[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / memoir-sections.md

waypoints—
✓ Jessica help with "Unnatural Categories"
✓ wireheading his fiction subreddit
✓ discrediting to the community
✓ people-I-usually-respect footnote
- Yudkowsky is trying to be a religious leader
- let's recap

sections—
- existential risk interlude; social justice game theory; I could forgive him
- September 2020 Category War victory
- prelude to pronouns post

dedicated day each?—
_ the dolphin war
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
_ Sasha disaster 

With internet available—
_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
_ footnote Charles Murray's caveats
_ record of Yudkowsky citing TDT as part of decision to prosecute Emerson?
_ university library sells borrowing privileges
_ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn
_ Eddie Izzard
_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance (MIRI dialogues, knew how to say anything at all)
_ rational-ist/physics-ist analogy (and link to Yudkowsky Tweet where I think I got this from)
_ "linking to K-complicity in my replies", link the specific reply
_ Wentworth on mutual information being on the right track?
_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
_ "not taking into account considerations" → rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
_ except when it's net bad to have concluded Y: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/[Error%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server]/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
_ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
_ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning Children
_ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
_ that neuroscience paper backing the two-types
_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
_ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists" 
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity


far editing tier—
_ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to as part of December 2019 blogging streak
_ It's not clear anyone he usually respects was making this mistake; it seems likely that the original thread was subtweeting Eric Weinstein, who was not making this mistake
_ "I Wish You Well" as breakup song
_ the function of privacy norms is to protect you from people who want to selectively reveal information to hurt you, so it makes sense that I'm particularly careful about Yudkowsky's privacy and not Scott's, because I totally am trying to hurt Yudkowsky (this also protects me from the charge that by granting more privacy to Yudkowsky than Scott, I'm implying that Yudkowsky said something more incriminating; the difference in treatment is about _me_ and my expectations, rather than what they may or may not have said when I tried emailing them); I want it to be clear that I'm attacking him but not betraying him
_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
_ illustrate "student dysphoria is worse" with anecdote about leaving physics class and going to the counselor to see if I could graduate earlier?
_ as an author and a critic, I expect to lose status when my critics make good points, and expect to gain status when my criticism makes good points; communism analogy: you wouldn't expect credibly helpful work to be unpaid; and I have to make this kind of analysis even he didn't _say_ "I'm a communist"
_ hate for secrecy probably correlates with autogynephilia blogging
_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
_ at some point, speculate on causes of brain damage
_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general ("Let's say that the true level of negativity"), does that seriously undermine my thesis, or does it only merit a footnote?
_ worth footnoting the "some sort of communist" joke?
_ elaborate on why I'm not leaking sensitive bits, by explaining what can be inferred by what was and wasn't said in public
_ footnote on "no one would even consider" 
_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
_ consistent-ize reference to Somni getting it in pt. 4, with mention of protest in pt. 3
_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
_ make sure to quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy before calling back to it
_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
_ explain earlier that my practice of "throw money at things" also applied to my friendship with Anna
_ mention my robot cult history (I've been here since the late 'aughts)
_ ask Anna what she meant by "soldiers in an ambulance"; I was going to write up an explanation for Ben, but I don't seem to remember
_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
_ context of his claim to not be taking a stand
_ clarify "Merlin didn't like Vassar" example about Mike's name
_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
_ clarify why Michael thought Scott was "gaslighting" me, include "beeseech bowels of Christ"
_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
_ explain "court ruling" earlier
_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
_ better explanation of posse formation
_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
_ when to use first _vs. last names
_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
_ better summary of Littman
_ explain Rob
_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics?
_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
_ why doesn't he apply his anti-optimism to his gender statements?!


terms to explain on first mention—
_ "Caliphate"
_ "rationalist"
_ Center for Applied Rationality
_ MIRI
_ "egregore"


people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
_ Iceman
_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
_ Scott
_ Anna
_ secret posse member
_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
_ maybe Big Yud (ask #drama about the politics/ettiquitte)

marketing—
_ Twitter
_ Facebook
_ Less Wrong
_ should I buy Twitter ads to increase reach??
_ TheMotte.org

things to bring up in consultation emails—
_ dropping "and Scott" in Jessica's description of attacking narcissim
_ I think it's OK to copy my friends' language from emails; plagiarism instincts


-------

4 November progress assessment: My 113 word TODO bullets on "discrediting to the community" bloated up into 563 words of prose, a decompression ratio of 5. Taking this at face value—

My remaining TODO notes in the pt. 3 ms. are about 1400 words—does that mean they become 7000 words, with the finished pt. 3 weighing in at 46K words??

For pt. 2, does 970 words of TODO inflate into 5K words of prose, for a finished pt. 2 at 16K words? Feels more likely to be an underestimate due to these notes being sparser on average? An additional 7K words, to finish at 18K??

For pt. 4, I have 617 words of TODO notes, but those also feel pretty sparse and should expand at a higher ratio than 5. An additional 5K words, to finish at 19K??

Projected post lengths: 18K + 46K + 19K = 83K??
Projected additional words: 17K??
Projected additional drafting: 17K / 750 K/day = 23 days??
cross-referenced with my dayjob schedule implies ... finished draft ms. on 15 December?

-------

The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP

https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"

[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander 
Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
]

I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.

At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...

Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).

_for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."

It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.

In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!

There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".

But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.

If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).

(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))

_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—

_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).

I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.

[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]

But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—

_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.

In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):

> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.

This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.

[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]

If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_. 

In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).

At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?

Someone asked me: "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 _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.

If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)

If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all. 

In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).

Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.

No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")

What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).

[missing mood]

Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.

It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)

I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).


----

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

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

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


(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):



Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)

Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.

Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)

Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).

And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.

Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.

But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.

[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.

Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"

But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."

What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).

I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).

But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.

In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.

In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.

In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.

Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.

I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.

It worked once, right?

-----

> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978

The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.

Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
(!!)


> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized

> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500

"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU

I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but

> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed! 
http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108

EGS??

(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)

how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.

https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.

https://archive.is/7Wolo
> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
Namespace's point about the two EYs

The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"— link to the correct contrarian cluster


But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.


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.


I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention


https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."

The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).

A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis. 

A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).

> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html

twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences

I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.

> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."

(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)

E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175

The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.

> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667

the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore

> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before. 
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY

It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.

But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me


As far as I can tell, 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.

"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!

> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things

Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.

https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
> These neurons detect gender^10
> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.

https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns

> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648

If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"

https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-government/
> propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network.

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/




that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses

[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]

[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
> Appeal to arbitrariness - again, the notion that [word definitions are arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/) serves as a good example (in fact I was harvesting some of these appeals from that sequence).  It's not just that this is wrong, but that it serves to cut off further discourse.  Generally, anything that people are motivated to argue about is not _arbitrary_.  It is being controlled by invisible criteria of evaluation, it has connotations with consequences, and if _that_ isn't true either, the topic of discourse is probably not "arbitrary" but just "meaningless". No map that corresponds to an external territory can be arbitrary.

> _Appeal to inner privacy_ - "you can't possibly know how I feel!"  It's true that modern technology still encounters some slight difficulties in reading thoughts out of the brain, though work is underway as we speak.  But it is rare that the exact details of how you feel are the key subject matter being disputed.  Here the bony borders of the skull are being redeployed as a hard barrier to keep out further arguments.


If Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man ..." had never been published, would we still be talking about dolphins and trees in the same way?

Scott has so many fans—
https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles

Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
Yudkowsky retweeted Nate on dolphins—
https://archive.is/Ecsca

my rationalist community has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my community's name

cite to "Not Especially Related to Transgender"
https://twitter.com/fortenforge/status/1402057829142302721

"Hero Licensing": to provide an earnest-token of all the techniques I couldn't show

uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.

If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?

When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."

humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"

The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!

> just the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men, and that this is obvious if you are rational, and a hidden truth most people are too cowardly to speak, until you retreat in misery and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us....

People change their opinion with the party line—similarly with Scott and Yud
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12550?campaign=woletoc

https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy

prevaricate

back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as if you had to be of a particular generation to understand the ideas—that could apply in both directions (the next generation's culture does not look promising to me; midwits say that elders have always said that, but maybe the elders were always right, by the standard preference-stability argument)

> [Anna] seemed to disapprove of our putting pressure on Scott, because the fact that Scott has done a lot of great work is exactly what made him a target for our pressure.

> I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and Mean—I don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."

> He says he likes "monastic rationalism vs. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben is proposing.

> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.


Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender





Yudkowsky complains—not entirely without justification—that I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)

But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.

You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words: "Men aren't women tho."


> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270

> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible.  And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead.  That's woke filter bubble thinking.  I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787


But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad

Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction

I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:

> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy

> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...

> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped

example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower



Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.

I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.

https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.

"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?

3 January 2020 text from Michael to me:
> because I want to make it very clear to you, and to encourage you to make it very clear to others [...] that you are experiencing extremely articulate and extremely by the book trauma, caused in a very canonical manner by institutional betrayal and causing silencing of a sort very similar to that which causes investigation of sex crimes to be problematic (as in the high quality current Netflix show "Unbelievable", which you all might benefit from watching)

Forget it, Jake—it's the rationalist community

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
> The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious.
That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorization—actually, I'm going to bite the bullet here; "Eurasian" is actually fine as a paraphyletic category (and @CovfefeAnon uses it productively)

And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"),

when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part

me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy

If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts

-----

Why does this matter?

[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]

a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars

It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016


https://www.readthesequences.com/
> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.

> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018

https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1769064#reply-1769064
> "Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly.  None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."
It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly

congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258



I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/


Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG8i7ZiqLxthACaBi/do-fandoms-need-awfulness

> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is—aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences—committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.

> The people who aren't doing that mostly aren't participating in the LessWrong identity, but while factions like that are hostile to the confused people who behave as though they're part of a community trying to become less wrong, such factions are also parasitic on such people, claiming credit for their intellectual contributions. When such participation is fully extinguished, the group begins to decay, having nothing distinctive to offer, unless it has become too big to fail, in which case it's just another component of one political faction or another.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r

contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard (supposedly for the benefit of people with your sexuality), you don't take it lying down

Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!

Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread

maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes

one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_

When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble

OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent

http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html

A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
[...]
> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
[...]
> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war

Rubices—
> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
gonna mostly bite the bullet on this one


https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
> You all remember the thing I predicted correctly 12 years ago, therefore you should heed my word on this completely unrelated topic

The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels telling—you could say it's circumstantial nitpicking, but I think it's revealing, like the "reducing negativity"
https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz


https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon. 

> One nice thing about intellectuals is that when they turn, they frequently leave behind a detailed, mostly coherent record of what a person turning into a rhinoceros thinks is going on.
https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1477733825702936581

Rationality was supposed to be important!!

Paul says so—
>  My current sense is that cooperation has a better tradeoff than some forms of enhancement (e.g. giving humans bigger brains) and worse than others (e.g. improving the accuracy of people's and institution's beliefs about the world).

Rob says so, too—
> Help ourselves think more clearly. (I imagine this including a lot of trying-to-become-more-rational, developing and following relatively open/honest communication norms, and trying to build better mental models of crucial parts of the world.)

> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228

dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140

> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them.  It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374

I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)

The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise

jbeshir
> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing


[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
[internet pharmacy]


> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
response—
> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do

In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]

https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma

postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky

if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"

Gell-Mann amnesia

EY's commenting guidelines

> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409

flu virus that cures Borderer culture
https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057


https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement

> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps

> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not

Standard excuses—
"i just don't think that gender is less of a politeness mind-control regime when it doesn't allow people to switch categories"
biosex actually exists
also no one cares about that fact of  the matter, unless they want to have sex with someone or are doing a weird ideological thing
I think you're the ones doing a weird ideological thing

brain: wow, eiko has a deep understanding of straight men for a lesbian! she must be so empathetic
me: ...

... why validated and not offended??
Eiko — Today at 8:37 PM
?_?
what... would i be... offended by...
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 8:38 PM
The "brain: / me:" thing seems like it should be offensive for the same reason that the phrase-I-said-I-wasn't-going-to-say is offensive
the language is subtler, but it's gesturing at the same thing

(explanation: I read this as ozy saying they parsed Eiko as a girl so much that they didn't remember she used to be a straight guy)

... I, just, really have trouble emphasizing with this culture where people are allowed to make jokes about the similarities between trans lesbians and straight guys, and as long as you talk in terms of "I thought I was a straight guy", it's all cool, but as soon as someone bites the bullet and says, "Yes, because trans lesbians are straight males, etiologically; you thought correctly", then they're ... marking themselves as not part of the coalition? From my perspective, it just looks like your culture is pro-lying

like if i look at a person and my brain's intuitive instinctive bucketing function goes "girl" and they tell me "i'm a boy actually" does whether that's mind control depend on what genitals the person has??
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 10:02 PM
Yes?
Omega ω — Today at 10:02 PM
?????

