At this meeting, Ziz recounted [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) story of how Anna Salamon (in her capacity as President of CfAR and community leader) allegedly engaged in [conceptual warfare](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to falsely portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. ([I remember that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1081952880649596928) at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
-Probably the most ultimately consequential part of this meeting was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up [a website slandering them](https://archive.ph/Kvfus). (I don't know the details of the alleged settlement. I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid Helm as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then (whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee) that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
+Probably the most ultimately consequential part of this meeting was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up a website slandering them. (I don't know the details of the alleged settlement. I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid Helm as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then (whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee) that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
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(Why now? Maybe he saw the tag in my "tools have shattered" Tweet on Monday, or maybe the _Quillette_ article was just timely?)
-The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a political concession to me. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was originally trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up my side on that.
+<a id="proton-concession"></a>The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a political concession to me. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was originally trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up my side on that.
At this point, some readers might think that this should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. But now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something favorable to my agenda! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I call it even?
But it's only "obvious" if you take as a given that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year.
-Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of validity in defense of meaning" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.
+Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.
-Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, maybe there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it must have just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
+Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, maybe there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it probably just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
-One might wonder why this was such a big deal to us. Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for transparently political reasons, and he couldn't be moved to clarify in public even after we spent an enormous amount of effort trying to explain the problem. So what? Aren't people wrong on the internet all the time?
+One might wonder why this was such a big deal to us. Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for political reasons, and he couldn't be moved to clarify even after we spent an enormous amount of effort trying to explain the problem. So what? Aren't people wrong on the internet all the time?
-Ben explained: Yudkowsky had set in motion a marketing machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on the claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he, almost uniquely, was not. "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically. If the claim was true, it was important to make, and to actually extract that labor.
+This wasn't just anyone being wrong on the internet. In [an essay on the development of cultural traditions](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), Scott Alexander had written that rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. To no small extent, I and many other people had built our lives around a story that portrayed Yudkowsky as almost uniquely sane—a story that put MIRI, CfAR, and the "rationalist community" at the center of the universe, the ultimate fate of the cosmos resting on our individual and collective mastery of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition.
-But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If, after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to either live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built, then we had a right to talk about what we thought was going on.
-
-This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
-
-Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my short story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the initial intent, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't survive long-term in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry (instead of playing savvy power games) to live, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+But my posse and I had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way. Maybe _he_ didn't think he had done anything wrong (because he [hadn't strictly lied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly)), and probably a normal person would think we were making a fuss about nothing, but as far as we were concerned, the formerly rightful caliph had relinquished his legitimacy. A so-called "rationalist" community that couldn't clarify this matter of the cognitive function of categories was a sham. Something had to change if we wanted a place in the world for the spirit of "naïve" (rather than politically savvy) inquiry to survive.
(To be continued. Yudkowsky would [eventually clarify his position on the philosophy of categorization in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)—but the story leading up to that will have to wait for another day.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff