5 The malicious gossip about you continues on "EA Corner" Discord; I _thought_ about posting a message but then decided not to (because my testimony would probably hurt you rather than help you, and because there's too much variance even if I thought the expected value went the other way)
9 The message I privately typed and THOUGHT about sending, but did NOT send was '@Gwen#7137 re "in which Anna admitted to ...", I tried to say this during the meeting with Michael, but again, I think you're _massively_ overestimating how easy it is to misinterpret/misparaphrase what someone was trying to say in a real-time conversation; the leap fomr what Ziz said that Anna literally said, to "Anna disciminates against tran womken" is inference on your part'. And the REASON that it's good that I didn't send this is because the defnese doesn't want their own witnesses to validate the plausibility of the prosecution's alleged observations (but disputing the alleged observations' interpretation) when there are still possible worlds in which the jury could decide that the alleged observations were made up
13 Sara Bareilles is great and you should listen to her songs
17 I sent you an email!! [various emoji] [...]
21 Is there any way you could give me a projected DATE at which you'll be able to publicly and honestly engage with my post (or endorse it if you think I got everytyhing right)? If you don't have time now because of bankruptcy, will you have time within a week? Within a month? Two months? If it was worth spending 650 words of effort trashing Michael, isn't it worth spending 650 words clarifying the relationship between Bayesian reasoning and human natural language when it's demonstrable that people are very confused about this and they might listen to you when they won't listen to me alone? My post is LITERALLY about math and dolphins, the political risk here is ZERO.
23 [revolving-hears emoji] [dolphin emoji]
27 I've had a lot of uncertainty about whether I'm doing the right thing this year, but I remember that the correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed
31 Ziz finally published Ziz's threatened blog post: [...] I really don't think it's that damaging? (Default dismissible as weird person's weird unreliable memories)
35 I was momentarily tempted to write an email thanking the Santa Rose Press Democrat newspaper reporter for writing such an informative news story and linking the reporter to Ziz's blog for context (because I have vritue ethics that say that sharing information is Generically Good), but then I decided not to, because you wouldn't want me to
39 How much red-teaming did you do before your wrote that hit-piece comment about Michael?
43 If you don't feel a deontology-adjacent need to correct philosophy errors (becasue it could have political costs), but you do feel a deontology-adjacent need to attack someone who is eager to help correct philosophy errors, can you see why that makes me suspect your rationality organization if [sic] being "fraudulent" in the sense of "claiming to be optimizing for rationality education, but actually not trying to do that"?
47 Increasingly on a war footing, still very sad about possible implications for our friendship [...]
49 Escalating to "war" (publicly and privately-to-others talking about how "rationalists" are being intellectually dishonest) is a lot healthier than private sniping/begging, because when I try getting the concern addressed in private, it's just a perma-stalemate. (You see my point, you just don't want to do anything about it.) But I keep feeling motivated to try to work things out in private (even when it's petty and repetitive) because "war" feels disloyal
51 [link to "With You By My Side" with my description as a possibly "apropow" song from the Tangled sequel series, followed by explanation for misspelling]
55 (Postscript: for more context, the more immediate trigger of me feeling "warlike" yesterday/today was feeling the need to defend Michael from the influence of your hit piece [...] I sent Vaniver an angry email that I don't think contains any false sentences about you)
59 I think "war" could also include starting conversations with a goal of liberating human capital and funding streams away from your sphere of indluence (hopefully only using tactics that result in liberating capital if and only if liberating capital is the right thing to do: [link to "The Humility Argument for Honesty"])
65 [...] "gerrymander concepts to avoid momentary pain" seems like an insanely evil thing to do to a developing intelligence in your care
67 [...] it's not implausible that my unskillful advocacy carries negative weight
69 [redacted] and [redacted] literally met on lesswrong.com; if we don't have an actual-community-with-women-and-children that cares about teaching the children production-grade Yudkowskian philosophy, then it doesn't exist anywhere else, either
73 I'm really glad you're writing election comments on Facebook
75 (as you know, because Speech matters, not because the election matters)
79 If it turns out (after the quarantine) that I can't realistically remain a family friend of the [redacted] household, maybe the last thing I'll say to Kelsey as I leave willl be, "I have the honor to be your obedient servant"
83 GPT-3 does not look like good news
85 > I agree. Got thoughts?
87 "Maybe this is partially our fault" [link to "OpenAI makes humanity less safe"]
91 I guess I already technically believed that We Are Dead, but just ... the details: unalignable AI progress AND political collapse AND public health non-progress (covid) AND non-AI transhumanism non-progress (Steve Hsu's defeat)
95 Sorry I couldn't be there for you the other year when you were having a stressful time because of the bad luck of me being at war with your embedding sovereign at the same time
99 I'm still planning to do most of the same things (like finish the "Optimized for Deception" post), but now I'll be able to take my time and treat it as an ordinary philosophy post for math nerds, rather than being stuck in a delusional rage-grief loop and using the phrase "lying motherfuckers" in every other thought
109 > Can you share your best model of what would have happened if you had seen Raymonds's LW thread a few years ago and had been told that his attitude had become the dominant one in LW & EA
111 I'm ... not sure? Plausibly not much, because I'm not perceptive enough to notice anything until it personally hits me over the head; I want to Ray's 2017 "HUfflepuff unconference" and 2018 "Archipelago" talk at REACH, and I didn't notice anything wrong
113 The current situation on LW seems bonkers to me, but I asked Steven Kaas if he saw what I was seeing [...]
115 And they would be "taken seriously" in the sense that we have good free speech norms and people would make the in-genre responding to criticism noises
117 How is he supposed to tell whether the noises are connected to any decision-controlling information processing?
121 Kelsey Piper wrote me a REALLY IMPRESSIVE email about why she thinks you're a bad influence who is making me worse at thinking (her character assessment of you and your influence is wrong, but her character assessment of me is dead-on in a way that makes me really optimistic about useful engagement
127 (Two years ago, you told me that my character assessments of women are always too optimistic)
131 Had been meaning to send you detailed email about slander but didn't get around to writing it; REACH story got more interesting (Kelsey says an undisclosed someone credibly threatened to sue (!) over the panel report about you, which will delay its release for the one-year statute of limitations, which is short-term good news (not published) but longer-term bad news (the report muyst be a hit piece if you secret ally is trying to hush it), sorry
133 [my comment: Kelsey said that _someone_ threatened to sue about the report about Michael, and I didn't infer that it was Michael itself?! Jeez, I'm dumb
135 Kelsey's further comments on 28 November 2020 (comment thread on https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10158484261660199 ):
137 > I can confirm that REACH investigated complaints by REACH attendees about Vassar's behavior. The panel wrote up a summary of their conclusions, which included that they felt Vassar should not be welcome at REACH for the time being. The summary was not meant for publication with Vassar's name attached. REACH policy at the time was for investigations to be published with enough information that the person could be uniquely identified in the community "Michael V/A" but not with any information that'd make them Googleable. When the document was shared with Vassar for comment, Vassar threatened the REACH panelists with litigation for "defamation". He did not claim that any specific content of the document was false. The panelists included some people who would be very adversely affected by ongoing defamation litigation, so they made the decision to not publish, and the panelists stepped down.
139 > At the same time as I was consulting with lawyers trying to figure out some way to publish the REACH document in some fashion so the liability would be solely on me and other people willing to deal with it, Zack and other Vassar-defenders were barraging me with assurances that Vassar was not engaged in reputation management within the rationalist community and had stopped trying to protect opinion of him within the rationalist community. To this day none of them have acknowledged that this was blatantly lying.
143 Kelsey, hi. At the time I was defending Vassar to you (in our 25 July 2019 email conversation), I actually didn't know that Vassar had threatened to sue in response to the REACH report! That conversation definitely wouldn't have happened the way it did if I had known that piece of information at the time!
145 I certainly agree that threatening a lawsuit is definitely an instance of reputation-management.
147 If you actively want to go over the Discord/email log, I could go in to more detail about why I said what I said given what I knew at the time? I can apologize for and retract specific sentences I said that were wrong, but I can't agree with the characterization of my behavior as "blatantly lying."
151 oh, I had angrily testified to the panel on your behalf (which would be a bad idea if it were plice, but I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt): "Michael is great; this is a skapegoating process, not a justice process, &c."
153 > The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
157 > Do you see the argument for 'these rioters need to fight now'?
159 Probably not? If you need to fight sometime, now is probably a good time (covid depression stacked the hay, Officer Chauvin lit the match), but I'm not sure what happens afterwards
161 > Nobody is, but they do have to fight. And so do we. And we can and have been doing so successfully.
167 The Veil of Kayfabe wants me to believe that the anti-cop rioters and the anti-Stephen Hsu petitioners are the same, but the Veil lies
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob