Title: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-Date: 2021-02-15 11:00
+Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+Recapping our story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric prison once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
+That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously _directionally_ correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.
-> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
+But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
+After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could reference a _Slate Star Codex_ post in conversation and expect people to familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis, by other people having referenced the idea in conversation. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me, seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's "party line" on trans issues.
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
+But the post is very wrong in very obvious ways. To be clear, it's true _that_ categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's true that trans women might be women _with respect to_ some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories _in order to make trans people feel better_:
-(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
+> I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
+This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. [Yudkowsky wrote a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) back in 'aught-eight, as part of the original Sequences. Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home _over and over and over again_, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—principles that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology."
-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
+In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to be misled into making bad predictions.
-Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
+Importantly, this is a very general point about how language itself works _that has nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about politically-controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if [positive consequence]" is not the correct philosophy of language, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_.
-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
+Also, this ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But at this point I still trusted people in my robot cult to be basically intellectually honest, rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, so I endeavored to respond to the category-boundary argument as if it were a serious argument: when I quit my dayjob in March 2017 in order to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next links post](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later, I followed it up with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument. I'm proud of those posts: I think Alexander's and _Unit of Caring_'s arguments were incredibly dumb, and with a lot of effort, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining exactly why to anyone who was interested and didn't, at some level, prefer not to understand.
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone else's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the _Slate Star Codex_ links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. At this point, I was _disappointed_ with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that.
-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
+... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war.
-In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
+The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the afternoon arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord. [TODO: review Discord logs; email to Dad suggests that offsite began on the 26th, contrasted to first shots on the 28th]
-So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
+Just that month, I had started a Twitter account in my own name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous/established in the that world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the Blanchard retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in the Code of Conduct wars.
-So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
+[TODO: SECTION SUMMARIZING AND RESPONDING TO "Hill of Validity" Tweet thread]
-But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
+I was physically shaking. I remember going downstairs to confide in a senior engineer about the situation. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (And I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed less important given the present crisis.)
-> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+It seemed better to try to clear this up in private. I still had Yudkowsky's email address. I felt bad bidding for his attention over my gender thing _again_—but I had to do _something_. Hands trembling, I sent him an email asking him to read my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), suggesting that it may qualify as an answer to his question about ["a page [he] could read to find a non-confused exclamation of how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232), and that, because I cared very much about correcting what I claim are confusions in my rationalist subculture, that I would be happy to pay up to $1000 for his time, and that, if he liked the post, he might consider Tweeting a link.
-> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+[TODO (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)")]
-> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, and not _quid quo pro_ advertising, and that if he didn't trust his brain circuitry not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.
-> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
+Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ on of your posts? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)—and that it was a way to signal that I _really really didn't want to be ignored_.
-> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
+[TODO: and cc'd Michael and Anna as character references]
-> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
+[TODO: I did successfully interest Michael, who chimed in—Michael called me up and we talked about how the "rationalists" were over]
-> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
+[TODO: as with earlier cheerful price offer, I can't confirm or deny whether Yudkowsky replied or whether he accepted the cheerful price offer]
-> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
+[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession. You might think that should be the end of the matter—but this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder? https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529 ]
-> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
+Greedy or not, I wasn't satisfied. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander, asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
-> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+The _issue_ is that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful): you want to [draw your category boundaries such that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your [information-theoretically limited budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) of short words on the simplest and most wide-rangingly useful categories.
-[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
-When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
-Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
-]
-
-So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
-
-At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
-
-Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-
-An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
-
-It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
-
-In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
-
-There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
-
-But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
-
-If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
-
-(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
-
-_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—
-
-_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
-
-I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.
-
-[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]
-
-But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
-
-_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
-
-In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
-
-> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
-
-This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
-
-[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
-
-If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
-
-In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
-
-At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
-
-Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
-
-But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
-
-If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
-
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
-
-In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
-
-Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
-
-No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
-
-What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
-
-Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
-
-It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)
-
-I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
-
-Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
-
-Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
-
-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
-
-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
-
-Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
+It's true that the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this to the extent of sending you him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, what kind of asshole does that?!) has to with transgender stuff, but that's not the reason _Scott_ should care. Rather, it's like [his parable about whether thunder or lightning comes first](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): there aren't many direct non-rationalizable-around consequences of the sacred dogmas that thunder comes before lightning or that biological sex somehow isn't real; the problem is that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_. If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_. If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
-And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
+And the reason to write this is a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander when I could be working on my own blog, was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the Zeitgeist, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
+So, what do you say, Scott? Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we don't. If you don't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that's fine. I like getting credit, but the important thing is that this "No, the Emperor isn't naked—oh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garments—it would be pretty weird if we were claiming that!—it's just that utilitarianism implies that the social property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" gaslighting maneuver needs to _die_. You alone can kill it.
-But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
+... Scott didn't get it.
-[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
+[TODO: paraphrase remaining interaction with Scott, or not worth the space?
-Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
+> I don't have a simple, mistake-theoretic characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I can do is try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of conflicts over possible conventions.
-But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
+helping Norton live in the real world
-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
+If any concrete negative consequence of taking gender self-identity categories (e.g., more sexual assaults) is going to be waved away with "Oh, that's a mere policy decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender categories", then I guess I can't argue with that. But I wish I knew what happened to my wallet.
-I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
-
-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
-
-In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
-
-In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-
-In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
-
-Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
-
-I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
-
-It worked once, right?
-
-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
-
-> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
-OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
-
-The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
-
-Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
-> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
-(!!)
-
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
-https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
-> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
-
-
-> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
-
-> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
-
-> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
-
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
-"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
-
-I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-
-the most recent pronoun update
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
-
-> I would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character.
-[...]
-> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
-
-like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
-
-* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
-
-> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
-
-EGS??
-
-(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
-
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
-how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
-
-https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
-> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
-
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
-
-I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-
-https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
-> 16: I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
-
-> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
-
-https://archive.is/7Wolo
-> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
-Namespace's point about the two EYs
-
-[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
-
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
-
-Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
+Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus."; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious.
+]
-But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
+[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
-what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
+Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
-I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+When I told Michael about this, he said that I was ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer matters more for your claims than the equivalent of a scientist, and that Ben Hoffman (who I had already shared the thread with Scott with) would be helpful in solidifying my claims to IP defense. I said that I didn't _feel_ like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+[TODO: re Ben's involvement—I shared Scott thread with Ben and Katie; Michael said "could you share this with Ben? I think he is ready to try & help." on 17 December
+19 December
+> talk more with Ben Hoffman, he will be more helpful in solidifying your claims about IP defense etc. ]
+[TOOD: Sarah's involvement: I cc'd her on the 1 December Scott thread, and Sarah chimed in support in that thread, and 16 December draft to Michael]
-I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
+to Sarah—
+> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
+Ben's reply—
+> Your special interest is not just a coincidence here.
-"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
+Sarah shying away, my rallying cry—
-The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
+> There have been times during the last few weeks where it's felt like my mind has shut down with the only thought, "What the hell am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? I don't want to be one of the Bad Guys. Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
+> Except that I was raised to believe that you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind. And I can't actually point to such a counterargument. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is not a counterargument. When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
-> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
-https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
+> But "whatever" is _not a counterargument!_
-twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
+> But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_—where a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
-I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
+> But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
-> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+> I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
-Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
+> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
-It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
+> I want to emphasize this, because I don'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)."
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
+> My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
-E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
+> I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute
-The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
+> Imagine your friends got a new front porch installed on your house, and you noticed that the boards were smoother and shinier than you expected. A question you might then ask your friend is, "Oh, is this real wood, or one of those wood-plastic composites?"
-> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
-https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+> In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
+[TODO: 4 January plea to Yudkowsky again—this is the part that I should base my thread analysis off of]
-It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
+[TODO: ... email analysis goes up to 4 January]
-But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
+[TODO: proton concession]
+[TODO: minor psych episode in March 2019]
-As far as I can tell, Professor, I'm just doing what _you_ taught me—carve reality at the joints, speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect.
+[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
-"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!
+[TODO: more blogging (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aqumaym7Jd2qhDcy/containment-thread-on-the-motivation-and-political-context), 2019 Christmas party, disclaimer on "Categories Were Made"]
+["Univariate fallacy" also a concession]
-> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things
+[TODO: categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
-Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
+[TODO: "simplest and best" pronoun proposal, sometimes personally prudent; support from Oli]
-typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
+[TODO: the dolphin war, our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014; this is a sign that we're a cult]
-https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
-> These neurons detect gender^10
-> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
+[TODO: why you should care; no one should like Scott and Eliezer's proposals; knowledge should go forward, not back — what I would have hoped for, what you can do; hating that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy; the Church is _still there_ sucking up adherents; this is unambiguously a betrayal rather than a mistake]
+[TODO: the Death With Dignity era]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff