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> But even ignoring that, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
-Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_. Let me explain.
+Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped out_. Let me explain.
This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to carve reality at the joints, even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
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-... I didn't have all of that criticism collected and carefully written up on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I _flipped the fuck out_ when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was—tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastal—that had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+... I didn't have all of that criticism collected and carefully written up on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I _flipped out_ when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was—tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastal—that had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
But trusting Eliezer Yudkowsky—whose writings, more than any other single influence, had made me who I am—_did_ seem reasonable. If I put him on a pedastal, it was because he had earned the pedastal, for supplying me with my criteria for how to think—including, as a trivial special case, [how to think about what things to put on pedastals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC3ArwKM8xhNjYqQK/on-things-that-are-awesome).
He was obviously correct that this was a distortionary force relative to what ideal Bayesian agents would do, but I was worried that when we're talking about criticism of _people_ rather than ideas, the removal of the distortionary force would just result in an ugly war (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems _should_ be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.
-This is why I felt like I couldn't give up faith that [honest discourse _eventually_ wins](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I could criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's _ideas_ without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I were to give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I _know_ you guys are just fucking with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really _were_ just fucking with me.
+This is why I felt like I couldn't give up faith that [honest discourse _eventually_ wins](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I could criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's _ideas_ without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I were to give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I _know_ you guys are just messing with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really _were_ just messing with me.
Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was _creating clarity about behavioral patterns_. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff