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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / i-tell-myself-notes.txt

Write the whole thing, then ask team if I should cut the backstory or split into its own post

POINTS TO HIT
* In 2016, it was a huge shock to realize that I could be trans, too (I thought AGP was a different thing), and making this less confusing for other people seemed in line with the rationality mission
* slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong: "Changing Emotions", "Failed Utopia #4-2"
* It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
* But I notice people kept brining up this "Categories are arbitrary, therefore it's not wrong to insist that TWAW", and that's _definitely_ wrong; that, I knew I could win
* But then Eliezer did it, too, and I _flipped the fuck out_, and set out on a mission to try to get this shit settled in public
* Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness; Outside View of bad-faith nitpickers
* When email didn't work (details redacted), I thought, "Oh, it's probably because of the politics", so I wrote up the completely general version with examples about dolphins and job titles and Mullerian mimickry in snakes
* And this is _still_ being perceived as too political, even though everyone else shot first?!?!
* And I can't object without looking like a status grab
* What I think is going on. People want to say on the good size of the Blue Egregore, and that means they can't even defend the _basics_ if there's _any_ political context, or even the context of a _person_ with political cooties
* I don't know what the optimal play is ("pretend that political constraints don't exist" might not actually work in the real world), but this is pretty bad for our collective sanity, and my mental health, and I wish we could at least try to deal with it on the meta level
* I'm politically constrained, too: I don't talk about race differences even though I believe them (link to apophasis/hypocritical humor)
* conscious, deliberate dishonesty/cageiness is better than the egregore piloting your moves without you knowing
* social incentive gradients towards truth, forged by status
* not sure what the path forward is, my quest for Truth continues onwards (but I'm going to try to unwind the cult-speak)
* concern that people will be drawn to the beacon of the sequences, and end up in a shitty Bay Area cult
* mandatory obfuscation (Anne Vitale syndrome)
* if part of the resistacne to an honest cost/benefit analysis is 
* my vocbaulary is trained on this cult
* reasonable vs. unreasonable misunderstandings
* what did I expect, taking on an egregore so much bigger than me?
* if I agree that people should be allowed to transition, why am I freaking out? Because I _actually care about getting the theory correct_
* culture matters: if you're surrounded by crazy people
* it's not particular to social justice; I'd punch right in a Christian theocracy
* what I mean by "gaslighting"

person paper on purity https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

"The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."

And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, met a lot of trans women in real life for the first time, and did some more reading that convinced me of the at-least-approximate-correctness of the homosexual/autogynephilic two-types theory of MtF transgenderism that I had previously assumed was false (while being privately grateful that [there was a _word_ for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)) because everyone _said_ it was false

(As usual, no one cares about trans men.)

We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, [less wrong](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop) than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing 

I confess that I _may have [overreacted](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [somewhat](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)_ when people weren't converging (or [even engaging](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)) with me on the two-types/autogynephilia thing. Psychology is a genuinely difficult empirical science

I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to [take the Outside View seriously](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html): no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a systematically-correct-reasoning community_.

A.T. and R.B.'s Facebook comments

emphasize that the categories-are-relative thing is an important grain of truth, but that I expect _us_ to see deeper into the Bayes-structure

this is _really basic shit_

The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort

bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/ (not a coincidence that are positions aren't reversed)

Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/

the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me _already_ not believing in guided-by-the-beauty

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/12/forged-by-status.html

"I ought to accept ... within the conceptual boundaries" is a betrayal of everything we stand for

(I don't consider "if it'll save someone's life" to be a compelling consideration here, for the same reason that "What if Omega punishes all agents who don't choose the alphabetically first option?" doesn't seem like a compelling argument against timeless decision theory. Specifying punishments for agents that don't follow a particular ritual of cognition doesn't help us understand the laws that make intelligence work.)

when _yet another_ (higher-profile, but more careful, this time only committing the error by Grecian implicature rather than overtly—if you're being careful to disclaim most obvious misinterpretations) people comitting the fallacy, I _flipped out_

The sheer number of hours we invested in this operation is _nuts_: desperate all-out effort, arguing over email with two ppl who were higher-status than me and fighting an entire Discord server three times, $1000, three postcards

what about _my_ mental health?

but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care

it's naive to think you can win against an egregore 1000 times bigger than you

the Church

won't all those trans women be embarrassed after the singularity 

we live in a world where reason doesn't work

_not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?

