Somewhat apologetically, I replied that the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and _named individuals_ still seemed very significant to me?—and that avoiding leaking info from private conversations seemed like an important obligation, too. I would be way more comfortable writing [a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists"](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/), than about a specific person not adhering to good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private. I thought I was consistent about this: contrast my writing to the way that some anti-trans writers name-and-shame particular individuals. (The closest I had come was [mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#photo-of-danielle-muscato)—and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done in desperation of other ways to make the point having failed.) I had to acknowledge that criticism of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women in general _implied_ criticism of Jessica, and criticism of "rationalists" in general _implied_ criticism of Yudkowsky and Alexander and me, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seemed useful for making the speech act less of an attack? Was I wrong?
-Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person", he would try to be curious, but if they don't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people", he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people that get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
+<a id="less-precise-is-more-violent"></a>Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person", he would try to be curious, but if they don't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people", he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people that get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
-----
[TODO: State of Steven]
-I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constraint; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively (if you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_), and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
+I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constraint; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. 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!
In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing _other_ heretics: not just _disagreeing_ with the other heretics _because those other heresies are in fact mistaken_, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
-Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though he's [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) [exhaustively](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) about the correct way, and he and I have a common enemy in the social-justice egregore): _he couldn't afford to_. He'd already spent his Overton budget on anti-feminism.
+Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though he'd [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) [exhaustively](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) about the correct way, and he and I have a common enemy in the social-justice egregore): _he couldn't afford to_. He'd already spent his Overton budget on anti-feminism.
-[TODO: ... remainder of "can't leave well enough alone" conversation]
+Scott (and Yudkowsky and Anna and the rest of the Caliphate) seemed to accept this as an inevitable background fact of existence, like the weather. But I saw a Schelling point off in the distance where us witches stick together for Free Speech, and it was _awfully_ tempting to try to jump there. (Of course, it would be _better_ if there was a way to organize just the good witches, and exclude all the Actually Bad witches, but the [Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) on witch Badness made that hard to organize without falling back to the falling back to the one-heresy-per-thinker equilibrium.)
+
+Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" _facts_.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad (and that it would be bad if I were doing that without "intending" to). I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had _learned stuff_ from reading far-right authors (most notably Moldbug), and from talking with my very smart neoreactionary (and former _Less Wrong_-er) friend. I was starting to appreciate [what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April](#less-precise-is-more-violent) (when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists").
+
+Jessica asked if my opinion would change depending on whether Yudkowsky thought neoreaction was intellectually worth engaging with. (Yudkowsky [had said years ago](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs) that Moldbug was low quality.)
+
+I did believe that Yudkowsky believed that neoreaction was not worth engaging with. I would never fault anyone for saying "I vehemently disagree with what little I've read and/or heard of this-and-such author." I wasn't accusing Yudkowsky of being insincere.
+
+What I _did_ think was that the need to keep up appearances of not-being-a-right-wing-Bad-Guy was a pretty serious distortion on people's beliefs, because there are at least a few questions-of-fact where believing the correct answer can, in today's political environment, be used to paint one as a right-wing Bad Guy. I would have hoped for Yudkowsky to _notice that this is a rationality problem_, and to _not actively make the problem worse_, and I was counting "I do not welcome support from those quarters" as making the problem worse insofar as it would seem to imply that the extent to which I think I've learned valuable things from Moldbug, made me less welcome in Yudkowsky's fiefdom.
+
+Yudkowsky certainly wouldn't endorse "Even learning things from these people makes you unwelcome" _as stated_, but "I do not welcome support from those quarters" still seemed like a _pointlessly_ partisan silencing/shunning attempt, when one could just as easily say, "I'm not a neoreactionary, and if some people who read me are, that's _obviously not my fault_."
+
+Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to _also_ to acknowledge, _e.g._, racial IQ differences?
+
+I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
+
+It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor, and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and _my_ incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) in the forbidden zone and I was a good programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves being pushed to the "Say Nothing" attractor.
+
+It was instructive to compare this new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013 (quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d)[^linkrot]), in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:
+
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot).
+
+> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
+>
+> Also to be clear: I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity. However I found Scott Alexander's takedown of neoreaction convincing and thus I shrugged and didn't bother to investigate further.
+
+My "negotiating with terrorists" criticism did _not_ apply to the 2013 statement. "More Right" _was_ brand encroachment on Anissimov's part that Yudkowsky had a legitimate interest in policing, _and_ the "I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand" disclaimer importantly avoided legitimizing the McCarthyist persecution.