... people just don't see the ideological bubble they live in! People tell me, "frankly you seem to be deeply unhappy about [being gendered male]", because they're relying on their prior of what trans women need. And having been born in 1987, I just don't share that prior! If you actually listen to the thing I'm been yelling for the last six years, I'm much more unhappy about the culture of mind-control than I am about being male, but people put more weight on their prior than my verbal self-report! I guess I can't blame them on the meta level (I also put more weight on priors that people's self-reports a lot of the time), but it's just—so shocking, that people don't see the thing

I don't actually want to return to the past permanently; I want to first rewind to 2007 or so, and then re-do the trans rights thing but with less 🐛  lying this time, "lying" being my heat-of-the-moment angry word for the thing where the born-in-the-wrong-body story that gets sold to the public is very different from the picture you get when you read what people write about their feelings when the general public isn't looking, and people know it's different, and they go on talking in terms of the standard story anyway, and when you challenge them on none of this stuff being true, they say, "Oh, well, those are just lies to cis people; that doesn't count" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/) as if lies to cis people weren't still lies

And, just—I think if an alien or an AI or really any normal person outside of this very specific Berkeley 2016– ideological subculture were to try to objectively describe what's actually happening there in the real physical universe, I don't think they would want to talk about a woman born in the wrong body, coping with her tragic dysphoria; I think the alien or AI would talk about a male primate with some kind of brain malfunction in its sexual targeting system causing it to get confused about a self-other distinction, and I think the normal person would talk about a man with a gross, weird fetish who they don't want sharing a locker room with their daughter.

And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the right ontology here? The Berkeley 2016– denizen can come up with a lot of replies ("But cis women also enjoy being women", "But I don't care about someone's private thoughts; I only care about whether they'll come vintage dress shopping with me"), but they all just seem fundamentally unserious to me?

----

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c5DgfRyWgS2Sjgzmt/on-funding-trust-relationships-and-scaling-our-community
> there will be someone in the world whose full-time job and top-priority it is to figure out how to write a proposal, or give you a pitch at a party, or write a blogpost, or strike up a conversation, that will cause you to give them money, or power, or status. For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question "how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of" or "how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?", and they will write long Google Docs to their colleagues about their models and theories of you, and spend dozens of hours thinking specifically about how to get you to do what they want, while drawing up flowcharts that will include your name, your preferences, and your interests.
not totally unlike what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/

The LW community is a bubble/machine that made me who I am (it doesn't infringe on my independence more than school, but it's still shaping force in the way that going to University or Google shapes people)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving them—well, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?

the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity.  I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.

------


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
> I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time.



If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:

> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT.  I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
>
> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it.  I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older.  That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.

Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I claim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.

To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, [the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once wrote to Judea Pearl](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKa9Lebyebf6a7P2o/the-rhythm-of-disagreement) to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.

[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]

If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he should remember the only reason he has _any_ people who defer to him _at all_ is _because_ he used to be such a good explainer who actually argued for things.

[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]

[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz  claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq

> The condescension is _important information_ to help a reader figure out what is producing the outputs, and hiding it would make the task of 'extract the key insights' harder. 

]

------

Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter

https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/686455476984119296/eliezer-yudkowsky-seems-really-depressed-these

> So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do.  In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes.  The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy.  It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1614129#reply-1614129

I was pleading to him in his capacity as rationality leader, not AGI alignment leader; I know I have no business talking about the latter

(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)

[TODO: misrepresentation of the Light: Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.]

"You're allowed to talk to me," he said at the Independence Day party

MIRI made a point of prosecuting Tyler Altman rather than participating (even if it was embarrassing to be embezzled from) because of game theory, but it sees folding to social-justice bullies as inevitable

re Yudkowsky not understanding the "That's So Gender" sense, I suspect this is better modeled as a nearest-unblocked-strategy alignment problem, rather than a capabilities problem ("doesn't comprehend"). Author has a Vision of a Reality; that Reality conflicts with the ideology of the readership, who complain; Author issues a patch that addresses the surface of the complaint without acknowledging the conflict of Visions, because describing the conflict in too much detail would be construed as aggression

------

[TODO:
Email to Scott at 0330 a.m.
> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: "The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories." That thing is a fucking Absolute Denial Macro!
]

------

So, because

[TODO: the rats not getting AGP was excusable, the rats not getting the category boundary thing was extremely disappointing but not a causis belli; Eliezer Yudkowsky not getting the category boundary thing was an emergency]

-----

a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars

It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html

------

comments to "Wilhelm", January 2019—

I got concessions on all the important parts (categories should make predictions, trans women differ from cis women in a masc direction),  and these people just don't fucking CARE ... like, if I'm trying to be agreeable, I could agree that trans women resemble women if you restrict your vision to the subspace spanned by the "preferred pronouns" and "self-identified gender identity" dimensions ... but, but, WTF, be serious, guys

Scott or Eliezer know better and could put an end to this bullshit (or at least put a dent in it), and I begged and I pleaded, and they just don't CARE

even Ozy knows better

I said: I probably do put too much rhetorical emphasis on passing; like, I agree that that's not the only criterion that one can use. I like drawing attention to that particular distinction because it at least has the benefit of not requiring people to override their perceptual system they way that self-identity does?

and Ozy (correctly!) chimed in: "in fact it is the only criterion that doesn't involve people overriding their perceptual system!"

as if she's objectively pro-gaslighting

more charitably: people care a lot about this very thin layer of socual constructions (if you mindfuck ppl into believing that AGPs are women, that really does make it easier to transition) and are being instrumentally rational about that, whereas I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist and want to study the deep structure if which social constructions are feasible, how we can be more reflective about them, &c.

Ppl with less power than Scott or Eliezer can afford to be more honest with me that they see but don't care enough to pay the cost of fighting

the rationalist lore here is that status makes you stupid; maybe the NRx twist is that status plus rivals/insecurity makes you stupid

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."

"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208

Keltham and Carissa's attitude towards Pharima mirrors my attitude towards Yudkowsky (I'm grateful for him having created me, but he can't be allowed to get away with this shit)
https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1834769#reply-1834769

sometimes I get a cite, too—
https://putanumonit.com/2022/05/02/genders-discrimination/
https://axrp.net/episode/2022/05/23/episode-15-natural-abstractions-john-wentworth.html

People learn a lot from Godel Escher Bach, too, but they don't form an identity around Douglas Hofstadter being the most important person in the world

and Keltham tells Carissa (null action pg 39) to keep the Light alive as long as possible, not do throw away your deontology too quickly.

> It, it—the fe—it, flame—flames. Flames—on the side of my face. Breathing—breathl—heaving breaths, heaving—

But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732

https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4361.html
> Half the time I regard myself as "an AI wannabee trapped in a male human body"

Nate's "missing the hard part" post is all strawmen—I'm not looking down on it because it's a blog post and not an "official" arXiv paper; I'm looking down because it's visibly low-effort

"What do you say to the Republican?" !!!

subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"

4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
> Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)

Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai

The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor

(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequences—that's what words like _good_ do—but that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)

—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.

... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that


Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal.


But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.

At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's 


Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water

[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
]

[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler]  https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's —cite South Park)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!

]

Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. 

really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.

Because of my hero worship,


> People probably change their mind more often than they explicitly concede arguments, which is fine because intellectual progress is more important than people who were wrong performing submission.
> If your interlocutor is making progress arguing against your claim X, just say, "Oh, X is a strawman, no one actually believes X; therefore I'm not wrong and you haven't won" (and then don't argue for X in the future now that you know you can't get away with it).
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429

My 28 November 2018 text to Michael—
> I just sent an email to Eliezer ccing you and Anna; if you think it might help inject sanity in into the world, maybe your endorsement would help insofar as Eliezer Aumman-updates [_sic_] with you?
> hope all is well
> just a thread reply to Eliezer that says "I trust Zack's rationality and think you should pay attention to what he has to say" (if and only if you actually believe that to be true, obviously)?



helping Norton live in the real world

Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus.

"; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious 
]

[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]

What do think submitting to social pressure looks like, if it's not exactly this thing (carefully choosing your public statements to make sure no one confuses you with the Designated Ideological Bad Guy)?!? The credible threat of being labeled an Ideological Bad Guy is _the mechanism_ the "Good" Guys use to retard potentially-ideologically-inconvenient areas of inquiry.

Kerry Vaughan on deferral
https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1552308109535858689

It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average (in which case, you might just shrug and accept unequal outcomes, the way we shrug and accept it that some athletes have better genes). Different traits have different relevance to different sports: women do better in ultraswimming _because_ that competition is sampling a 

where body fat is an advantage. 

It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight".

For example, the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to _protect females from males_, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.

all I actually want out of a post-Singularity utopia is the year 2007 except that I personally have shapeshifting powers

The McGongall turning into a cat parody may actually be worth fitting in—McCongall turning into a cat broke Harry's entire worldview. Similarly, the "pretend to turn into a cat, and everyone just buys it" maneuver broke my religion

 * https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position  

Michael on EA suppressing credible criticism https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1559534045914177538

zinger from 93—
> who present "this empirical claim is inconsistent with the basic tenets of my philosophy" as an argument against the _claim_

reply to my flipping out at Jeff Ladish
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493440041684993

We don't believe in privacy 
> Privacy-related social norms are optimized for obscuring behavior that could be punished if widely known [...] an example of a paradoxical norm that is opposed to enforcement of norms-in-general").
https://unstableontology.com/2021/04/12/on-commitments-to-anti-normativity/

Sucking up the the Blue Egregore would make sense if you _knew_ that was the critical resource
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai

I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizing—actually I think it's OK

This should be common sense, though
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3szWd8HwWccJb9z5L/the-ea-community-might-be-neglecting-the-value-of


sorrow at putting on a bad performance with respect to the discourse norms of the people I'm trying to rescue/convert; I think my hostile shorthand (saying that censorship costs nothing implies some combination "speech isn't useful" and "other people aren't real" is pointing at real patterns, but people who aren't already on my side are not going to be sympathetic)


https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
> You could argue that a wise policy is that we should all be called by terms and pronouns we don't like, now and then, and that to do otherwise is coddling.  You could argue that Twitter shouldn't try to enforce courtesy.  You could accuse, that's not what Twitter is really doing.

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880
> But Twitter is at least not *ontologically confused* if they say that using preferred pronouns is courtesy, and claim that they're enforcing a courtesy standard. Replying "That's a lie! I will never lie!" is confused. It'd be sad if the #IDW died on that hill of all hills.

> Acts aren't sentences, pronouns aren't lies, bathrooms aren't fundamental physical constants, and if you know what a motte-and-bailey is you're supposed to know that.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067287459589906432

> I don't care whose point it is on this planet, the point I'm making would stand in any galaxy:  You are not standing in noble defense of Truth when you ask who gets to use which bathroom.  This is true across all possible worlds, including those with no sociologists in them.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067187363544059905

------

https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896




·
Sep 9, 2021
Crux: "If you say that Stalin is a dictator, you'll be shot, therefore Stalin is not a dictator" has the same structure as "If you say that trans women are male, they'll take massive psych damage, therefore trans women are not male"; both arguments should get the same response.
Zack M. Davis
@zackmdavis
·
Sep 9, 2021
Thoughts on your proposed cruxes: 1 (harmful inferences) is an unworkable AI design: you need correct beliefs first, in order to correctly tell which beliefs are harmful. 4 (non-public concepts) is unworkable for humans: how do you think about things you're not allowed words for?


[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.

"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: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)

I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
]

> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745

> a gradual shift away from STEM nerd norms to fandom geek norms [...] the pathological insistence that you're not allowed to notice bad faith
https://extropian.net/notice/A7rwtky5x3vPAedXZw

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
"When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."

https://glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=83
> A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit. 

further post timeline—
"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019

"Darkest Timeline" June 2020
"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" Aug 2020
"Unnatural Categories" Jan 2021
"Differential Signal Costs" Mar 2021


"Public Heretic" on "Where to Draw the Boundary?"—
> But reality, in its full buzzing and blooming confusion, contains an infinite numbers of 'joints' along which it could be carved. It is not at all clear how we could say that focusing one some of those joints is "true" while focusing on other joints is "false," since all such choices are based on similarly arbitrary conventions.

> Now, it is certainly true that certain modes of categorization (i.e. the selection of certain joints) have allowed us to make empirical generalizations that would not otherwise have been possible, whereas other modes of categorization have not yielded any substantial predictive power. But why does that mean that one categorization is "wrong" or "untrue"? Better would seem to be to say that the categorization is "unproductive" in a particular empirical domain.

> Let me make my claim more clear (and thus probably easier to attack): categories do not have truth values. They can be neither true nor false. I would challenge Eliezer to give an example of a categorization which is false in and of itself (rather than simply a categorization which someone then used improperly to make a silly empirical inference).

Yudkowsky's reply—
> PH, my reply is contained in Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace.


https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2
> I would have been surprised if she was. Joscelin Verreuil also strikes me as being a projection of some facets of a man that a woman most notices, and not a man as we exist from the inside.
>
> I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
> Could you please [taboo](Could you please taboo these?) these?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
> Okay. I’ve never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime’s work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. 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.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b


> Duly appreciated.




https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY#comments 110 karma
support from Oli—
> I think there is a question of whether current LessWrong is the right place for this discussion (there are topics that will attract unwanted attention, and when faced with substantial adversarial forces, I think it is OK for LessWrong to decide to avoid those topics as long as they don't seem of crucial importance for the future of humanity, or have those discussions in more obscure ways, or to limit visibility to just some subset of logged-in users, etc). But leaving that discussion aside, basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to. 
>
> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues". 
>
> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me. 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=cPunK8nFKuQRorcNG#comments
iceman—
> I kinda disagree that this is a mere issue of Straussian reading: I suspect that in this (and other cases), you are seeing the raw output of Elizer's rationalizations and not some sort of instrumental coalition politics dark arts. If I was going for some sort of Straussian play, I wouldn't bring it up unprompted or make long public declarations like this.
>
> Zack is hypersensitive to this one issue because it interacts with his Something to Protect. But what I wonder about is where else Eliezer is trying to get away with things like this.


https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1853001#reply-1853001
> Another reason people go to Hell?  Malediction!  An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too!  Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit!  At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted.  A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her _really giving a shit_.


I furthermore claim that the following disjunction is true:

> Either the quoted excerpt is a blatant lie on Scott's part because there are rules of rationality governing conceptual boundaries and Scott absolutely knows it, or
> You have no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way.

there needs to be _some_ way for _someone_ to invest a _finite_ amount of effort to _correct the mistake_

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404698587175350275
> That Zack now imagines this to be a great trend [...] does seem like an avoidable error and a failure to take perspective on how much most people's lives are not about ourselves

I have a _seflish_ interest in people making and sharing accurate probabilistic inferences about how sex and gender and transgenderedness work in reality, for many reasons, but in part because _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.

[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like 

[Dawkins can see it.](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) [Jerry Coyne can see it.](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/)]

when I was near death from that salivary stone, I mumbled something to my father about "our people"




https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228
> I don't think it *should* preclude my posting on topics like these, which is something I get the impression Zack disagrees with me about. I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do *know* they're living in a half-Stalinist environment, even though it hugely bugs Zack that the exact degree of Stalinism and filtration can't be explicitly laid out the way they would be in the meta-Bayesian Should Universe... or something. I think people are better off at the end of that.

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

]

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1568338672499687425
> I'm not interested in lying to the man in the street.  It won't actually save the world, and is not part of a reasonable and probable plan for saving the world; so I'm not willing to cast aside my deontology for it; nor would the elites be immune from the epistemic ruin.

The problem with uncritically validating an autodidactic's ego, is that a _successful_ autodidact needs to have an accurate model of how their studying process is working, and that's a lot harder when people are "benevolently" trying to _wirehead_ you.

The man is so egregiously sexist in any other context, _except_ when I need the right answer to make extremely important medical decisions

I don't need to be a mind-reader about how it feels because I can read, I can point to the text from 2010 and 2016+, and notice the differences

Maybe he was following the same sucking-off-Stalin algorithm internally the whole time (just like Anna was), and I only noticed it in 2016+ because the environment changed, not the algorithm? I doubt it, though (rather, the environment changed the algorithm)

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/

origins of the strawberry example
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155625884574228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
(Note: we can do this with images of strawberries! The hard problem is presumably inventing nanotech from scratch.)

lack of trust as a reason nothing works: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ shouldn't the rats trust each other?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way
> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
I'm totally still doing this

> it's that it's hard to get that innocence back, once you even start thinking about whether you're _independent_ of someone

If Scott's willing to link to A. Marinos, maybe he'd link to my memoir, too? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242
My reaction to Marinos is probably similar to a lot of people's reaction to me: geez, putting in so much effort to correct Scott's mistake is lame, what a loser, who cares

This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
> journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3

--------

23 June 2020: people are STILL citing "Categories Were Made", TWICE when people on the subreddit asked "What is Slate Star Codex"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvqv9av/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvr47v1/
> But the blog wasn't always on that 'side', either. Scott wrote one of the best analyses/defenses of trans identity and nonbiological definition of gender that I've ever read, and which ultimately convinced me.
Yet again someone citing "Categories Were Made" as influential: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/he96rm/star_slate_codex_deleted_because_of_nyt_article/fvr7h7w/

people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/status/1327730282703835137

Even the enemies respect that post!
https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208

And using it for defense.

Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/

Another "Made for Man" cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwwxycr/

More damage control: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hpohy5/what_are_some_of_scotts_posts_that_challenge_the/fxsu8p0/
(Comment was deleted. Was I over the line in commenting at all, or just because of the "transparently political reasons" side-swipe? The fact that it got ~18 points suggests the readership was OK with it, even if the moderators weren't)

People are still citing it! https://twitter.com/churrundo/status/1283578666425806851

Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825

Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/

Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."

Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739

31 December
"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/

Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609

Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/

Still citing it (20 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qagtqk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_18/hhdiyd1/

Still citing it (21 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qcrhc4/can_someone_provide_an_overview_ofintroduction_to/hhkf6kk/

Still citing it (15 July 21) in a way that suggests it's ratsphere canon: https://twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1415754203293757445

Still citing it (14 November 21): https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1459846336845697028

Still citing it (December 21 podcast): https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2021/12/152-frame-control-with-aella/

Still citing it (2 February 22): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4838964

Still citing it (22 March 22): https://twitter.com/postpostpostr/status/1506480317351272450

Still citing it (25 March 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tj525b/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_21_2022/i22z367/

Still citing it (13 May 22): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkFTXKeFxwcGiBTwk/against-longtermist-as-an-identity

Still citing it, in Eliezerfic Discord (18 Jul 22): https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/954750671280807968/998638253588631613

Still citing it (31 Jul 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wbqtg3/rationality_irl/

Still citing it (19 Sep 22): https://twitter.com/ingalala/status/1568391691064729603

https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."

------

If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.

If you _don't_ have intent-to-inform, but make sure to never, ever say false things (because you know that "lying" is wrong, and think that as long as you haven't "lied", you're in the clear), but you don't feel like you have an obligation to acknowledge criticisms (for example, because you think you and your flunkies are the only real people in the world, and anyone who doesn't want to become one of your flunkies can be disdained as a "post-rat"), that's potentially a much worse situation, because the errors don't cancel.

----

bitter comments about rationalists—
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare?commentId=Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7

------

https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
> changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money

when I talked to the Kaiser psychiatrist in January 2021, he said that the drugs that they gave me in 2017 were Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg, which actually seems a lot more reasonable in retrospect (Trazadone is on Scott's insomnia list), but it was a lot scarier in the context of not trusting the authorities

I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.

http://archive.is/SXmol
>  "don't lie to someone if you wouldn't slash their tires" is actually a paraphrase of Steven Kaas.
> ... ugh, I forgot that that was from the same Black Belt Bayesian post where one of the examples of bad behavior is from me that time when I aggro'd against Phil Goetz to the point were Michael threatened to get me banned. I was young and grew up in the feminist blogosphere, but as I remarked to Zvi recently, in 2008, we had a way to correct that. (Getting slapped down by Michael's ostracism threat was really painful for me at the time, but in retrospect, it needed to be done.) In the current year, we don't.


_Less Wrong_ had recently been rebooted with a new codebase and a new dev/admin team. New-_Less Wrong_ had a system for post to be "Curated". Begging Yudkowsky and Anna to legitimize "... Boundaries?" with a comment hadn't worked, but maybe the mods would  (They did end up curating [a post about mole rats](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness).)



Yudkowsky did [quote-Tweet Colin Wright on the univariate fallacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124757043997372416)

(which I got to [cite in a _Less Wrong_ post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)


"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
(which I got to cite in  which I cited in "Schelling Categories")



"Yes Requires the Possibility of No" 19 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019

scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May 

"epistemic defense" meeting

[TODO section on factional conflict:
Michael on Anna as cult leader
Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
me being regarded as Michael's pawn
assortment of agendas
mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
]

8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining

REACH panel

(Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip")


Scott said he liked "monastic rationalism _vs_. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben was proposing.

(I wish I could use this line)
I really really want to maintain my friendship with Anna despite the fact that we're de facto political enemies now. (And similarly with, e.g., Kelsey, who is like a sister-in-law to me (because she's Merlin Blume's third parent, and I'm Merlin's crazy racist uncle).)


https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1164332124712738821
> I unfortunately have had a policy for over a decade of not putting numbers on a few things, one of which is AGI timelines and one of which is *non-relative* doom probabilities.  Among the reasons is that my estimates of those have been extremely unstable.


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
> You might even be justified in [refusing to use probabilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/sg/when_not_to_use_probabilities/) at this point.  In all honesty, I really _don't_ know how to estimate the probability of solving an impossible problem that I have gone forth with intent to solve; in a case where I've previously solved some impossible problems, but the particular impossible problem is more difficult than anything I've yet solved, but I plan to work on it longer, etcetera.
>
> People ask me how likely it is that humankind will survive, or how likely it is that anyone can build a Friendly AI, or how likely it is that I can build one.  I really _don't_ know how to answer.  I'm not being evasive; I don't know how to put a probability estimate on my, or someone else, successfully shutting up and doing the impossible.  Is it probability zero because it's impossible?  Obviously not.  But how likely is it that this problem, like previous ones, will give up its unyielding blankness when I understand it better?  It's not truly impossible, I can see that much.  But humanly impossible?  Impossible to me in particular?  I don't know how to guess.  I can't even translate my intuitive feeling into a number, because the only intuitive feeling I have is that the "chance" depends heavily on my choices and unknown unknowns: a wildly unstable probability estimate.




I don't, actually, know how to prevent the world from ending. Probably we were never going to survive. (The cis-human era of Earth-originating intelligent life wasn't going to last forever, and it's hard to exert detailed control over what comes next.) But if we're going to die either way, I think it would be _more dignified_ if Eliezer Yudkowsky were to behave as if he wanted his faithful students to be informed. Since it doesn't look like we're going to get that, I think it's _more dignified_ if his faithful students _know_ that he's not behaving like he wants us to be informed. And so one of my goals in telling you this long story about how I spent (wasted?) the last six years of my life, is to communicate the moral that 

and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.

Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But he didn't create me to not say mean things. If it helps—as far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007–9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).

ReACT seems similar to Visible Thoughts Project: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway?commentId=HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt#HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt
> I've noticed that none of my heroes, not even Douglas Hofstadter or Eric Drexler, seem to live up to my standard of perfection. Always sooner or later they fall short. It's annoying, you know, because it means _I_ have to do it.

But he got it right in 2009; he only started to fall short _later_ for political reasons

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256
> Your annual reminder that academically conventional decision theory, as taught everywhere on Earth except inside the MIRI-adjacent bubble, says to give in to threats in oneshot games.  Only a very rare student is bright enough to deserve blame in place of the teacher.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
> Atheism:  Yes.
> Many-worlds:  Yes.
> "P-zombies":  No.
>
> These aren't necessarily simple or easy for contrarians to work through, but the correctness seems as reliable as it gets.
>
> Of course there are also slam-dunks like:
>
> Natural selection:  Yes.
> World Trade Center rigged with explosives:  No.

I wonder how the history of the site would have been different if this had included "Racial differences in cognitive abilities: Yes." (It's worse if he didn't think about it in the first place, rather than noticing and deciding not to say it—it doesn't even seem to show up in the comments!!)


https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0tTk5VoLSxZ1hJKPRMdzpPzNaBR4eU5ufKEhvvowMFTjKTHykogFfwAZge9Kk5jFLl
> Yeah, see, *my* equivalent of making ominous noises about the Second Amendment is to hint vaguely that there are all these geneticists around, and gene sequencing is pretty cheap now, and there's this thing called CRISPR, and they can probably figure out how to make a flu virus that cures Borderer culture by excising whatever genes are correlated with that and adding genes correlated with greater intelligence.  Not that I'm saying anyone should try something like that if a certain person became US President.  Just saying, you know, somebody might think of it.


commenting policy—
> I will enforce the same standards here as I would on my personal Facebook garden. If it looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with you, I will ban you from commenting on my posts.
>
> Specific guidelines:
>
> Argue against ideas rather than people.
> Don't accuse others of committing the Being Wrong Fallacy ("Wow, I can't believe you're so wrong! And you believe you're right! That's even more wrong!").
> I consider tone-policing to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and will delete it.
> If I think your own tone is counterproductive, I will try to remember to politely delete your comment instead of rudely saying so in a public reply.
> If you have helpful personal advice to someone that could perhaps be taken as lowering their status, say it to them in private rather than in a public comment.
> The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section.
> The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead.

I tried arguing against ideas _first!_

I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism


couldn't resist commenting even after I blocked Yudkowsky on Twitter (30 August 2021)
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02AGzw7EzeB6bDAwvXT8hm4jnC4Lh1te7tC3Q3h2u6QqBfJjp4HKvpCM3LqvcLuXSbl?comment_id=10159857276789228&reply_comment_id=10159858211759228
Yudkowsky replies (10 September 2021)—
> Zack, if you can see this, I think Twitter is worse for you than Facebook because of the short-reply constraint. I have a lot more ability to include nuance on Facebook and would not expect most of my statements here to set you off the same way, or for it to be impossible for me to reply effectively if something did come up.
("impossible to me to reply effectively" implies that I have commenting permissions)


"Noble Secrets" Discord thread—
> So, I agree that if you perform the experimental test of asking people, "Do you think truthseeking is virtuous?", then a strong supermajority will say "Yes", and that if you ask them, "And are you looking for memes about how to do actually do it?" they'll also say "Yes."
>
> But I also notice that in chat the other day, we saw this (in my opinion very revealing) paragraph—
>
> I think of "not in other people" [in "Let the truth destroy what it can—but in you, not in other people"] not as "infantilizing", but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological.
>
> My expectation of a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 in which people were _actually_ looking for memes about how to seek truth, is that the modal, obvious response to a paragraph like this would be something like—
>
>> Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)" (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased>). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Your Rationality Is My Business" (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business>).
>
> —or _something like that_. Obviously, it's not important that the reply use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone responds to this _very obvious_ anti-epistemology (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology>) with ... memes about how to actually do truthseeking.
>
> And what we _actually_ saw in response to this "You don't get to do harm to other people" message is ... it got 5 :plus_one: reactions.

Yudkowsky replies—
> the Doublethink page is specifically about how you yourself choosing not to know is Unwise
> to the extent you can even do that rather than convincing yourself that you have
> it specifically doesn't say "tell other people every truth you know"
> the point is exactly that you couldn't reasonably end up in an epistemic position of knowing yourself that you ought to lie to yourself


--------

My last messages in late-November fight with Alicorner Discord was 4:44 a.m./4:47 am. (!) on 28 November; I mention needing more sleep. But—that would have been 6:44 a.m. Austin time? Did I actually not sleep that night? Flipping out and writing Yudkowsky was evening of the same calendar day.

Sam had said professed gender was more predictive.

Bobbi has claimed that "most people who speak the involved dialect of English agree that ‘woman’ refers to ‘an individual who perceives themselves as a woman’"

Kelsey 27 November
> I think you could read me as making the claim "it's desirable, for any social gender, for there to be non-medical-transition ways of signaling it"

27 November
> I don't think linta was saying "you should believe ozy doesn't have a uterus"
that would be really weird

> well, for one thing, "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" isn't directed at you, it's directed at the trans person
My reply—
> that's almost worse; you're telling them that it's okay to gaslight _everyone else in their social circle_

1702 27 November
> Stepping back: the specific statement that prompted me to start this horrible discussion even though I usually try to keep my personal hobbyhorse out of this server because I don't want it to destroy my friendships, was @lintamande's suggestion that "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab". I think I have a thought experiment that might clarify why I react so strongly to this sort of thing
> Suppose Brent Dill showed you this photograph and said, "This is a photograph of a dog. Your eyes may tell you that it's a cat, but you have to say it's a dog, or I'll be very unhappy and it'll be all your fault."
> In that case, I think you would say, "This is a gaslighting attempt. You are attempting to use my sympathy for you to undermine my perception of reality."

> Flight about to take off so can't explain, but destroying the ability to reason in public about biological sex as a predictive category seems very bad for general sanity, even if freedom and transhumanism is otherwise good

https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/516744646034980904
26 November 14:38 p.m.
>  I'm not sure what "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" is supposed to mean if it doesn't cash out to "it's okay to enforce social norms preventing other people from admitting out loud that they have correctly noticed your biological sex"

In contrast to Yudkowsky's claim that you need to have invented something from scratch to make any real progress, this is a case where the people who _did_ invent something can't apply it anymore!!

-----

Examples of non-robot-cult authors using rationality skills that they visibly didn't get from being a robot-cult loyalist—

James C. Scott, _Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts_, Ch. 4, "False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?", 1990

> The thick theory [of false consciousness] claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation. In its most subtle form, the thin theory is eminently plausible and, some would claim, true by definition. I believe, nevertheless, that it is fundamentally wrong and hope to show why in some detail after putting it in as persuasive a form as possible, so that it is no straw man I am criticizing.

(Steelmanning! One of us!)

Kathryn Paige Harden, _The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality_, Ch. 9, "Using Nature to Understand Nurture", 2021

> [P]olicies that are built on a flawed understanding of which environments are truly causal are wasteful and potentially harmful. In this specific example, even if the state of Texas was successful at delaying teenagers' sexual activity, such a change would not actually improve their mental health—and an emphasis on such programs potentially diverts investment away from educational programs that _would_ be helpful. (Proponents of teenage abstinence might argue that abstinence is a valuable end for its own sake, but that is a different justification for the policy than the empirical claim that abstinentce is a means toward increased adolencent well-being.)

("Fake Optimization Critiera")

John Snygg, _A New Approach to Differential Geometry Using Clifford's Geometric Algebra_ (§4.7.3) recounts the Arabic mathematician al-Biruni (973–1048). 

> More is known about al-Briruni than most Islamic mathematicians because he included bits of autobiographical writings in some of his academic publications. In one of these, _Shadows_, he relates an encounter with a hard-line orthodox cleric. The cleric admonished al-Biruni because he had used an astronomical instrument with Byzantine months engraved on it to determine the time of prayers. Al-Briuni replied:
>> "The Byzantines also eat food. Then do not imitate them in this!"

(Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence)

-----

I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)

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. This does not seem remotely credible to me any more.

_It will never stop hurting until I write it down._ ("I've got a thick tongue / Brimming with the words that go unsung.")

_My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter. What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.

An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.

Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by people—I've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fans—all four of you!) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...

And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.

----

imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bible—or at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on.

You _know_ this is wrong. Okay, maybe there's _some_ way that same-sex marriage could be compatible with the Church's teachings. But you would have to _argue_ for that; you _can't_ just say there's no arguments _against_ it and call that the end of the discussion! [1 Corinthians 6:9–10](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NKJV): "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators [...] nor homosexuals, nor sodomites [...] will inherit the kingdom of God." It's _right there_. There's [a bunch of passages like that](https://www.livingout.org/the-bible-and-ssa). You _can't possibly_ not see it.

As a man of faith and loyal parishioner, you would _expect_ to be able to resolve the matter by bringing your concern to the priest, who would then see how the sermon had been accidentally misleading, and issue a clarification at next week's sermon, so that the people would not be led astray from the path of God.

The priest doesn't agree; he insists on the contrived technically-not-heresy interpretation. This would be a shock, but it wouldn't, yet, shatter your trust in the Church as an institution. Even the priest is still a flawed mortal man.

Then the Pope misinterets the Bible in the same way in his next encyclical. With the help of some connections, you appeal your case all the way to the Vatican—and the Pope himself comes back with the same _bullshit_ technically-not-heresy.

You realize that you _cannot take the Pope's words literally_. 

That would be _pretty upsetting_, right? To lose faith in, not your religion itself—_obviously_ the son of God still died for our sins—but the _institution_ that claims to faithfully implement your religion, but is actually doing something else. You can understand why recovering from that might take a year or so.

Or maybe imagine an idealistic young lawyer working for the prosecution in the [Selective Draft Law Cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Draft_Law_Cases) challenging the World War I draft. Since 1865, the Constitution _says_, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If the words "involuntary servitude not as a punishment for a crime" _mean anything_, they surely include the draft. So the draft is unconstitutional. Right?

----

I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember Erin recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)

It needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.

people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)—

> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.

I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)

That ended up being quite a lot of effort!—but at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work. 

This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"

If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically expensive for me. Sorry," I can't say I'm not _disappointed_, but I can respect that they labor under different constraints from me.

But we can't even have that, because saying "You're right, but I can't admit this in public" requires _trust_. 

_socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.

I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)

[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.

Alicorn writes (re Kelsey's anorexia): "man it must be so weird to have a delusion and know it's a delusion and still have it"
what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true
... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group

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

If we _actually had_ magical sex change technology of the kind described in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality.

Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy.


Steve Sailer retweeted me today criticizing Lee Jussim https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1160662220511932416

I'm a natural true believer in Yudkowskian ideology https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/187004568356/your-ideology-if-it-gets-off-the-ground-at-all

Yudkowsky's assessment of Moldbug: "Politics mindkilled him; he cannot separate the normative and the descriptive." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs#TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs

----

2019 comments to "Wilhelm"—

these people are at the center of the rationalist egregore and could steer it if only they were a little bit braver

the prevailing narrative is something like "the rationalist community is doing just fine; poor Zack is just freaking out because he's in denial about being a trans woman, and mean ol' Michael and Ben are preying on his vulnerability"

I'm never gonna get over this
you can tell your IQ 110 hairdresser, "Men who fantasize about being women don't particularly resemble actual women", and she'll just be like, "yeah"
and you tell IQ 135 "rationalists" the same thing, and it just becomes this multi-year, 30,000-word ... whatever

people use the word "gaslighting" to refer to the cognitive dissonance between what you're seeing and what the local egregore expects you to see

 being trapped between two egregores is so painful / and even when it's not painful, it's confusing

recently-transitioned MtF Facebook acquaintance had generally positive feedback about my blog, but also says stuff like, "objective autobiography is impossible, ultimately we just tell the stories about ourselves that help us survive and thrive" / "she" went to Caltech / where are all the serious people??

in the new Twilight Zone episode featuring a crew of 5 astronauts, both the commander and the rebellious one are black women (who I have trouble telling apart)
You sent
there's a legitimate (really!) social-justice angle to this (the fact that I can't tell them apart proves that my perceptual system is RACIST)
You sent
(but the general phenomenon has to do with anchoring on unusual characteristics; at old dayjob, someone once confused me with the other white-guy-with-a-ponytail—we don't really look alike, but long hair on males is unusual)

17 March 19: "I think 'Vanessa Kosoy' is a guy I met at Summer Solstice 2016"

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messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May

Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity

Greg Egan's "Closer" (1992) predicted language models, and seemed wild at the time

The text of _Inadequate Equilibria_ is more modest than his rhetorical marketing blunder

and the BOTZ ETF I bought in 2020 has a −27.57% unrealized loss! awesome!!

Katie also asked "MTF?" when I told her about the Sasha disaster!!

27 Feb 2019: Ben playing Bad Cop, Sarah playing good cop, me as plantiff/puppydog/victim (not as a coordinated strategy; that's just how our personalities are)

ideological-drivenness—
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/speaking-of-addiction/
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending-heartbreak/

I assume starting a detransition market would be not-OK

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FYI, I think this turned out significantly harsher on you than my January 2022 emails made it sound, thus occasioning this additional email.

I'm planning on publishing the drafts linked below on [dates].

 * "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer" (18K words)
 * "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (46K words)
 * "Agreeing with Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" (19K words)
 * **"Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty"** (1.5K word summary of the parts of the Whole Dumb Story that are specifically an attack on your reputation)

**If you want to contest any purported factual inaccuracies or my interpretation of the "no direct references to private conversations" privacy norm, get back to me before [date].** If you have anything else to say for yourself, you can say it in the public comments section. End transmission.

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(If you weren't interested in meeting my standards for intellectual honest before, it's not clear why you would change your mind just because I spent 80,000 words cussing you out to everyone else.)

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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BbM47qBPzdSRruY4z/instead-of-technical-research-more-people-should-focus-on

I hate that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY
> I am broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative. 

https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1405032189708816385
> Egregore psychology is much easier and more knowable than individual human psychology, for the same reason macroscopic matter is more predictable than individual particles. But trying to tell people what the egregore is doing doesn't work because they don't believe in egregores!!

https://glowfic.com/replies/1882395#reply-1882395
> the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend.
Similarly, you should stop pretending to be a rationality teacher if you're going to be corrupted by politics

20 June 2021, "The egregore doesn't care about the past", thematic moments at Valinor


You don't want to have a reputation that isn't true; I've screwed up confidentiality before, so I don't want a "good at keeping secrets" reputation; if Yudkowsky doesn't want to live up to the standard of "not being a partisan hack", then ...

Extended analogy between "Scott Alexander is always right" and "Trying to trick me into cutting my dick off"—in neither case would any sane person take it literally, but it's pointing at something important (Scott and EY are trusted intellectual authorities, rats are shameless about transition cheerleading)

Scott's other 2014 work doesn't make the same mistake

"The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy"
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html

"English is fragile"

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1590460598869168128
> I now see even foom-y equations as missing the point. 
(!)

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dialogue with a pre-reader on "Challenges"—

> More to the point, there's a kind of anthropic futility in these paragraphs, anyone who needs to read them to understand won't read them, so they shouldn't exist.

I think I'm trying to humiliate the people who are pretending not to understand in front of the people who do understand, and I think that humiliation benefits from proof-of-work? Is that ... not true??

> No, because it makes you look clueless rather than them look clueless.

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compare EY and SBF

Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly _insinuates_ nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it _does_ present.

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown

https://twitter.com/jstn/status/1591088015941963776
> 2023 is going to be the most 2005 it's been in years

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re the FTX debacle, Yudkowsky retweets Katja:

https://twitter.com/KatjaGrace/status/1590974800318861313
> So I'd advocate for instead taking really seriously when someone seems to be saying that they think it's worth setting aside integrity etc for some greater good

I'm tempted to leave a message in #drama asking if people are ready to generalize this to Kolmogorov complicity (people _very explicitly_ setting aside integrity &c. for the greater good of not being unpopular with progressives). It's so appropriate!! But it doesn't seem like a good use of my diplomacy budget relative to finishing the memoir—the intelligent social web is predictably going to round it off to "Zack redirecting everything into being about his hobbyhorse again, ignore". For the same reason, I was right to hold back my snarky comment about Yudkowsky's appeal to integrity in "Death With Dignity": the universal response would have been, "read the room." Commenting here would be bad along the same dimension, albeit not as extreme.

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effects on my social life—calculating what I'm allowed to say; making sure I contribute non-hobbyhorse value to offset my hobbyhorse interruptions