There could be similarly egregious errors that I'm not as sensitive too

I don't think you can build an aligned superintelligence from a culture this crazy

it's not fair to expect ordinary people to understand the univariate fallacy before they're allowed to say "men aren't women"

maybe S. was trying to talk about "legal fiction" categories, but I'm trying to talk about epistemology, and that's a probable reading when you say "categories"

Hansonian mental illness that people should be less accomodating of

there has to be a way to apply a finite amount of effort to _correct_ errors, and possibly even profit from correcting errors

(I'm not making this up! I _couldn't_ make this up!)

smart people clearly know, but I can't be allowed to win the argument in public

free-speech norms

maybe 50,000 years from now we'll all be galatic superminds and laugh about all this

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.

I guess this issue is that the mob thinks that arguments are soldiers and doesn't understand local validity, and if you're trying to appease the mob, you're not even allowed to do the local-validity "This is a bad argument, but the conclusion might be true for other reasons" thing?


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.

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??????

_everyone else shot first_, and I'm _correct on the merits_

competence forcing conclusions: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
https://archive.is/nb5rH

analogy to school

(["_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake_. _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening_."](http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good))

selection effect whereby citizens of the Caliphate only petition the rightful caliph when they have a problem, which can be discouraging when you're the caliph and you don't see the people's appreciation for the ways in which the kingdom is great

From my perspective, Professor, I'm just doing what you taught me (carve reality at the joints; speak the truth, even if your voice trembles; make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect; _&c._)

I _have_ to keep escalating, because I don't have a choice

It shouldn't be a political demand; people should actually process my arguments because they're good arguments

James Watson 'aught-seven

Arguing is not a punishment https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/

Brief group conversational silences are ostracism threats, but like, threats are great because you have the option of complying with them if you don't want a war.)

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" 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).

probably the strongest is "These people have ignored their own carefully gathered experimental evidence for decades in favor of stuff that sounds more intuitive."  : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster

power is weird: I feel a bit icky when I notice Sophia or Rachel or Tetra changing their description in a way that seemed influenced by me

"audience capture" https://forward.com/opinion/431400/youtuber-pewdiepies-adl-boycott-shows-how-anti-semitism-goes-mainstream/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/15/my-id-on-defensiveness/

_out of cards_

[K. passing my intellectual Turing test]

"I" statements

chapter and verse

I will try to be less silly about "my thing is actually important for the world" claims, when what I really mean is that I'm just not a consequentialist about speech

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory
"Outside the Laboratory" dumbness could be selection rather than causal

I don't expect anyone to take a stand for a taboo topic that they don't care about
I would have expected Scott and/or Eliezer to help clarify the philosophy-of-language mistake, because that's core sequences material
but I was wrong

I was imagining that it should be safe to endorse my "... Boundaries?" post, because the post is about philosophy, and surely it should be possible to endorse a specific article without that being taken as an endorsement of the author
but ... I guess that's not how politics works

They can't _trust_ me not to leverage consensus on the categories-aren't-arbitrary for my object-level thing, in a way that would go on RationalWiki and SneerClub

The counterargument that Dark Side Epistemology isn't that recursive

-----

I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical question in psychology. Psychology is _really complicated_—and psychology questions that impinge on hot-button culture war issues are subject to additional biasing pressures. In this domain, no matter how "obvious" I think something is, I have to [take the Outside View seriously](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html) and

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/15/my-id-on-defensiveness/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ Popular Author is very tired
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/

Savvy people have an incentive to stonewall me until I give up and go away, and on any other subject where I didn't have Something to Protect, it would have _worked_

Lying or gerrymandering an individual object-level category boundary is forgivable; constructing a clever philosophical argument that lying is OK, is not

Another kind of asymmetric weapon: whether this narrative "looks worse" for me or my subjects depends on the audience (you can read it as a tale of betrayal of sacred principles, or a tale of personal mental illness)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Lurkers_Support_Me_in_Email

still cited: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/d178n2/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/

transitioning has _costs_; maybe you think some of those costs are illigitimate and should be game-theoretically resisted (Society's transphobia is a terrorirst who you shouldn't negotiate), but first of all, "People are good at noticing each other's sex" isn't transphobia, and second, even if you're doing game-theoretic defiance, you should make that explicit

double-perceception of bad faith: I don't believe "categories are arbitrary" is intellectually honest (and I'm right); my interlocutors don't believe that I'm really this upset about the philosophy of language (and they're _kind of_ right)

I have 3,405 users/7,172 sessions this year, S.'s prediction lists have been 50/50 on "At least one SSC post > 100,000 hits: 50%"

rhetorical superweapon: https://archive.is/6WGbk

Say it's comin' soon,
Someday without you
All I can do, is get me past the ghost of you
Wave goodbye to me
I won't say I'm sorry
I'll be alright, once I find the other side of

"If I'm aching at the thought of them, what for? That's not me anymore."

"And I'm not the girl that I intend to be."

AGP blogging: "Somebody has to and noone else will."

notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways

contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic

people who are constrained by their Overton ratio have an incentive to make this sacred-but-unimportant issue their https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat but that's cruel to me

Second, consider [cause prioritization](https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/prioritization-research/). If some Issues are particularly important from a utilitarian perspective, and some Issues are particularly important to Green partisans

[Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect)

[make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort)

But _that_ would have to be someone else's story on someone else's blog.

[No, it's not the incentives—it's you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you)

[The Correct Contrarian Cluster](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster)

getting a reversal was improbable, but: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/st7DiQP23YQSxumCt/on-doing-the-improbable

TWAW is a positive-valence instance of the worst-argument-in-the-world, but it's still the SAME THING; if you can't see that, you're dumb

I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)

The "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want" argument is bullshit. All the actually-smart people know that it's bullshit at _some_ level, perhaps semi-consciously buried under a lot of cognitive dissonance. But it's _socially load-bearing_ bullshit that _not only_ does almost no one have an incentive to correct—


But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public. 

"woah, [toddler]'s learning about the facts of life
[friend]'s explaining about how some parts usually get covered and about how some people don't have penises and stuff"
"Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!

same person: "people do tend to present as their genders"

politicizing the question of what 2 + 2 should equal

Aumann is an Orthodox Jew

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ovvwAhKKoNbfcMz8K/on-expressing-your-concerns

If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.

stroop test https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

I was pretty surprised how well the coinflip post did

speculating that people are lying for political cover may be "uncharitable", but what else can I do when I _can't_ take people seriously?!

https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/

A world that makes sense. A world that's not lying to me.

_(But this time not for you, but just for me—)_

_(Well, no more; I won't beg to buy a shot at your back door)_

_(If I'm aching at the thought of you, what for? That's not me anymore)_

The "truth/anti-truth attractors in human psychology" hypothesis feels more plausible when I emphasize the need to cover-up cover-ups as the specific mechanism for anti-truth.

Introspectively, I think I can almost feel the oscillation between "I'm embarrassed and upset about {thing} that I don't want to acknowledge or explain, but that makes me not want to acknowledge or explain the fact that I feel embarrassed an upset" vs. "Yes, {thing} is real; real things are allowed to appear on maps."

----

an implicit don't-ask-don't-tell agreement, where they certainly had clues that something was wrong with me gender-wise, but no one had an incentive to bring it up.

(Contrary to popular belief, it's not exactly ignorance that's bliss, but more generally lack of game-theoretic common knowledge: if they know, and I know that they know, but they don't know that I know that they know, that's often close enough.)

For example, I seem to remember my first pair of breastforms mysteriously disappearing just after the time my mother unilaterally cleaned out my closet. (And a friend not long thereafter reported overhearing her telling his parents that she was pretty sure I wasn't gay.)

my history of email exchanges with the Popular Author being demanding

posting on LW because it's the conversational locus https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8rYxw9xZfwy86jkpG/on-the-importance-of-less-wrong-or-another-single

M.L. Morris "Vocational Interests in the United States" d=1.7 on occupational preferences

playing for scraps vs. playing for keeps https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1151902363059392512

You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."

I didn't not have any reason to _invent the hypotheses_ that I had some undiagnosed brain-intersex condition, or that I was literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.

[This is something where I _actually need the right answer_]

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.

Great at free speech norms, there's a level above free speech where you _converge on the right answer

(I cried my tears for three good years; you can't be mad at me.)

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

Technical mistake

_politically load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.

https://economicsofgender.tumblr.com/post/188438604772/i-vaguely-remember-learning-trans-women-are : "for a while nobody argued about the truth or implications of 'trans women are women.' It would be like arguing over whether, in fact, the birthday boy really gets the first piece of cake."

So, while I have been seeking out a coalition/bandwagon/flag-rally for the past few weeks, 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, the different definitions imply different probabilistic inferences, so banning one definition as hurtful is an epistemic issue that rationalists should notice because it makes it artificially more expensive to express probabilistic inferences that can be expressed concisely with that definition."

I do usually mention the two-types model at the same time because that's where I think the truth is and it's hard to see the Bayes-structure-of-language problem without concrete examples. (Why is it that that only ~3% of women-who-happen-to-be-cis identify as lesbians, but 60% of women-who-happen-to-be-trans do? If you're careful, you can probably find a way to encode the true explanation in a way that doesn't offend anyone. But if you want to be able to point to the truth concisely—in a way that fits in a Tweet, or to an audience that doesn't know probabilistic graphical models—then "Because trans women are men" needs to be sayable. You don't need to say it when it's not relevant or if a non-rationalist who might be hurt by it is in the room, but it can't be unsayable.)

Do I need to be much louder about the "This philosophy-of-language point can be accepted independently of any empirical claims" disclaimer and much quieter about the empirical claims, because literally no one understands disclaimers!?

(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.)

I don't want to fall into the bravery-debate trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."

Strongly agree with this. I have some misgivings about the redpilly coalition-seeking I've been doing recently. My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.

"Moshe": "People rightly distrust disclaimers and nearly no one except me & Michael can say so instead of acting like it’s common knowledge with people who don’t fully know this."

Standards! https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096
"The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous)."

_Why_ is it humorous? Because you don't like sports? (["Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours.  A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge))

It's alarming when someone who shattered all your dreams with logic ten years ago, then turns around and tells you your dreams can be real by definition

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1065666629155995648 "The only leaders in the current ecosystem who express any kind of controversial opinion, ever, are organisms that specialize in subsisting on the resource flows produced by expressing that kind of controversial opinion."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/14/cancer-research-removes-word-women-smear-campaign-amid-transgender/ "anyone who has a cervix"

A rationality mistake is made that's useful for supporting political agenda X, now no one can ever correct the rationality mistake (even in the most abstract terms with examples about dolphins) for fear of being smeared as anti-X

if THAT is now too politically contentious to affirm in public, we're DEAD

http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/

http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/ "you yourself admit that your model won't assign literally all of its probability mass to the exact outcome?!"

"Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info

casuistry

Eliezer's NRx 2013 vs. 2019 takes

In the English language as it is spoken today, third-person singular gender pronouns _do_ have truth conditions. If a stranger crossing your path is rude to you, you'll say, "What's _her_ problem?" or "What's _his_ problem?" depending on your perception of their secondary sex characteristics.

(1) If _x_ is a noun, you can't define _x_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition (for at least 37 different reasons).
(2) _Woman_ is a noun.
[From (1), (2), and _modus ponens_] Therefore, you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want without negative side-effects on your cognition.

It's _unhealthy_ to spend this many hours stuck in a loop of, "We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!"

What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness)

At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult.

(A _secondary_ reason for explaining, is that it could _possibly_ function as a useful warning to the next guy to end up in an similar situation of trusting the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to actually be interested in doing systematically correct reasoning, and incurring a lot of wasted effort and pain [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) to [try to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth) correct the situation. But I don't know how common that is.)

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/

I feel betrayed, but that doesn't

"chromosomes" isn't as dumb as it sounds—it's the "root" of the causal net of all other sex differences

Am I suffering from a "hostile media" effect?

Choose a gerrymandered or thin-subspace category isn't that dangerous in itself—it's the dark-side epistemology that kills everyone

deconfusion https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/

I want the thing Ozy is doing here to be _socially unacceptable_; I want it to be _laughed out of the room_
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/in-my-culture/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zGJw9PGhu9e8Z6BEX/fake-norms-or-truth-vs-truth

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/

(And if you should prefer to model the pain as having been manufactured by the [elephant in my brain](http://elephantinthebrain.com/) as a game-theoretic precommitment to force conscious-me to write in the face of social incentives that would otherwise make silence feel safer, you should know that only real pain is a credible threat.)

If an Outer Party member in the world of George Orwell's 1984 says, "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," even though they clearly remember events from last week, when Oceania was at war with Eurasia instead [...] even if it's not really their fault

> but not worth starting over over

I mean, this is the part where I do a very not Effective Altruist-themed thing, and stop talking as if I do anything for the good of the lightcone. (Maybe see Ben on "Against Responsibility" and "The Humility Argument for Honesty".) I internalized a particular vision [...] of what conduct is appropriate to a "rationalist"; I'm didn't that standard upheld with respect to my Something to Protect; so I am doing a halt–melt–catch-fire on "the community." It's worth starting over over _for me_. If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.

the appeal to arbitrariness technically extends in both directions (if there's no rule saying you can't use the word to talk about self-identity, there's no rule saying I can't use the word to talk about sex), but systematically favors one side—sex is a pretty robust abstraction, and there's no reason to deny the appeal of robustness

Inadequate Equilibria!

I'm expressing the same kind of frustration as the Great Teacher complaining about cryo not being standard—my personal benchmark of "sanity" isn't realistic

there's a sense in which everyone is behaving reasonably given their incentives, but 

"Concessions" don't help: even if people will grant some of my points if I threaten to walk, that's not a truth-seeking discourse process that systematically responds to arguments and evidence

Julia Serano 

words don't have intrinsic definitions, but the only reason you would want to repurpose an _existing_ word is either becasuse you think you can carve the joints better, or mindfucking

cat/dog gaslighting; even if you don't particularly need that particular classification for a practical purpose, even so ...

fame: arguing with a Discord server was low-impact compared to getting the leadership on board

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent


https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/

> Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it's considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it–or say it only in a very careful way–in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of "low-status" and "bad and wrong" have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it's true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it's in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it's true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don't know how many times it's slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement.


https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
> I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions

> Jun 18, 2008
> this is too perfectly terrifying, too terrifyingly perfect
>
> My search for not-previously-read Eliezer Yudkowsky material was getting kind of pathetic--I'd gotten to the point of reading his old messages in the archives of the extropians mailing list. And then I read this:
>
> http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html
>
> --and the worst thing is that I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused? I'm not going to read the replies right now. I have work to do, and--and I'm too floored? _I'm just not built to handle this sort of thing_. I remain,
>
> Zachary Michael Davis

Arguing with a specific person's published words is important, because otherwise you can strawman

[Am I the asshole?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/)

(I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone.)

blegg commentary:  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode#aAgSDZ4ddHpzj9fNN

if it's objective, there is truth; if it's not-objective social construction for coordination purposes (like money or Christmas), it is at least subject to _negotiation_ (so "words don't mean anything" isn't a valid excuse)

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

If we _actually_ had the sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would be motivated to invent these category-gerrymandering mind games in the first place

at some point, maybe tell my "leading intellectual figure of the alt-right" anecdote??

anyone else I thought was being dumb about philosophy, I would just shrug and write off rather than spend a _goddamned year_ prosecuting the mistake

canary

Scott being more sensible in a less-visible place: https://archive.is/In89y

like [not being an astronaut](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)

[but it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter)

three worlds collide no such thing as love

I would have hoped you'd be proud of me, as your (mass correspondence-course) student

 People who spend their entire lives on the receiving end of the calm voice of [authority-backed-by-implied-violence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/29/reflections-from-the-halfway-point/) might be justified in thinking that Slate Star mistake-theoretic ideals like "reason" and "debate" are for suckers: that's what their distribution of training data actually looks like!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7gkv/what_happened_to_me_and_why_i_think_women_need/

Archive links—
Extropians "changing sex is difficult" https://archive.is/En6qW

The _original_ meaning of the word "woman" points to a cluster in

No one is actually surprised in System 1; it's just that the parts of us that talk aren't supposed to believe in psychological sex differences (since before my time—and I still prefer not to believe) or physical sex (since 2015).

Slate Star-power: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/  1,476 people attended SSC meetups,

not-lying is most usefully constraining when a situation is suspected to be adversarial (if you're trying to hurt someone with your speech, not being allowed to outright make shit up constrains you quite a lot)

to which my attitude is: if your behavior is optimized to respond to political threats, but _not_ optimized to respond to carefully reasoned arguments from your friends, at some point your friends have to stop being your friends and start threatening you politically because you've made it clear from your behavior that _that's all you'll respond to_

I think if the so-called "rationality" community is going to not be FRAUDULENT, we should at LEAST be able to publicly clear up the philosophy-of-language mistake (I DON'T expect a community consensus on gender politics; that would be crazy! I JUST expect public consensus on "You can't define a word any way you want", which was not controversial when Eliezer taught us in 2008)

I'm grateful to [...] for actually helping me, but I feel incredibly betrayed that Scott is playing dumb about philosophy (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore), Eliezer will PRIVATELY admit that he has no objections to my philosophy arguments but is playing dumb about how the things he said in public were incredibly misleading (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore). I have more conversation-bandwidth with Anna because I've been friends with her for 10 years, but Anna doesn't believe in free speech; she'll privately sympathize that it's bad that we're in a situation where political factors are interfering with being able to have an honest public conversation about philosophy, but

> "friendship, supplication and economics"

This whole multi-year drama _should_ have been a three-comment conversation. If we were _actually trying_ to do the systematically-correct-reasoning thing

Random Commenter: Hey, that can't be right—we had a whole Sequence about 

Robot cult leaders: 

> "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."

Steve said it's funny that Ziz and I are ragequitting over opposite things, and I couldn't help but want to phrase it as "She thinks our institutions are transphobic; I don't think they're transphobic enough"

"I guess an "only delusional people get to self-actualize" equilibrium is better than "no one gets to self-actualize, because the general public wouldn't allow it if they knew the truth" if those _really were_ the only two options

> Katie quoting my comment: "Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"  01/15/2017

> [I am actively hostile](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600) to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters.  Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.

; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers

genetic heuristic and progressivism

I don't _care_ if the blatantly-misleading statements were carefully worded to permit a true interpretation such that they're not technically "lying."

This situation is _fucked_. I don't care whose "fault" it is. I don't want to "blame" anyone. But as the first step to making things less fucked, I need to _write about the world I see_—and you are, still, a pretty prominent part of my mental universe.

Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal

Heinlein

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584

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

Ooh, how I wish they'd want me to stay.

[trade arrangments: if that's the world we live in, fine]

that's what makes it so hard: the only thing that actually helped me stop being bitter about school, was exiting the entire social context that made it an issue: once I had a grown-up software job
it became irrelevant
I was able to ragequit school (which was claiming to be one thing, education, but I don't think was living up to its marketing message) because I had somewhere else to go
the obvious analogy here is to ragequit the "rationalist community" (which is claiming ot be one thing, but I don't think is living up to its marketing message)
but ... that's my entire social circle

If I can't ragequit the community, I have to do the analogue of going to grad school, while hating school—I don't have an exit this time


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try
> it's a lens through which you can view many-but-not-all personal dilemmas—"What standard am I holding myself to?  Is it high enough?"

see, you're doing this "reasoning about sex differences" thing, and you're allowed to do the reasoning-about-sex-differences thing because you're female. (Same reason Nixon could go to China, and I'm allowed to express gender-identity skepticism.) But since everyone else is required to speak as if gender identity is real and sex differences aren't (because those are the rules for being a good person in Berkeley), we get an equilibrium where discrimination against transfems is a huge Issue
I'm being incredibly cynical here and it feels awful, but I just ... can't take the things people say literally anymore; I tried, and it drove me crazy

everything anyone says is "true" if the speaker is allowed to define their own category boundaries!

if I'm allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about other people, then those people are also allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about me—not just as a matter of procedural fairness, but "symmetry" in the physics sense (the Rules are universal and don't depend on who "I" am)

"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything." —Daniel Dennett

> "The Choice between Good and Bad," said the Lord of Dark in a slow, careful voice, as though explaining something to a child, "is not a matter of saying 'Good!'  It is about deciding which is which."

inside views are just outside views against a finer-grained method of constructing reference classes

["Fear not to touch the best / The truth shall be thy warrant"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)

more of my Overcoming-Bias-era sex differences denialism: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Evc7xKXjd4LaRR26c

"Preferences about how other people model you" is very general, though! Lots of people would prefer that others model them as smart and funny and attractive, and feel genuine pain when other people don't see them that way. It might be tempting to say, "Ah! We can alleviate that pain by redefining 'smart' and 'funny' and 'attractive' to include the people who are hurt by not being included in those categories" ... and in the short term, if you only look at the emotional state of the people who are now being acclaimed as smart/funny/attractive who previously weren't, it works. But the reason it works is what, from an AI-design perspective, we would call "wireheading": manipulating the map, not the territory; it works because of equivocating between the old cutoff for smart/funny/attractive (what people were originally sad about not having) and the new, artificially lowered bar (which you'll be happy about meeting if you don't realize that it's not the same as the old cutoff).
smart transhumanism is about keeping the map as accurate as possible (don't destroy language in order to wirehead ourselves) and then using the accurate map to actually make the territory better (e.g., by developing nootropics and cosmetic surgeries to actually make people smarter/funnier/more-attractive, in real life, and not just by linguistic fiat)

> 'that in 10 to 20 years, every male with some kind of autogynephilia will "transition" if something isn't done stop reverse things. That is about 2-3% of the male population.' https://twitter.com/TransRadically/status/1212102282499829761

getting in repetitive arguments on Discord is a form of culture change maybe????

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/

karaoke "some cis women sing bass"

What I'm up against: "you can have a social context wherein nobody is incentivized to figure out who's deserving of Real Woman Status and who's not."

speaking in Sequences links: in my review of "Origins of Unfairness", the phrase "suggestively named Lisp tokens" just came out

Nice Job Breaking It Hero feels relevant to my about-face on sex differences

If the explanation that predicts your observations makes you unhappy, then the explanation—and the unhappiness—are functioning as designed.

fitness subs: https://np.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/et231b/qt_what_good_reason_is_there_to_allow_tw_to_post/

Discord arguments get _very_ repetitive; I wish there was a way to make progress and move on rather than having to keep yelling.

my Culture War struggle is actually structurally similar to AI alignment: the economy/social-justice provides vast riches in the process of eating your soul. (I can have my hair long, I can get HRT and surgeries—but at the cost of not being able to explain why.)

sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica was outside), because it was what Harry would do (but notably, not Hermione)

playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles

[Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status]


The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_.