+
+The question was, what had specifically happened in the last six years to shift Eliezer's opinion on neoreaction from (paraphrased) "Scott says it's wrong, so I stopped reading" to (verbatim) "actively hostile"? Note especially the inversion from (both paraphrased) "I don't support neoreaction" (fine, of course) to "I don't even want _them_ supporting _me_" [(_?!?!_)](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164329446314135552).[^them-supporting-me]
+
+[^them-supporting-me]: Humans with very different views on politics nevertheless have a common interest in not being transformed into paperclips!
+
+Did Yudkowsky get new information about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter, or did moral coercion on him from the left intensify (because Trump and [because Berkeley](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/))? My bet was on the latter.
-----
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
-[TODO: Ziz's protest]
+[TODO: Ziz's protest; Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
+
+[TODO: rude maps]
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
+[TODO: complicity and friendship]
+
+[TODO: affordance widths]
+
+[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019
+pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone]
+
[TODO: "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans]
-[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
+[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick 14 December
+Anna's reply 21 December
+22 December: I ask to postpone this
+Michael asks for me to acknowledge that my sense of opportunity is driven by politics
+discussion of what is "political"
+mention to Anna that I was postponing in order to make it non-salesy
-[TODO:
-Scott asked me who to ask about survey design on 20 December, I recommended Tailcalled
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/30/please-take-the-2020-ssc-survey/
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
+]
+
+------
+
+On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking about asking about autogynephilia on next _Slate Star Codex_ survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or a suggestion of who to consult on "the other side" of the issue. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being painful for me ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/), who I thought was more qualified. (Tailcalled had a lot of experience running surveys, and had a better grasp than me of the science of sexology and transgenderism, in constrast to my preoccupation with the philosophical and political aspects of the problem.)
-Scott replies on 21 December https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E
+The next day (I assume while I happened to be on his mind), Scott also [commented on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E) "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist", my post from back in October replying to his "Against Lie Inflation."
-on Christmas Eve, I gave in to the urge to blow up at him
+I was ... frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account considerations that I had already covered. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I [succumbed to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7) [the temptation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH) [to blow up at him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF) in the comments.
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF
+After commenting, I noticed that maybe Christmas Eve wasn't the best time to blow up at someone like that, and added a few more messages to our Discord chat—
-> Like, sibling comments are _very_ not-nice, but I argue that they meet the Slate Star commenting policy guidelines on account of being both true and necessary.
+> okay, maybe speech is sometimes painful
+> the _Less Wrong_ comment I just left you is really mean
+> and you know it's not because I don't like you
+> you know it's because I'm genuinely at my wit's end
+> after I posted it, I was like, "Wait, if I'm going to be this mean to Scott, maybe Christmas Eve isn't the best time?"
+> it's like the elephant in my brain is gambling that by being socially aggressive, it can force you to actually process information about philosophy which you otherwise would not have an incentive to
+> I hope you have a merry Christmas
-December tussle with Scott, and, a Christmas party—
+And then, as an afterthought—
-Christmas party
-playing on a different chessboard
-people reading funny GPT-2 quotes
+> oh, I guess we're Jewish
+> that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat
+
+Scott messaged back the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed, and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convincingly-to-me demonstrate his sincerity, and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).
+
+I explained that the reason I accused him of being motivatedly dumb was that I _knew_ he knew about strategic equivocation, because he taught everyone else about it (as in his famous posts about [the motte-and-bailey doctrine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), or [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)). And so when he acted like he didn't get it when I pointed out that this also applied to "trans women are women", that just seemed _implausible_.
+
+He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses," being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted [an article from the nationally prominent progressive magazine _The Nation_](https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/): "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women are in fact women." Scott agreed that
+
+[TODO: I got to the party and people were doing a read-aloud of the "Hero Licensing" dialogue _Inadequate Equilibria_ (with Yudkowsky himself playing the Mysterious Stranger)]
+
+[TODO: Scott and I retreated to the attic and continued our discussion]
+
+[TODO: people reading funny GPT-2 quotes, and I got to show off my knowledge of the infomation]
A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
-memoir motivation deflates after Christmas victory
-5 Jan memoir as nuke]
+[TODO: playing on a different chessboard]
+
+[TODO: feeling much less ragequitty about the rationalists after the party
+to ragequit, the elephant in my brain was able to extort more bandwidth out of Scott
+
+[TODO: Ben on me not being on the side of clarity]
-------
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff