2 Actually—maybe I _do_ want to keep this narrowly scoped to the Category War, where I have a very strong case, rather than telling my whole gender/rationalism story!
5 * I haven't been doing so well, and I need to tell the story for my own sanity
6 * I spent my entire adult life in "rationality", and I actually believed
7 * 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
8 * slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong: "Changing Emotions", "Failed Utopia #4-2"
9 * It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
10 * 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
11 * 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
12 * Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness; Outside View of bad-faith nitpickers
13 * 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
14 * And this is _still_ being perceived as too political, even though everyone else shot first?!?!
15 * And I can't object without looking like a status grab
16 * 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
17 * 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
18 * I'm politically constrained, too: I don't talk about race differences even though I believe them (link to apophasis/hypocritical humor)
19 * conscious, deliberate dishonesty/cageiness is better than the egregore piloting your moves without you knowing
20 * social incentive gradients towards truth, forged by status
21 * not sure what the path forward is, my quest for Truth continues onwards (but I'm going to try to unwind the cult-speak)
22 * concern that people will be drawn to the beacon of the sequences, and end up in a shitty Bay Area cult
23 * mandatory obfuscation (Anne Vitale syndrome)
24 * if part of the resistacne to an honest cost/benefit analysis is
25 * my vocbaulary is trained on this cult
28 * reasonable vs. unreasonable misunderstandings
31 * what did I expect, taking on an egregore so much bigger than me?
32 * if I agree that people should be allowed to transition, why am I freaking out? Because I _actually care about getting the theory correct_
33 * culture matters: if you're surrounded by crazy people
34 * it's not particular to social justice; I'd punch right in a Christian theocracy
35 * what I mean by "gaslighting"
37 person paper on purity
39 "The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."
44 So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _absolute truthseeking_.
48 [briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it]
50 [briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it; provide the necessary backstory while being reasonably brief]
52 [my Facebook tantrum kept getting derailed]
55 , to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
57 (Oh, and there was also this part about how the uniquely best thing for non-math-geniuses to do with their lives was to earn lots of money and donate it to our founder's nonprofit dedicated to building a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence to take over the world in order to save our entire future light cone from the coming robot apocalypse. That part's complicated.)
59 I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
61 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
64 rebrand—or, failing that, disband—or, failing that, be destroyed.
67 (As usual, no one cares about trans men.)
69 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
71 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
73 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
75 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 rationality community_.
77 A.T. and R.B.'s Facebook comments
79 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
81 this is _really basic shit_
87 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
89 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
91 Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons
93 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
94 http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
96 "I ought to accept ... within the conceptual boundaries" is a betrayal of everything we stand for
98 (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.)
100 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_
102 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
104 what about _my_ mental health?
106 Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
108 my friend thinks I'm naive to have expected such a community—she was recommending "What You Can't Say" in 2009—but in 2009, we did not expect that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue, which is new evidence about the wisdom of the original vision
110 but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care
112 it's naive to think you can win against an egregore 1000 times bigger than you
114 MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
118 won't you be embarrassed to leave if we create utopia
120 invent a fake epistemology lesson
122 we live in a world where reason doesn't work
124 _not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
126 I don't think I'm setting my price for joining particularly high here?
128 if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
130 There could be similarly egregious errors that I'm not as sensitive too
132 I don't think you can build an aligned superintelligence from a culture this crazy
134 it's not fair to expect ordinary people to understand the univariate fallacy before they're allowed to say "men aren't women"
136 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"
138 Hansonian mental illness that people should be less accomodating of
140 there has to be a way to apply a finite amount of effort to _correct_ errors, and possibly even profit from correcting errors
142 (I'm not making this up! I _couldn't_ make this up!)
144 the frame in which I'm
146 outside view hobby-horse
152 smart people clearly know
156 I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
158 maybe 50,000 years from now we'll all be galatic superminds and laugh about all this
160 (probably tell the story with no external links, only this-blog links)
162 I'll be alright. Just not tonight. But someday.
164 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.
166 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?
169 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.
171 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.
173 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??????
175 _everyone else shot first_, and I'm _correct on the merits_
177 competence forcing conclusions: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
179 language as an AI capability
181 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions
183 "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value. [...] There are many such shards of desire, all different values."
185 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/
190 (["_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))
193 "One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to this effect. Telling someone, "I define the word 'wiggin' to mean a person with green eyes and black hair", by Gricean implication, asserts that the word "wiggin" will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages.
195 If green-eyes and black hair have no greater than default probability to be found together, nor does any other property occur at greater than default probability along with them, then the word "wiggin" is a lie: The word claims that certain people are worth distinguishing as a group, but they're not.
197 In this case the word "wiggin" does not help describe reality more compactly—it is not defined by someone sending the shortest message—it has no role in the simplest explanation. Equivalently, the word "wiggin" will be of no help to you in doing any Bayesian inference. Even if you do not call the word a lie, it is surely an error." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
201 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
203 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._)
205 I _have_ to keep escalating, because I don't have a choice
207 I'm trying to keep the rheotrical emphasis on "tale of personal heartbreak, plus careful analysis of the sociopolitical causes of said heartbreak" rather than "attacking my friends and heros"
209 It shouldn't be a political demand; people should actually process my arguments because they're good arguments
211 "Actually, we're Ashkenazi supremacists"
213 James Watson 'aught-seven
215 Arguing is not a punishment https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/
217 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.)
219 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."
221 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).
223 http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
225 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
227 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
230 "audience capture" https://forward.com/opinion/431400/youtuber-pewdiepies-adl-boycott-shows-how-anti-semitism-goes-mainstream/
233 https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
234 https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/15/my-id-on-defensiveness/
242 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
244 "Outside the Laboratory" dumbness could be selection rather than causal
246 I don't expect anyone to take a stand for a taboo topic that they don't care about
247 I would have expected Scott and/or Eliezer to help clarify the philosophy-of-language mistake, because that's core sequences material
250 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
251 but ... I guess that's not how politics works
253 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
255 The counterargument that Dark Side Epistemology isn't that recursive
259 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
261 https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/15/my-id-on-defensiveness/
262 https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
263 https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/ Popular Author is very tired
264 https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
266 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_
268 Lying or gerrymandering an individual object-level category boundary is forgivable; constructing a clever philosophical argument that lying is OK, is not
270 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)
272 https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Lurkers_Support_Me_in_Email
274 still cited: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/d178n2/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/
276 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
278 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)
280 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%"
282 rhetorical superweapon: https://archive.is/6WGbk
284 "If I'm aching at the thought of them, what for? That's not me anymore."
286 "And I'm not the girl that I intend to be."
288 AGP blogging: "Somebody has to and noone else will."
290 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
292 contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
294 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
296 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
298 [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect)
300 [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort)
302 But _that_ would have to be someone else's story on someone else's blog.
304 [No, it's not the incentives—it's you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you)
306 [The Correct Contrarian Cluster](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster)
308 getting a reversal was improbable, but: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/st7DiQP23YQSxumCt/on-doing-the-improbable
310 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
313 [I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)
315 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_.)
317 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—
319 But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public.
321 "Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!
323 politicizing the question of what 2 + 2 should equal
325 Aumann is an Orthodox Jew
327 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ovvwAhKKoNbfcMz8K/on-expressing-your-concerns
329 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.
333 the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me already not believing in guided-by-the-beauty
335 I was pretty surprised how well the coinflip post did
337 speculating that people are lying for political cover may be "uncharitable", but what else can I do when I _can't_ take people seriously?!
339 https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
341 whether it's too late for the pebbles to vote https://status451.com/2016/08/10/too-late-for-the-pebbles-to-vote-part-2/
343 A world that makes sense. A world that's not lying to me.
345 _(But this time not for you, but just for me—)_
347 _(Well, no more; I won't beg to buy a shot at your back door)_
349 _(If I'm aching at the thought of you, what for? That's not me anymore)_
352 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.
354 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."
358 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.
360 (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.)
362 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.)
364 my history of email exchanges with the Popular Author being demanding
366 posting on LW because it's the conversational locus https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8rYxw9xZfwy86jkpG/on-the-importance-of-less-wrong-or-another-single
368 M.L. Morris "Vocational Interests in the United States" d=1.7 on occupational preferences
370 playing for scraps vs. playing for keeps https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1151902363059392512
372 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."
374 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.
376 Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems pretty obvious, really?
378 [This is something where I _actually need the right answer_]
380 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.
383 Great at free speech norms, there's a level above free speech where you _converge on the right answer
385 (I cried my tears for three good years; you can't be mad at me.)
387 a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation
391 _politically load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
394 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."
397 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."
399 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.)
401 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!?
403 (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.)
405 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)."
408 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.
410 "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."
412 Standards! https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
414 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096
415 "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)."
417 _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))
421 https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
423 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."
425 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/14/cancer-research-removes-word-women-smear-campaign-amid-transgender/ "anyone who has a cervix"
427 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
429 if THAT is now too politically contentious to affirm in public, we're DEAD
431 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?!"
433 "category boundaries" were just a visual metaphor for talking about beliefs? There's a little naive Bayes model in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that I can use observations to update my beliefs about category-membership, and use my beliefs about category-membership to predict observations. The set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than p is conveniently visualized as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space, but the beliefs are the important thing.
435 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
437 (I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
439 "Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info
443 Schelling: "One must seek, in other words, a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."'— this was basically what I was hoping to do with "Where to Draw The Boundaries?"—I was hoping to get a victory on _just_ the philosophy-of-language part
445 Eliezer's NRx 2013 vs. 2019 takes
447 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.
449 (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).
450 (2) _Woman_ is a noun.
451 [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.
453 It's _unhealthy_ to spend this many hours stuck in a loop of, "We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!"
455 What are you looking at me like that for? [It's not a cult!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness)
457 At least, it [_wasn't_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) a cult.
459 (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.)
461 https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
462 https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob