Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals! If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And _to their credit_, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are intellectually honest about the fact that this is what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_ (the argument goes) and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
-In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while insinuating that people who oppose the policy are ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being less honest than the theocrat or the activist: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" faction already know that, and the dumber people in the faction wouldn't change their alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" faction, while [putting on a show of being politically "neutral."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise)
+In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while accusing people who oppose the policy of being ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being less honest than the theocrat or the activist: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" faction already know that, and the dumber people in the faction wouldn't change their alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" faction, while [putting on a show of being politically "neutral."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise)
It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at [what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people). (Despite my misgivings—and the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—this blog _is_ still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being _very good_ at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the world where Scott Alexander didn't have a [traumatizing experience with social justice in college](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/), causing him to dump a ton of anti-social-justice, pro-argumentative-charity antibodies in the "rationalist" collective "water supply" after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.) I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for being silenced or shouted down (which I wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
-For example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need the phrase 'actual women' in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call 'trans women' would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology".
+As an illustrative example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need the phrase 'actual women' in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call 'trans women' would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology".
Kelsey Piper replied, "[T]he people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
Another woman said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" (to the acclaim of 4 "+1" emoji reactions).
-The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, ["algorithmically"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had better terminology for this phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that to suggest that Kelsey was _consciously_ thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order gain an advantage in this argument". I don't doubt that, _subjectively_, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery sometimes _felt like_ a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was very obviously trying to talk about the "biological sex" thing, and Kelsey could have figured that out _if she had wanted to_.
+The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, ["algorithmically"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had better terminology for this phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that to suggest that Kelsey was _consciously_ thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order gain an advantage in this argument". I don't doubt that, _subjectively_, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery sometimes _felt like_ a relevant reply (because I had mentioned transition technology). It's just that, in context, I was very obviously trying to talk about the natural category of "biological sex", and Kelsey could have figured that out _if she had wanted to_.
-It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knows it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.
+It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knows it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism. ("'The original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me"!!)
Ben thought I was wrong to think of this kind of behavior as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ ended up getting published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own in [future posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) by [other authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/).)
-Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: was it really necessary to make the point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it is written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
+Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it is written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", "Using language in a way _you_ dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret"), and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").
I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I'm supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
-(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing last year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently deniably allegorical. It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the trainwreck in the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
+(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently deniably allegorical. It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the trainwreck in the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
-----
> I am reminded of someone who I talked with about Zack writing to you and Scott to request that you clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
]
-
[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking—
One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. If someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I think I _would_ put some serious thought into it.
-
]
+[TODO: We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!? And, post-war concessions ...
-* We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!?
+curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
-
-
-[TODO: my reluctance to write a memoir, displacement behavior
-Ben thought it was imporant on 30 Apr, 12 Aug , I confess to being stuck on 9 Nov
-I write more about the philosophy of language instead
+"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 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
]
-curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
-
-[TODO scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility of No"
-19 May
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
-]
+Since arguing at the object level had failed (["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), and arguing at the strictly meta level had failed (["... Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)), the obvious thing to do next was to jump up to the meta-meta level and tell the story about why the "rationalists" were Dead To Me now, that [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) was not being met. (Just like Ben had suggested in December and in April.)
-[TODO scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+I found it trouble to make progress on. I felt—constrained. I didn't know how to tell the story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise "the rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
-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.
+[TODO 2019 activities—
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019, "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019, "Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019, "Heads I Win" Sep 2019, "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+"epistemic defense" meeting
-there needs to be _some_ way for _someone_ to invest a _finite_ amount of effort to _correct the mistake_
+bitter comments about rationalists—
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
]
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.
]
-
[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
]
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
+[TODO: write to Ben about being stuck on memoir]
+
[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
[TODO:
5 Jan memoir as nuke
]
-(There's another very important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but unfortunately, it's not my story to tell.)
+There's another very important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but unfortunately, it's not my story to tell.
+
+[TODO: theorizing about on the margin]
[TODO: "out of patience" email]
[TODO: Sep 2020 categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
-I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively try to transform me into a Jane Austen character_.
+I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character_.
+
+
[TODO section: rats from the Scott Alexander era will protest that I'm being uncharitable—failure of perspective taking; but I'm not complaining about Yudkowsky's subjective experience; I'm talking about a very clear pattern of behavior that's gone on for _years_]
[TODO: if he's reading this, win back respect— reply, motherfucker]
-
[TODO: the Death With Dignity era]
-[TODO: regrets]
\ No newline at end of file
+[TODO: regrets]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff