shouldn't do this because the "Volunteer to throw four-figure amounts of money at people in order to get them to hear me out" move is simultaneously personally degrading, psychologically coercive, extremely socially weird, and bad for my economic self-interest.
 
https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/

commit a5316c23ac837c004922e2d192c2bea914a21ebc
Author: Zack M. Davis <zack@thecoalition.com>
Date:   Tue Mar 19 00:27:53 2019 -0700

    DIS-327: broker-facing duplicate-quote route
    
    It's sharing code with the internal resïssue-quote endpoint, because
    that's convenient.




Scott, like, you sent me that email piously arguing that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries because it's important for trans people's mental health. And there's a couple things that I don't understand.

(1) If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of outright lying when the truth would make people sad?  I don't understand why semantic mind games are OK, but lying is wrong. (Compare: "If you’re going to ignore a probabilistic counterargument, why not ignore a proof, too?") From my perspective the motte-and-bailey definition-hacking mind games are far more cruel than a simple lie. Speaking of which----

(2) If "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, like, why doesn't my mental health matter? Aren't I trans, sort of? Like, what do I have to do in order to qualify, was my being on hormones for only 5 months not good enough? Or do I have to be part of the political coalition in order for my feelings to count? We had an entire Sequence whose specific moral was that words can be wrong. And of the 37 Ways that Words Can Be Wrong, number 30 is "Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together," and number 31 is, "You use a short word for something that you won't need to describe often, or a long word for something you'll need to describe often." And this is the thing I've been trying to tell everyone about. And when I try to talk to you about it, you're like, "Doesn't matter, mental health benefits for trans people are more important according to the utilitarian calculus! Also, you're wrong." And like ... getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I'm trying to use reason to make sense of the world is observably really bad for my mental health! Does that matter at all? Also, if I'm philosophically wrong, then Eliezer was wrong in 2009, because everything I'm doing now, I learned from him. Do you really think "c'mon, parsimony doesn't matter" is an improvement on the Sequences?!

(3) You write, "wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"

But the original reason it seemed plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us", it was because we were trying to do systematically correct reasoning, with the hope of using the systematically correct reasoning to build aligned superintelligence. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the reason that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever. You can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China.

(4) You write, "I realize you are probably thinking something like 'This isn't just me getting triggered by some culture war thing evolved to trigger me, it actually really *is* that important that rationalists get transgender right!' [...] All I can say is that I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."

I don't know how much social proof influences you, but is the fact that I managed to round up Michael and Ben and Sarah and [name redacted] into a coalition to help me argue with Eliezer shift your estimate at all of whether my concerns have some objective merit? It can simultaneously be the case that I have the culture-war PTSD that you propose, and that my concerns have merit.

(5) I don't know how other people's confidentiality intuitions work. Am I being an asshole by cc'ing in my coalition members (plus Anna, who is my friend even though she hasn't been helping me with this particular quest) in an email that references things you said in an email that was addressed only to me? I think this should be OK; I don't think we're talking about anything particularly secret.
 
----


I'm really sorry about this. I don't need Scott's help and I think Michael is being a little aggressive about that, but I guess that's also kind of Michael's style? I'm really sorry, because I still think that even very emotionally disturbed people are clearly incentivizable, and so the narrative of, "Oh, poor Zack, he's crazy, he can't help it" is not attributing me enough agency. Like, if I get really upset literally once every two years and impose a lot of care costs on other people in the process, I should be held accountable for that somehow. Last time, I ended up giving people some money (I didn't end up doing the public-praise part that I proposed in the blog post about it, because it turned out that that would have been too socially weird) but I don't know if even the money was a good social experiment or not.

> No.
> We don't have punishment.
> We don't have morality.
> I'm trying to change that and you are undermining the attempt!
> We won't be friends. 
> We're not friends anymore already! Once again, I am trying to change that and you are making it impossible. 
In terms of making intellectual progress, I'm still most excited about the idea I was talking myself into all day in the "strategy huddle II" thread (I'll forward that to Jessica): "If Scott and Eliezer don't want to talk, whatever, I can just write those guys off (why did I think they were so important anyway?) and just focus on writing up the mathematically rigorous version of the thing I'm trying to say about how categories can be value-dependent because your values determine which dimensions you pay attention to (like 'birds' vs. 'flying things'), but that's really different from 'people will be sad if I use this category', and we should be able to demonstrate mathematically that the 'people will be sad if I think this' categories are less useful for making inferences. Not only will I learn lots of stuff in the process of figuring out the details, but when it's finished, our coalition can hype it up as interesting new 'Human's Guide to Words'-like content, and then at least the mathy people in our alleged community will see the parsimonious-categories-are-important thing in a context where the math will convince them and politics won't distract them."
 
So ... I really should have just stuck to that plan and not freaked out: forget this stupid "appeal to local celebrities" game and just do cool math for two months. But when it was 4 a.m. (because I'd been obsessing all day, and I really wanted to meet my manager's deadline for the code that we want for our business, and I did write some code intermittently between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m.), I was just really upset at the whole situation, and I sent some more hasty emails, I think because at some psychological level I wanted Scott to know, "I'm so frustrated about your use of 'mental health for trans people' as an Absolute Denial Macro that I'm losing sleep over it even though we know sleep is really important for me." But then when Michael started advocating on my behalf (Michael seems to have a theory that people will only change their bad behavior when they see a victim who is being harmed), I started to minimize my claims because I have a generalized attitude of not wanting to portray/sell myself as a victim, even if it is technically literally true that I'm really hurt in a way that is causally related to other people behaving in ways that are bad. And I feel really guilty and wanting-to-appease about disappointing Michael (who has done so much for me), even though I know that Michael doesn't want me to care about disappointing him in particular, because I should just care about doing the Right Thing. I think that Michael thinks that aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. I think that's obviously true, but I just can't be too aggressive to my friends and people I admire (e.g., Anna, Scott, Eliezer). I just won't do it. I can passively let my metaphorical lawyers like Ben do it while accurately claiming to represent my interests, but I won't do it myself because I'm scared of damaging relationships. (Or offending people I worship as demigods.)

So, I don't know. I think having been on the edge of a bad outcome but stepping away (I got 2ish hours worth of napping; I'll be just fine) will help me move on, and dissolve my unhealthy attachment to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity? (At the meeting on Sunday, it was pointed out that forging a new brand-name/Schelling-point-for-interesting-people-to-gather is easier than recapturing an old one.) I just ... we had a whole Sequence specifically about how you can't define a word any way you want, because you need words to map to the statistical structure in the world. I keep trying to point out, "Look, isn't that inconsistent with this newly fashionable 'categories were made for man'/'hill of meaning in defense of validity' moral? Right? Right? You have to see it? It can't possibly just be me who sees it?!" and Scott and Eliezer seem to keep rounding me off to, "Zack is upset about trans stuff which doesn't matter" even though I keep explicitly disclaiming that (while it's true that I'm upset about trans stuff that doesn't matter), that's not the part I expect them to care about. And I've just been really freaking out for three and a half months on end, because I learned everything I know from Eliezer, and the other half of everything I know from Scott, and like ... they can't really be that stupid, right? They have to just be fucking with me, right??

That's really unhealthy. (We were warned that it's unhealthy: "nervously seeking reassurance is not the best frame of mind in which to evaluate questions of rationality".)

The tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is absolutely unacceptable; if I have to do social aggression and lose friends and burn bridges if there's any hope of getting people to see the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing again, then I'll do it" has been causing me a lot of pain and making me make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 a.m., and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me is just crazy.)

If there isn't actually any such thing in the world as a "rationalist community" (it's just a category boundary in my head that I keep attaching importance to, even though Sarah clearly explained to my why this is dumb two years ago, and I just haven't made the corresponding mental adjustments), then maybe losing the Category War within it is acceptable? Maybe that's the answer? If so, I wish I had been able to find the answer without leaving so much of a mess.

Wait, maybe there is a reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity that isn't just me being stupid, and if we can find what the non-stupid reason is, then we can make better decisions.

I think a non-stupid reason is that the way I talk has actually been trained really hard on this subculture for ten years: most of my emails during this whole campaign have contained multiple Sequences or Slate Star Codex links that I can just expect people to have read. I can spontaneously use the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro" in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just give up on "rationalists" being as sane as we were in 2009 (when we knew that men can't become women by means of saying so), and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with Quillette readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I lose all that accumulated capital. The language I speak is mostly educated American English, but I rely on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her "... To Make Predictions", she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, probably because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent motte", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. This essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in Quillette. The links and phraseology are just too context-bound.

Maybe that's why I feel like I have to stand my ground and fight a culture war (even though I really don't want to be socially aggressive, and the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness makes me make crazy decisions).

I feel like I have to be careful phrasing my complaints about Berkeley culture, because if I'm not super-careful, people will round me off as saying, "Help! Censorship! I'm being repressed!" and then counterargue that I'm observably not being censored (which is true, modulo Ben's concerns about distributed silencing, which I feel motivated to downplay because I don't want to sell myself as a victim). The problem is much subtler than that. Berkeley "rationalists" are very good at free speech norms and deserve credit for that! But it still feels like a liberal church where you can say "I believe in evolution" without getting socially punished. Like, it's good that you can do that. But I had a sense that more is possible: a place where you can not just not-get-punished for being an evolutionist, but a place where you can say, "Wait! Given all this evidence for natural selection as the origin of design in the biological world, we don't need this 'God' hypothesis anymore. And now that we know that, we can work out whatever psychological needs we were trying to fulfil with this 'church' organization, and use that knowledge to design something that does an even better job at fulfilling those needs!" and have everyone just get it, at least on the meta level.

I can accept a church community that disagrees on whether evolution is true. (Er, on the terms of this allegory.) I can accept a church community that disagrees on what the implications are conditional on the hypothesis that evolution is true. I cannot accept a church in which the canonical response to "Evolution is true! God isn't real!" is "Well, it depends on how you choose to draw the 'God' category boundary." I mean, I agree that words can be used in many ways, and that the answer to questions about God does depend on how the asker and answerer are choosing to draw the category boundary corresponding to the English language word 'God'. That observation can legitimately be part of the counterargument to "God isn't real!" But if the entire counterargument is just, "Well, it depends on how you define the word 'God', and a lot of people would be very sad if we defined 'God' in a way such that it turned out to not exist" ... unacceptable! Absolutely unacceptable! If this is the peak of publicly acceptable intellectual discourse in Berkeley, CA, and our AI alignment research group is based out of Berkeley (where they will inevitably be shaped by the local culture), and we can't even notice that there is a problem, then we're dead! We're just fucking dead! Right? Right?? I can't be the only one who sees this, am I? What is Toronto??????

Ben—
> Just wrote to Scott explicitly asking him to alter the beacon so that people like Zack don't think that's the place to go for literally doing the thing anymore, and ideally to redirect them to us (but that's a stretch). If he actually does this, that would be a really good time to start the new group blog.

> This seems like the sort of thing where it's actually in his local interest to help us, as it reduces our incentive to ask him to do hard things.


Michael—
> This all seems sound, but also not worth the digression.  Zack, do you feel comfortable with generalizing the sort of things that Scott said, and the things that others here have said about fear of talking openly, and assuming that something similar is probably happening with Eliezer too?  

> If so, now that we have common knowledge, there is really no point in letting technical quibbles distract us. We need to deal with the actual crisis, which is that dread is tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while it's existence is still being denied. 


He said that he wasn't sure why the grand moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" was "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You can define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."

Ultimately, I think this is a pedagogy decision that Eliezer got right. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking a useful discussion about the exact, precise ways that specific, definite things are, in fact, relative to other specific, definite things.


You texted last week, "Am I agitating you in a manner that isn't a good idea? If so, please tell me."

I'm tempted to speculate that I might be better at taking your feedback about how to behave reasonably rather than doing the "cowering and submission to whoever I'm currently most afraid of losing relationship-points with" thing, if you try to be gentler sometimes, hopefully without sacrificing clarity? (Concrete examples: statements like, "What the FUCK Zack!?!" are really hard on me, and I similarly took "We're not friends anymore already!" badly at the time because I was reading it as you damning me, but that one is mostly my poor reading comprehension under sleep deprivation, because in context you were almost certainly responding to my "everyone will still be friends" babbling.)

But, if you think that gentleness actually sacrifices clarity in practice, then I guess I could just do a better job of sucking it up.

Michael—
> I think that the strongest argument for continuing to press on is that we need to actually be able to press on into opposition to clarity if we are going to succeed regardless of where we go. We actually have to figure out, either here or elsewhere, how to win this sort of argument decisively, as a group, against people who are acting in bad faith, and can't afford to simply accept a status quo that says that we accept defeat when faced with bad faith arguments in general.

     
Wait, you lost me. What post about transgender? I've been objecting to the post about how category boundaries are arbitrary and we can redraw them for utilitarian benefits. Sure, the post used transgenderism as an illustrative example, but the main point should succeed or fail independently of the choice of illustrative example. (Obviously a person of your brilliance and integrity wouldn't invent a fake epistemology lesson just to get a convenient answer on one particular question!)

> I realize that allowing one thing violates a Schelling fence that potentially keeps other people from making me do awkward things, but as far as I can tell gender dysphoria is a pretty unique problem

"Conceptual gerrymandering to sneak in connotations" is _not_ a unique problem! I know you know this, because you've written about it extensively. 

"Conceptual gerrymandering to sneak in connotations" is not a unique problem! I know you know this, because you've written about it extensively. That's why my "twelve short stories about language" email gave "(repeat for the other examples from "The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?")" as entries II.–VII.

>    Zack I think - everyone else experiences their disagreement with you as a disagreement about where the joints are and which joints are important, including Scott
>    and parses the important part of Scott's post as 'the usability of the categories for humans is one thing we should use to decide which joints are important'
>    and it is annoying to be told that actually we all believe the categories should be whatever makes people happy and that this is an inexcusable rationalist sin
>    when no one believes that
I didn't want to bring it up at the time because I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but ... you seem to be pretty explicit that your position is about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey thinks she agrees with you, but actually doesn't, that's kind of bad for our collective sanity, right?



(The tenth virtue is precision! Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)

 "Naïvely" hauling out the most exhaustively rigorous analytical machinery I have is the only way to shatter the surface-level symmetry between "How much do you care about this? C'mon, it isn't worth it" versus "Well, I think it is worth it."

Perhaps it is "overkill" to transform the debate into "How much do you care about this? C'mon, it isn't worth it" versus "No! Fuck you! I have math, and I have a pretty decent heuristic argument about how the math translates into human practice, and I'm willing to put in more blood and pain and sweat and money and hours to make it even more rigorous if there's any hope left of getting you savvy lying bastards to stop fucking with my head."

I want the people I love and trust and respect to stop fucking with my head. That's more important to me than whatever proportionality-intuition generates the word "overkill."


Ben, I know that you've previously written about how holding criticism to a higher standard than praise distorts our collective map (in the context of effective altruism). You're obviously correct that this is a distortionary force relative to what Bayesian agents would do, but I'm worried that when we're talking about criticism of people (as opposed to ideas), the removal of the distortionary force would just result in an ugly war (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems should be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.

This is why I feel like I can't give up faith that good-faith discourse eventually wins (even though I'm starting to suspect that Michael is right to suggest that it doesn't in our world). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I can criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's ideas without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I know you guys are just fucking with me," then I don't see how that leads anywhere good, even if they really are just fucking with me.

I think Anna's input could potentially be really valuable here, because this kind of issue (whether to cooperate with Society and have peace, or give it the lie at risk of war) seems like one of the core tensions between her and Michael's crew (of which I've been saying for a while that I would really like to see a peace treaty).

> Self-promotion is imposing a cost on others. Eliezer, to a lesser extent Scott, and formerly Will, have all collected actual revenue from their self-promotion, on top of the less legible social capital they've acquired. It sounds like you think that this somehow creates a reciprocal obligation on our part to avoid talking about ways in which they've disappointed us or people like us. ?!?!?!?!?!

> Unilateral surrender to someone strong enough to hold and defend territory, with a low enough time preference not to consume everything in it can be a good way to avoid the war of all against all. Do you think Eliezer or Scott is meeting that standard? It seems to me like Eliezer's not interested in having you as a subject, and Scott will just pass any threats from the outside right through to you.

> Separately there are good pragmatic reasons to be careful about this and I don't want to ignore them - I'm really specifically arguing against what I perceive as a misapplied moralism around not criticizing people who definitely aggressed first, in a way that's much more clearly objectively aggression than criticizing someone's conduct, accurately described.


I'd like to elaborate on what seems off to me about this.

> Um. I see the value you're pointing at, but I also really don't want to attack my friends in public.

What is being proposed here is creating clarity about behavioral patterns, and specifically ones that people claim not to have.  What you're saying here implies that you believe creating such clarity is an attack on someone.  If so, your blog is attacking trans people.

What's going on here?  Here's a hypothesis.  Creating clarity about behavioral patterns is interpreted as an attack by the social field, and can sometimes (but not always) result in concretely worse outcomes for someone.  As such, it is much easier to create clarity about behavior patterns down power gradients than up power gradients.  So it's easy for you to create clarity about trans people's narcissistic behavior but hard for you to create clarity about Eliezer and Scott's narcissistic behavior (where they pretend to be pro-truth/rational/agenty and in fact aren't, and even optimize against those things).

In effect, creating clarity about behavior patterns down power gradients but not up power gradients is just going to reinforce the scapegoating system.  In a world with high amounts of hypocrisy about drug use, it's rather perverse to only investigate and report on the drug use of majority-black neighborhoods; it ends up maintaining the impression (to privileged people) that it's other people's problem, that someone else can be blamed, and so it does nothing to reform the drug laws.

You don't get to claim that creating clarity about trans people's behavior patterns is justified because that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and also that creating clarity about Eliezer/Scott's behavioral patterns is unjustified because it would be an attack and start a war or whatever.  If you're being cowardly here or otherwise unprincipled, own that instead of producing spurious justifications.

> You're obviously correct that this is a distortionary force relative to what Bayesian agents would do, but I'm worried that when we're talking about criticism of people (as opposed to ideas), the removal of the distortionary force would just result in an ugly war (and not more truth).

Oh come on, calling all non-androphilic trans women delusional perverts (which you've done) is totally a criticism of people.  We're actual people, you know.  If you call all non-androphilic trans women delusional perverts, then you are calling me a delusional pervert, and having corresponding effects on e.g. my chances of being scapegoated.  (Which is not to say you shouldn't do this, but you should be honest about what you are doing!)

To conclude, I'm on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not on board with a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies and then doesn't continue that effort where it leads (in this case, to Eliezer and Scott's narcissistic fantasies), and especially not if it produces spurious justifications for this behavior.


I would be way more comfortable writing a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists" (e.g.), than "Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't use good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private." I think I'm consistent about this: contrast my writing to the way that some anti-trans-activism writers name-and-shame named individuals. (The closest I've come is mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass, and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done in desperation of other ways to make the point having failed.)

Am I wrong here?

Like, I acknowledge that criticism of non-androphilic trans women in general implies criticism of Jessica Taylor, and criticism of "rationalists" in general implies criticism of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander and Zack Davis, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seems really useful for maximizing the information-conveying component of the speech and minimizing the social-warfare component?


If someone says "the Jews are OK, but they aren't Real Americans" I feel similarly concerned, and if they say "Michael is OK but he isn't a Real American" likewise not. 

Targeting that is Less Precise is always more violent.

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019, 4:33 PM Michael Vassar <michael.vassar@gmail.com> wrote:

    I think that is really really importantly backwards. If someone says "Michael Vassar is a terrible person" I hope they are OK, and I try to be empathically curious, but if they don't have an argument, I don't worry much and I worry more For them than About them. If someone says The Jews are Terrible People I see that as a much more serious threat to my safety. "rationalists and trans-girls very clearly appear to me to be the exact categories of people that get targeted by the sorts of people who would also target Jews, so this analogy is *particularly* apt.  

This actually interacts with the good-faith kind of social constructionism! (Which mostly isn't done, but could be done.) Speakers of my generation are more likely to say "person" when sex isn't relevant, whereas older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers similarly frown on mentioning race when it's not relevant.)


I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of being a generic social conservative. My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."


cut from the first draft—
> You scream and punch him in the face. Clutching his bloody nose, Bob seems more shocked than angry. "You—you punched me."

> "I wouldn't say that," you say. "It depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of the word 'punch.'"

Um, I guess it's important to notice that the only reason I think the "Vice President" example is "depoliticized" is because I live in a bubble that's obsessed with identity (gender, &c.) politics and doesn't care about class politics. It still works if my audience lives in the same bubble as me, but it would be pretty poor performance on my part to not notice the bubble.



One reason someone might hypothetically be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by bad-faith nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.

This is why I found myself wondering if, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I'm a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for freaking the fuck out over a blog post from 2014 (!!) and a Tweet (!!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, have probably said things that were wrong five years ago that I would be annoyed about being pressured to issue a correction for now!

But ... I don't know, I thought I put in a lot of interpretive labor making a pretty convincing case that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction would actually be justified in this case, and that it should be possible to take a hard stance on "categories aren't arbitrary, you idiots, just like Eliezer said in 2008" without taking a stance on what implications that might have for other more contentious questions?? Right? Right?? Like, there are noticeable differences between me and the hypothetical bad-faith nitpicker, right????

My mental health is continuing to deteriorate today, so I may need to focus on that (and therefore staying employable and having money, &c.) for a while rather than whatever we're trying to accomplish here.


I still feel sad and upset and gaslighted and I haven't done any dayjob work so far this week even though it's Tuesday afternoon. So, I feel motivated to send this email to communicate that I feel sad, even though this message is of questionable value to the recipients.





Eliezer, I've spent my entire adult life in the subculture you created. You created me. Everything I'm doing now, I learned from you. I've put in a lot of effort—along with Ben and Michael and Sarah and Zvi and now Jessica—trying to explain that there's a collective sanity problem that we could really use your help with. (You should see the strategy email threads we've been having behind your back!) I don't understand how repeating that people live in different mental universes is a relevant response to our thousands of words of careful arguments?

I'm pretty sure everyone here is strongly in favor of Jessica's existence. But maybe, if someone thinks really carefully about it, there could be some way to protect Jessica's interests without destroying the faculty of language?! (Especially given that Jessica herself may have interests in being able to talk.)

Michael—
> My guess is that at this point Zack and Ben should both sign off actually, and maybe Sarah as well, and that this should become a conversation between Eliezer and Jessica, Zvi, myself, and other people who have or have historically had strong MIRI affiliations and have paid serious attention to logical decision theories.  Maybe we should bring in Wei Dai, since along with Eliezer, he created logical decision theory, so in so far as there's a natural heir to the Caliphate other than Eliezer it's him.  At this point, I think that if this doesn't resolve with Eliezer backing down I am pretty much obligated to involve everyone who I believe has historically taken seriously Eliezer's claims of strong principles against lying.  Among other things, I think that it's clear that without standing on such a moral bedrock, Eliezer is no longer claiming to be the spiritual leader of the Caliphate (intuitively, that title passes to me?), and that the secular leader of the AI Risk Caliphate has been Demis for many years now.  

> Sarah, don't worry, this definitely doesn't imply involving shit-heads who want to carpet-bomb us.  It might involve explicitly discussing the pros and cons of involving leftist shit-heads as part of motivating Eliezer (and/or Scott) and I think that we should try to become psychologically immune to their carpet-bombing in any event, but there may be good reasons for Sarah to remain economically coupled to their good-will, since of all of us she's the only one who may stand to receive resources from the Corporate Center-Left Coalition or to direct their resources.  It does seem to me that technically, in so far as their attacks are harmless to those not seeking privilege, leftist shit-heads are Guided by the Goodness of their Weapons, and working out whether this is in fact true may be related to the logical decision theory that will enable us to integrate political threats with compassionate rational engagement and bring Eliezer and Scott back from the team of deception and privilege.

In retrospect, I totally backwards to say that I was worried about you using up our bandwidth! My message was probably pretty predictable given everything else I've said, whereas you actually made progress, even if I didn't quite understand where you were going in the moment.)

... I'm kind of perversely enjoying my position as plantiff/pawn/puppydog.

But—wait. Eliezer is accusing you guys of driving me crazy?? I think I might be obligated to respond to that. But, on a weekend.


Ben on our epistemic state—

> Zack started out operating on object-level trust that "Rationalists" would generically be trying to build true maps, and that while there might be errors, even quite bad errors, in individuals, coordination would be towards truth on net, on the meta-level and all higher levels of recursion. This hypothesis was decisively falsified - political factors caused it to be false. Zack's level of trust did not pay rent, except insofar as he ended up helping catalyze the formation of a dissident circle who are sympathetic to coordinating towards truth, and not just pretending to do so.

> Eliezer, as the best plausible individual representative of the "Rationalists" as currently constituted, is Eliza the bot therapist in Zack's story, letting the clock run out on the interaction with Zack instead of trying to inform him. He even initially accepted in principle financial compensation for doing this, and more generally is getting paid by MIRI donors. We should consider the whole system structurally similar to Zack's Eliza story. Regardless of the initial intent, anxious scrupulous Rationalists are paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which has no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, but remains in a facsimile of dialogue with them in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue, at least insofar as bigger revenue streams aren't available yet.

> Zacks don't survive long-run in this ecosystem. If we want minds like Zack's to survive somewhere, we need an interior that justifies that level of trust. In the short run, Zack just isn't useful until he self-mods to not be vulnerable to this sort of trolling again, and give up on people exhibiting behaviors like Eliezer's (or Scott's) as not worth his time. This means modeling the politics of the situation proactively, not just defensively as a horrible mess "we" want to fix.

> Jessica started out thinking that things like Eliezer's code of meta-honesty were worth parsing in detail, instead of just dismissing them as the sort of thing someone formerly scrupulous who wanted to narrate their transition to a deceptive strategy as technically okay would do. This hypothesis has been falsified as well - Jessica's attention was wasted by Eliezer on the object level, and was only valuable - like Zack's - because it clarified that people like Eliezer are not operating on the level of fidelity that justifies that attention to detail.

> We should expect others who are modeling politics, including the good guys who would like to build robust networks of truth-oriented trust, to ignore clever explanations we give for our behavior that substantially resemble what Eliezer is doing, and to rationally predict that we have intent to expropriate via clever rationalizations if we behave like someone with intent to appropriate via clever rationalizations. If we were mistaken to trust Eliezer, then others would be mistaken to trust us if we externally seem to behave like Eliezer.

> I'm not sure what this means on the object level except that SOME leftists and anarchists are probably much better allies than they seem to us right now. Possibly some of them have analogous confusions with respect to their faction's internal coordination mechanisms, and haven't figured out how to look trustworthy to people like us. (And also, there are way more than two or three factions.)


Michael—
> I don't think that we should be permanently giving up on people, but I do think that we should be regarding them as temporarily without the appeal to rights in relationship to ourselves. Varelse in Orson Scott Card speak. 

> I think that it was extremely worth our time to engage at this level of detail, and at an even greater level of detail in order to achieve common knowledge, as I don't think that we have achieved common knowledge*yet* if Zvi  still thinks that we shouldn't confidently act on the assumption that Eliezer is not doing useful things unobserved. 

> I would defend engagement with Eliezer for as long as we did in the past and in several future cases if we had several future relationships that seemed comparably valuable to the one we were hoping for, e.g. with a reformed Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I think that it's important that we be clear in our own minds that as of now there should be no presumptive loyalty to Eliezer over, for instance, Demis who is the Schelling Point for leader for an AI Risk coalition not Guided by the Goodness of it's Weapons.

> In fact,bin all seriousness, we should see Eliezer as less trustworthy than Demis by default in light of the fact that Eliezer claimed to be following a nuanced strategy but defected while Demis never stood on any claims of morality/trustworthiness and is thus entitled to the standing of any person who seems to have managed to be successful while remaining sane enough to advance technology and to turn down large monetary gains for strategic advantage.

Ben—
> Zack, I'm not asking you not to say that publicly if that's how you honestly feel and you want to report it, but as a political matter I don't expect it to help Eliezer understand; I just expect it to make him feel sad.

Jessica—
> Worth making explicit why Eliezer's response to my criticism is sufficient reason to write him off until something majorly changes (e.g. apology and serious signals of intent to recognize and act against corruption):

> - Instead of responding to my criticisms, he does a "tu quoque" (in this case accusing me of making a conflation I didn't make), which is particularly illegitimate (and thus, amusing) because I'm holding him to his standards, not mine.

> - He implies I'm insane for modeling psychology.  This is classic play in high-corruption gaslighting equilibria: act in bad faith while pretending to act in good faith, and label those who see it is pretend (and talk about this) as insane, to discredit them.  (It's rather obvious that psychological modeling is actually a sign of sanity, not of insanity)

> - He praises Zack relative to me (saying he is comparably sane because he doesn't psychologize... which, Zack does too, that's a lie).  Another classic political tactic: praise one member of an alliance while blaming another, to split cracks in the alliance, turning former allies against each other.

> Eliezer shifted from bullshitting in ways that plausibly defend his reputation, to actively trying to hurt me in ways that do not plausibly defend his reputation.  (Him initiating a political slap fight with me actually looks worse for him than it does for me)


>  I think this is what happens when one plays politics too long without sufficiently robust defenses, and develops habits and modes of thinking in different ways. Thinking of such action as being goal-oriented with a detailed map is the wrong way to model it - as you put it, Eliezer's thinking isn't worth this level of attention to its details, as Jessica/Zack observed with its meta-honesty.

> He also engaged in rhetorical actions that the Eliezer we know and value would never do, so he can't be that person at present. He is 'insane' in the sense that he has lost his mind, but it's his mind that he has lost rather than a mind in general, as such views are alas normal round these parts. 

Michael—
> Common knowledge achieved. 
> Intention to transition to politics achieved in so far as everyone agrees regarding 'stay in formation, this is not a drill'.

> Can everyone please let me know what you think about the value of achieving common knowledge. To my mind, we don't need Eliezer, but we absolutely need to be able to count that as value when using our 'board evaluators' or we are Totally Fucking Dead!

> Now that we are doing politics at all, and conveniently, against the least skilled opponent around, it's time to start practicing offense.  We have an extremely large, clear-cut weapon here. Eliezer has publicly stated his intention to commit fraud. He has publicly defrauded a number of us. If the guns that we can point at his head aren't larger than the guns already points at his head that means that he has forgotten how to see guns.

Ben—
> Eliezer's claim to legitimacy really did amount to a claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he almost uniquely was not.

> "Eliezer is criminally insane" and "Eliezer's behavior is a normal failure of rationality" are not competing hypotheses from the perspective of the Sequences - they're the same hypothesis.

> WE CAN'T GRADE OBJECTIVE CATEGORY DESCRIPTORS ON A CURVE.

I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?

In general, if someone writes to me with a criticism of the form of "That was really misleading in context; I really think it's worth clarifying to your readers", I think I would either say something like "Actually, I argue that it's not misleading because ..." or "You're right, I'll clarify." Promising to never speak about the topic again just seems weird?

Michael—
> From my perspective, she is an enemy combatant and can claim no rights in regards to either me or you.  We should be lying to her because we should also be trying, when convenient, to slash her tires.  I do think that it's pretty important that you absorb that point. Like, we know her to be actively acting against me in a manner that I think is unambiguously unrighteous, unprovoked and not self-serving, and we have established that Eliezer is actively breaking his oaths despite everything he has ever said about how 'you can break your principles once. After that, you don't have principles to break' and the like. Do we at least agree that he is unambiguously wither a criminal or an enemy combatant?  

> The latter frame is more accurate both because criminals have rights and because enemy combatants aren't particularly blameworthy. They exist under a blameworthy moral order and for you to act in their interests implies acting against their current efforts, at least temporary, but you probably would like to execute on a Marshall Plan later. 

> I don't really need this information, so don't bring it if it makes you uncomfortable, and it's totally fine to be 'friends' with enemy combatants, just not to feel obligations towards them mediated by lawful intuitions. We should work out the logic of this with Ben, as it's important, but basically one can have an obligation of beneficence towards a small child, a tame animal, or many other things, but to attribute rights to those things rather than entitlement to beneficence is actually to give up on the belief in rights.

Um. I can imagine that you might find my attitude here frustrating for reasons analogous to how I find it frustrating when people reach for the fake precision of talking about hormone levels and genitalia as separate dimensions in a context where I think the concept they actually want is "biological sex." But that's just the objection I come up with when I run my "How could a hypothetical adversary argue that I'm being hypocritical?" heuristic; it doesn't actually make me feel more eager to talk about criminality myself.


Ben—
> I don't think it's worth your time to read that thread - the result was Zack decided to do all the public interpretive labor himself, just asked Eliezer for an endorsement of a pretty straightforward but insightful extension of A Human's Guide To Words, and then we have the recent thread. [...] The coordination capital we are building seems way more important than persuading Eliezer.

Jack—
> And the more this sort of thing continues the more embarrassed I am to be associated
> Ptting this level of effort in looks pitiful
> Like actually just pathetic
> Sharing thread with the 3 most promising MIRI employees and offering to chat with them about it seems like not a horrible idea
> But sharing it with the whole cult just seems like poking a nest of dog shit - nothing in this thread was sufficiently obviously bad by the standards of either cynicism or naive pattern matching, so making a fuss rather than writing off the troll looks either stupid (can't see obvious troll) or weak (have nothing better to do than kick a pile of excrement)
> Oh or weak like Sarah read it
> Someone needs to slap Zack. Not literally, probably.
> But I already don't have much hope for the level of cultist cuck that Nick is. Zack seems like he might be further in that direction, but otoh he at least has narratized internal conflict about it.

> Zack sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys (which I think he was correct to do conditional on email happening at all). We're (accurately) narratized as a political coalition who people feel obligated to talk to but to not take too seriously.


I was _just_ trying to publicly settle a very straightforward philosophy thing that seemed really solid to me

if, in the process, I accidentally ended up being an unusually useful pawn in Michael Vassar's deranged four-dimensional hyperchess political scheming

that's ... _arguably_ not my fault



"Harry, were you involved in the breakout from Azkaban?" "Involved doesn't have a simple truth condition ..."



There's this thing where some people are way more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one wants to make it common knowledge (like with the blue-eyed islanders), which is really awkward for the people who are simultaneously (a) known but not commonly-known to be underperforming (such that the culture of common-knowledge-prevention is to my self-interest because I get to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually performing at that level, and my coworkers and even managers don't want to call attention to it because that would be mean—and it helps that they know that I already feel guilty about it) but also (b) tempermentally unsuited and ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation

(where I'm fond of the Ayn Rand æsthetic of "I earn my keep, and if the market were to decide that I don't deserve to live anymore, I guess it would be right and I should accept my fate with dignity" and I think the æsthetic is serving a useful function in my psychology even though it's also important to model how I would change my tune if the market actually decided that I don't deserve to live)

(also, I almost certainly don't have a coherent view of what "unjustly-acquired rents" are)

but the "Everyone knows that Zack feels guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish him, because he's already doing enough internalized-domination to punish himself" dynamic is unsustainable if it evolves (evolves is definitely the right word here) into a loop of "feeling gulit in exchange for not doing work" rather than the intended function of "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work"

I'm not supposed to be sending email during Math and Wellness Month, but I'm sending/writing this anyway because it's Wellness-relevant

You've got to be strong to survive in the O-ring sector

(I can actually see the multiplicative "tasks are intertwined and have to all happen at high reliability in order to create value" thing playing out in the form of "if I had fixed this bug earlier, then I would have less manual cleanup work", in contrast to the "making a bad latte with not enough foam, that doesn't ruin any of the other customer's lattes" from my Safeway-Starbucks-kiosk days)

This is genuinely pretty bad

I should do some of the logging-package prototyping stuff on the weekend (it looks fun/interesting enough such that I might be able to psych myself into thinking of it as a "fun" project)
 
30 April saying, essentially (and sincerely), "Oh man oh jeez, Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're the only ones backing me up on this incredibly basic philosophy thing and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to go."

(In a darkly adorable twist, Mike and Alicorn's two-year-old son Merlin was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael Vassar.)

Anyway, all of this leading up to a psychological hypothesis (maybe this is "obvious", but I hadn't thought about it before): when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could afford to not-understand (pace Upton Sinclair) the "words need to carve reality at the joints" thing when it was just me freaking out alone, but "got it" almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to walk (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes)—and maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Eliezer (assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later)??

This probably doesn't work if you repeat it (or if you try to do it consciously)?

> I keep scratching my head here Zack. Weaker language on this would just be weaker.  We aren't dealing with a problem of pedagogy here. We are dealing with a group of people who literally got together and built a movement around the need to do charity non-fraudulently but who were eventually shaped by the feedback systems they were in into doing exactly the thing they built their movement in opposition to while claiming that "anyone else would have done it and anyway some of us are vegans".  Nobody is endorsing punishing people for doing things that anyone else would have done, but we are asking them to stop preventing others from trying to do actual charity and actual science, which they are currently actually opposing in order to defend their egos. 

Yes, this is a lame rationalization: if everyone actually knew, what would the act be for? Present day senile!Eliezer wrote of people being "pseudo-fooled in part of themselves even when they are not really-fooled" as if it were no big deal, but 2007!Eliezer identified people being pseudo-fooled as a bad thing. I'll add this to my post-ideas list (working title: "Fake Common Knowledge"). 

he seems to be conflating transhumanist optimism with "causal reality", and then tone-policing me when I try to model good behavior of what means-end reasoning about causal reality actually looks like. This ... seems pretty cultish to me?? Like, it's fine and expected for this grade of confusion to be on the website, but it's more worrisome when it's coming from the mod team.

I talked with Ray from 7 to 10:30 tonight. My intellectual performance was not so great and I did a lot of yelling and crying. Ray thinks that people need to feel safe before they can seek truth, because otherwise they'll distort stuff until they can feel safe. I think this is mostly true: it's not a coincidence that I put out a poor intellectual performance during the same conversations that I do a lot of yelling and crying. But then Ray goes on to say something about stag hunts and coordination, and I'm like, "In slogan form, 'Telling the truth is not a coordination problem!' You can just unilaterally tell the truth!" And ... it doesn't seem to land?

I wish I hadn't done so much yelling and crying with Ray (it's undignified, and it makes me stupid), but when people seem to be pretty explicitly denying the possibility of actually reasoning with them, it's as if I don't perceive any alternative but to express myself in a language they might have a better hope of understanding

Also, I think it's pretty ironic that this happened on a post that was explicitly about causal reality vs. social reality! It's entirely possible that I wouldn't feel inclined to be such a hardass about "Whether I respect you is off-topic" if it weren't for that prompt!


I think mens rea as a concept is pretty clearly necessary for good incentives, at least some of the time. The law distinguishes between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") from premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), and this is an important distinction, because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable ("elastic"?) than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives is going to have analogues in nearby possible worlds who are guilty of vehicular manslaughter.) In the absence of mindreading tech, it may not be easy for the court to determine intent, but it should be possible in at least some cases: if the victim is a stranger and the weapon was a car, then it's probably manslaughter; if the victim was recently revealed to have slept with the perp's wife and the weapon was a gun purchased the previous day, then it's probably murder.

I would be pretty surprised if any of you disagree with this, at least in the case of homicide? The case of misinformation that moves resources is a lot trickier, to be sure (for one extremely important disanalogy, perps don't gain from manslaughter), but I don't see what would reverse the extremely weak principle that "intent matters, somewhat, sometimes"?


1. I didn't stay on them for long enough for the full/interesting effects. (I chickened out at 5 months because of health/fertility conservatism; might try again sometime.)

2. I in particular am unusually bad at introspection?? (I think I mentioned this in the posts: there could very well have been lots of changes that I just didn't consciously/verbally register as "change due to HRT".) Possible evidence: I drink coffee often, but I don't feel like I can consciously notice its effects most of the time, except when I'm very sleepy, feel not-sleepy some time after drinking coffee, and infer, "Oh, I'm not sleepy any more; it must have been the coffee, which I know is a stimulant because everyone says so and I believe them." But the fact that I feel motivated to seek out coffee even though it doesn't "objectively" taste particularly good suggests that the drug is doing something to my brain even though I wouldn't be very good at blogging about it.

3. People-in-general's verbal self-reports are heavily influenced by priors/selective-attention: if you expect HRT (or coffee) to drastically change your experience, you'll find things to notice; if you don't, then you won't. The actual effects of biochemistry are presumably real and in-principle-measuable, but the translation from "brain biochemistry" to "blog post" destroys almost all non-culturally-preconceived information.


 My previous understanding of the present struggle (filtered through the lens of my idiosyncratic Something to Protect) seemed like a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness; I didn't really feel like I understood what Michael/Ben/Jessica were seeing as a more general dire problem. But now we have two Less Wrong moderators (Ruby and Ray, not rando n00bs) who seem pretty actively opposed to honest discourse (on the grounds that we need to solve the coordination problem of colluding to protect each other's feelings before we can feel safe enough to have arguments). Michael's cockamamie social theories about there being a socio-psychological attractor optimizing for fraud-in-general are actually starting to seem plausible??

Steven, if you have time and are interested, could you read the secret ("secret") thread and my earlier meta-scuffle with Ruby and a just-now thread with Ray tell me if you're seeing what I'm seeing?

Anna, I continue to be pretty baffled at how (from my perspective, stated bluntly) you seem to be basically uninterested in the mounting evidence that your entire life's work is a critical failure?

(Ruby's profile says he's one of two people to have volunteered for CfAR on three continents. If this is the level of performance we can expect from a veteran CfAR participant, what is CfAR for? Like, yes, we've succeeded at getting money and eyeballs pointed at the alignment problem, which is good. But I pretty clearly remember back in 2009 that we thought this was going to take more than money and eyeballs. If we were wrong, that's good news for humanity! But there should be some sort of argument that explains why we changed our minds, rather than everyone seemingly just conveniently forgetting the original vision.)

Really interested in spending time with either of you in person to double-crux on some of this! (Or more Friendship maintenance with Anna.)

>  People sometimes think of it as "a math problem", but that's because of the branding, not because of the reality.  Yes, a lot of it is a math problem, but it's also an analytic philosophy problem, a cognitive science problem, a social psychology problem, a sociobiology problem, a sociology of science problem, a political strategy problem, and so on.  Many of these are politics-laden domains, where it isn't sufficient to merely be skeptical; it's also necessary to directly talk about politics without the conversation getting derailed.

Jessica—
> 1. GiveWell (talking about how current charities are inefficient/fraudelent/useless, and how it's possible to do better with cost-benefit analyses)
> 2. The Atheism movement (talking about how religion is false and people who promote it are being deceptive)
> 3. The fable of the dragon tyrant (talking about how deathists are being insane, worshipping death instead of fighting it)
> 4. AI safety as a concern for people not in the AI field (talking about how current AGI approaches would result in the discussion of the world; isn't that saying that what AI researchers are doing is bad, and they won't figure out how to do better themselves?)
> 5. The Sequences (talking about human rationality, including talking about lies and dark side epistemology)
> 6. Inadequate Equilibria (talking about how e.g. academia is producing disinformation or useless research, due to perverse incentives)

What I was trying to point out in the thread is a pattern where people say, "Yes, of course criticism and truthseeking is important; I just think that tact is important, too," only to go on and dismiss any particular criticism as insufficiently tactful. More generally: the surface indicators of rationality are easy to fake, and if we don't know how to detect when someone is faking, then it might be surprisingly hard to notice if fake versions of "rationality" are memetically outcompeting better versions. (To which a standard reply seems to go: "Ah, but the behavior of claiming that the surface indicators are easy to fake and that you know how to do better is also easy to fake." Well, yes. That's why this is a hard problem.)



Ben and Jessica, what did you get out of yesterday's meeting? Do you even remember what anyone said?

I think it was Vaniver who brought up "sanity-maximizers" and admitted that that's not what "the team" is trying to do (because Society would destroy it for heresy, like Anna has told me before)? I like Vaniver, who seemed to "get" me.

For me and my selfish perspective, I think the main outcome is finally shattering my "rationalist" social identity. (We knew this was coming, and I still need to mourn, but I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me; this is the first morning where "rationalists ... them" feels more natural than "rationalists ... us".)

I hope I wasn't too emotional, but I guess I had nothing to lose. I have my friends and I have money, and if Oli thinks I'm annoying, I guess I can live with that. (I mean, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be: I am, in fact, annoying.)

Ben—

> Seems like Oli would rather have ongoing internal political disagreements than make Lesswrong anything in particular. Vaniver actually believes that they should behave esoterically. Jim claimed that he updated during the meeting towards believing that norms had in fact shifted - possible he’ll make more downstream updates later. I don’t know how to characterize Ray.

> Everyone agreed that Zack was right and Scott wrong on the substantive issue of category boundaries, and I think agreed with my characterization of Scott as conflating basic decency with giving into extortion.

> There basically seems like there is no appetite for becoming the sort of counterparty we could negotiate with, and it seems like they think we’re probably right to leave.

I actually still feel pretty motivated to write for Less Wrong, but now more in the spirit of "marketing channel for my own writing" and "fuck you guys" rather than my previous hope of recapturing the beacon.

I was really grateful to Jim for piping up with, "We are somewhat cowardly about what we curate" (concerning why "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" didn't get Curated). (I'm not sure if he actually used the word "cowardly", but that was the sense.) I was like, "Thanks, that makes me respect you more!" (Ray was maintaining that my pedagogy wasn't good enough.)

I am a high-neuroticism person (the sex difference is only d = 0.4, so this isn't model-breakingly surprising; it's like being a woman who's 6'2")