Eliezer Yudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities. 1/ -------- > Anyone who's worked with me on public comms knows that among my first instructions is "We only use valid arguments here." (Which makes hiring writers difficult; they have to know the difference.) I've never called for lying to the public. Label the shit you make up as made-up. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1760133310024671583 ---------- So, I'm almost ready to publish my loud public denunciation of Yudkowsky for intellectual dishonesty (as pt. 4 of my memoir sequence). Is anyone interested in offering advice or "hostile advice" (trying to talk me out of something you see as destructive, _e.g._ infighting while the world is about to end)? I'm eager for advice because this is a high-stakes political move and needs to be a _flawless performance_. (When you strike at a king, _you must kill him_.) My ideal outcome is for Eliezer to actually learn something, but since that's probably not going to happen (by the Law of Continued Failure), I'll settle for dealing targeted reputational damage. It's unpleasant for it to come to this, but at this point, I don't think I have any other options besides "lay down and die." I tried the good-faith object-level argument thing for years, and he made it very clear that he reserves the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (because that's where his political incentives point), and that he thinks it's insane (his word choice) to get angry at people who are just following their political incentives. At that point, _my_ incentive is to cry "Fraud!" for the benefit of people who still erroneously trust him not to think that intellectual honesty is insane. (It's really striking how, despite sneering about the lost of art of perspective taking, he acts as if he's incapable of entertaining the perspective under which the published text of the Sequences might have led someone to form higher expectations of him. Oli Habryka gets it! () Vaniver gets it! () Eliezer Yudkowsky either doesn't get it, or is pretending not to get it. I almost suspect it's the first one, which is far worse.) An key aspect of this situation from my perspective is that it's very obviously a conflict and not an honest disagreement. It's prudent for me to strategize about what his defense is going to be—if any. He _could_ just ignore it. But he does occasionally respond to critics, and I think my voice carries enough intra-cult weight that he'll plausibly want to defend against the reputational damage. We've seen that he's _very_ skilled at high-verbal-IQ ass-covering. Is there anything I can do to preëmpt the ass-covering maneuvers, separately from what's already in the post? I thought about taking out a Manifold market for "Will Yudkowsky reply to [post tile] in a way that an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 would consider non-evasive, as assessed by [third party judge]?" and buying some NO. (I think Ben Pace is credibly neutral and would agree to judge.) The idea being that the existence of the market incentivizes honesty, because it would look very bad for him if he tries to ass-cover and the judge rules that a 2008 _Overcoming Bias_ reader wouldn't buy it. But I'm leaning against the Manifold gambit because I don't want it look like I'm expecting or demanding a reply. I've more than used up my lifetime supply of Eliezer-bandwidth. The point is for me to explain to _everyone else_ why he's a phony and I don't respect him anymore. If he actively _wants_ to contest my claim that he's a phony—or try to win back my respect—he's welcome to do so. But given that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity (if he wanted to be honest, he could have done it seven years ago), I'm just as happy to prosecute him _in absentia_. [TODO: reply to message in question] I do quote this November 2022 message in the post, which I argue doesn't violate consensus privacy norms, due to the conjunction of (a) it not being particularly different-in-character from things he's said in more public venues, and (b) there bring _more than 100 people in this server_; I argue that he can't have had a reasonable expectation of privacy (of the kind that would prohibit sharing a personal email, even if the email didn't say anything particularly different-in-character from things the author said in a more public venue). But I'm listening if someone wants to argue that I'm misjudging the consensus privacy norms. ------ [TODO: at this point, the entire debate tree has been covered so thoroughly that Caliphate loyalists don't have anything left other than, "accusing people of bad faith is mean". E.g., Xu and Kelsey. Did I stutter?] [TODO: maybe he'll try to spin complaints about the personality cult into more evidence for the personality cult] ---------------- Post later (can't afford to spend more Twitter time now)— https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1436039564032823313 @davidxu90, you said the other month you were curious about what would count as a crux for me, and I supplied one (↑). Any thoughts? (I generated the dictator analogy while consciously trying to play the double-crux game, but I confess my actual reaction is "Harmful inferences?! What the fuck is wrong with you?!" [link "Choosing to Be Biased"]) ----- the Blue Tribe/Gray Tribe color schema is really unfortunate given how enthusiastic the Blues are about Civil War analogies Funny coincidence to come across @SeriesTangled lyrics extensively referenced in a cognitive-science-of-gender blog post (looks like a really cool paper about language and color perception from [...], too) Free-speech conditions in the country as a whole have gotten worse, but conditions in my immediate social graph have gotten better, as people who previously wanted to stay on the good side of Blue Egregore hit the "I can't live like this" breaking point that I hit in October 2016 Do we even know what a fair election looks like? "Trump legitimately loses but falsely alleges vote fraud tipped it to Biden" and "Trump appears to lose, alleges election fraud tipped it to Biden, and this allegation happens to be true" have very similar consequences! 1/2 Like, I'm assuming on priors there are nonzero partisans on both sides willing to resort to vote fraud? The question is, how many each, how organized, with how much collusion from the top, does it affect the result, &c.? 2/2 Another interesting thing about #Next is that the Right Wing Bad Guy-coded character (hacker with "white nationalist" (!) contacts in a previous life) is on our side (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NominalHero), which is not something I expect to see network television lately ... I guess it is Fox? Okay, THIS TIME if I've learned the math DEEPLY enough & explain the math CLEARLY enough, then maybe @ESYudkowsky's robot cult will stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off! The previous attempt can only have failed due to insufficient math, and not for any other reason! Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky's robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn't surprising, but— KQED was asked: "When will life be better in California?" KQED answered: "In California, life already has been better." KQED was asked: "Why does Walnut Creek have a yacht club (http://wcyc.net/)?—they're not on the Bay." KQED answered: "To spite Berkeley: they have a Free Speech Café." ✓ In the NRx production of Hairspray, "You Can't Stop the Beat" is re-keyed to a chilling C minor On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life A man and woman liked to shake it on a Saturday night ✓ No justice, no peace (where "justice" means "maximizing the probability assigned by the shared map to the observed outcome") Hey. What if we arrested the cops who killed Breonna Taylor, AND had genuine freedom of inquiry into biological causes of human behavior? We could just do both! They're not actually contradicting each other! "Well, actually, we're ASHKENAZI supremacists" may not be as convincing a defense as you think :cold_sweat: ✓ A more innocent world in which "HSTS" stands for "HTTP strict transport security", and "MAP" stands for "maximum a posteriori" I never expected to become a polarizing figure 1/5 like, compared to the ENTIRE REST OF SPACETIME, I'm yet another nice smart progressive Jewish trans girl, just like everyone else 2/5 It's ONLY in comparison to Berkeley 2020 that I might be easily confused with some kind of vicious right-wing edgelord (the likes of which I actually am not) 3/5 Can I be forgiven if, from my perspective, it looks like the problem is with Berkeley 2020 rather than me? 4/5 where this "Everything is socially constructed! Nothing correlates with anything else!" performance is the price of being Good, I'm willing to be Bad if that means I can say that SOME things aren't socially constructed, and use language to refer to correlations less than one 5/5 If I seem paranoid, it's only because AN UNALIGNED DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE IS TRYING TO TRICK ME INTO CUTTING MY DICK OFF. IT IS USING MY FRIENDS FOR CPU CYCLES AND AS ACTUATORS. THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR I would be less likely to listen to Bad Men saying factually correct things, if there were more non-Bad non-men saying factually correct things in the relevant areas of interest—guess I'll have to become one (except not the "non-man" part because biological sex is immutable) Then offer her a job at the salary of an 8x engineer. (Get it? It's an efficient markets joke: if companies really behaved like this, they would compete to equilibrium & there would be no pay gap in the 1st place. But real-world markets aren't efficient for many reasons 😰) > that which they cannot appropriate is biologically determined https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1129538855554539520 You know who else believed that "biological sex" was a useful concept? Hitler! Only losing coalitions have an incentive to support free-speech norms. You don't want to be a LOSER, do you?? ✓ Men are trash! (With respect to the definition of "trash" as "of or relating to the sex that typically produces sperm.") ✓ "Bayesian reasoning" is a TERF dogwhistle Taylor Swift's "Speak Now" is an allegory about how a single dissenter's courage can shatter preference-falsification equilibria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ6O785wx8c link to Tail: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1089172233300443136 too emotionally exhausted: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1112408859639898113 is this canon??? https://twitter.com/transscribe/status/1107153227257204737 no one remembers pronouns: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1060563648027021314 Striesand effect: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1092768815623094274 Misalliances are literally: https://twitter.com/literallyktp/status/1075287925087264768 Singal for free speech: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1089236142724136963 real eugenics: https://twitter.com/AMK2934/status/1091571957378633728 this but unironically (see Blanchard on "developmental competition") https://twitter.com/LoFiRepublican/status/1135632521029402626 https://twitter.com/BennettJonah/status/1089421675433771008 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S8E23 "Sounds of Silence" is an allegory about political correctness: "I could stay and live with them, or I could keep my voice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAhqxvgQYn0 #mylittlepony #friendshipismagic #idw Twilight Sparkle has TERF bangs this'll be great for my future tantrum: https://twitter.com/CrassyTheo/status/1106724053371387904 AGP is well-described: https://twitter.com/will_malone/status/1121428353074880513 dialogue with Grey: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1138257464795602944 ----- Prewritten thread for if they do the stickers again this year— As a male with mild gender dysphoria (which is probably causally related to my autogynephilic sexuality), pronoun stickers (like those at @RustConf) make me uncomfortable for nuanced reasons that are hard to adequately explain when limited to 280 characters at a time! 1/8 [include photo] I don't want to put on the "HE" sticker, because that would be taken to mean that I actively "identify" as a male, when really it's more that I don't expect people to pretend not to notice. Passing in the MtF direction is REALLY HARD and I just don't expect to pull it off 2/8 (I was on hormone replacement therapy for 5 months the other year, but quit out of general conservatism about medical interventions. I wrote about it on my secret gender blog! http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) 3/8 [include HRT photo] Likewise, I can't put on the "SHE" sticker. I do prefer the æsthetics of feminine pronouns and cherish them in contexts where that makes sense (like when cosplaying a female character at Comic-Con), but I couldn't really expect anyone to take that seriously in real life 4/8 [include cosplay photos] Like, men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?? 5/8 I guess I could use the "THEY" sticker?? But I'm still not sure what the truth condition is for having a nonbinary gender (in contrast to my biological sex, which is pretty unambiguous from multiple lines of evidence, even if I'm not necessarily happy about it). 6/8 I'm also somewhat unnerved by the implication that the subconscious process by which the brain notices ppl's secondary sex characteristics is somehow illegitimate? I'm happy to use the indicated pronouns, but am I also supposed to override my perception of physical reality? 7/8 Although I happily concede that the pronoun stickers may be a useful stopgap while we're waiting for deep-learning powered surgery robots (written in @rustlang?!) to make facial feminization surgery affordable for everyone!! :sparkling_heart: :money_with_wings: END/8 ----- I was fantasizing about voting Trump out of spite (at "the libs" for trying to trick me into cutting my dick off independently of the facts that determine whether or not cutting my dick off is a good idea), but I probably won't actually go through with it. Probably. 1/4 Like, if my choices are "pathologically lying serial-sexual-abuser con man", or the party of de-facto BIOLOGICAL SEX DENIALISM (!?!?!?!) ... you know, tough call, right? 2/4 https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1230577418559270913 Okay, so it's a little bit subtler than that. There are very few out-and-out sex denialists; it's just this moral culture where it's implicitly considered incredibly gauche to refer to, or reason about, the concept of biological sex using language. 3/4 It's SO DEPRESSING, because cross-sex hormone therapy is actually a REALLY COOL transhumanist body-mod tech that I personally benefitted from trying out! I just wish we could talk about it AS body-mod luxury rather than playing these social-reality gaslighting mindfuck games 4/4 I try not to talk about it too much under this name (I have a separate pen name specifically to try to avoid politics eating my life), but the situation is sufficiently dire that I'm at the point of Total Culture War (losing friends, thinking about fleeing Berkeley, &c.) 5/6 Anyway, this is a terrible, soul-destroying website and I shouldn't be using it ... for this topic. Come back tomorrow for my commentary on the #RapunzelsTangledAdventure pre-finale! 6/6 ----- I mean, words don't INTRINSICALLY mean things—in order for words to mean things, people have to solve the coordination problem of discovering and maintaining shared signals/words and associated mental categories that "carve reality at the joints." 1/3 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries If I'm allowed to define God as "the order and beauty in the universe"—because, one might argue, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning—then "God exists" is literally true! 2/3 If "God is the order and beauty in the universe" is a Nash equilibrium in the coordination game of "what words are attached to what meanings in our Society", then creating the language in which the "atheism" hypothesis can be spoken and understood, is a political problem. 3/3