But I'm _not_ giving them credit for _for understanding the lessons of "A Human's Guide to Words"_; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that that's a man! Men aren't women!"—well, I _probably_ wouldn't want to invite such a person-in-the-street to a _Less Wrong_ meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is _performing useful cognitive work_. Because _I_ have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), _I_ know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."
-But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As it is written: "intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
+But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As Yudkowsky had once written of [the fourth virtue of evenness](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues): "Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street would be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](http://msblairewhite.com/) (an androphilic transsexual who passes very well). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And _in practice_, the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in [high-dimensional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman, [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
-Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which the obviously-absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized, and claim that that difference destroys the relevence of the joke. But on the off-chance that it might help _illustrate_ my concern, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
+Satire is a very weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which the obviously-absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized, and claim that that difference destroys the relevence of the joke. But on the off-chance that it might help _illustrate_ my objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
<div class="dialogue">
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: "Look at this <a href="https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656">adorable cat picture</a>!"</p>
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: "Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually."</p>
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: "<a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing</a> in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy</a>, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then."</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Look at this <a href="https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656">adorable cat picture</a>!</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually.</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing</a> in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy</a>, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.</p>
</div>
If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob (and reaped microhedonic social rewards for it in the form of, _e.g._, hundreds of Twitter likes), that would be a _pretty worrying_ sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things (_e.g._, AI alignment), right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [_selectively_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language insight to try to _undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world_, even though Bob _obviously knows goddamned well what Alice was trying to say_; it's _incredibly_ obfuscatory in a way that people would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have any trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. It is, of course, true as an isolated linguistics fact that saying "peace be unto him" is a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes_. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's _why_ the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone says it: it's a lot harder to atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like an atheist.
-And that's exactly why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender does not.
+And that's exactly why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
-Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals! If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And _to their credit_, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are _honest_ about the fact that this is what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_, and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
+Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals! If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And _to their credit_, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are intellectually honest about the fact that this is what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_, and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
-In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while asserting that people who oppose the policy are ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being either (somewhat implausibly) stupid or (more plausibly) intellectually dishonest: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" coalition already know that, and the dumber people in the coalition wouldn't change their coalitional alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" coalition, while putting on a show of being politically "neutral."
+In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while insinuating that people who oppose the policy are ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being either (somewhat implausibly) stupid or (more plausibly) intellectually dishonest: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" coalition already know that, and the dumber people in the coalition wouldn't change their coalitional alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" coalition, while putting on a show of being politically "neutral."
It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author. (Despite my misgivings—and the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—this blog _is_ still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.)
The other year, Alexander had written a post, ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), explaining the consequences of political censorship by means of an allegory about a Society with the dogma that thunder occurs before lightning. The problem isn't so much the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to _directly_ make use of the fact that thunder comes first), but that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_.
-It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said [imply that lesbians aren't women](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/)? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks could and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably be fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
+It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" got you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said [imply that lesbians aren't women](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/)? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks could and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably be fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional three years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by writing this memoir. Sorry, Ben—and thanks.)
+[TODO SECTION: relying on Michael too much; I'm not crazy
+ * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently."
+ * fairly destructive move
+* _Everyone got it wrong_. there was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex the other week that cited Scott, Eliezer, Ozy, Kelsey, and Rob as leaders of rationalist movement. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/
+
+"We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ..."
+]
+
+
+[TODO SECTION: Anna Michael feud
+ * Anna's 2 Mar comment badmouthing Michael
+ * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; I _remembered_ Michael as being high-status
+ * my immediate response: I strongly agree with your point about "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions"! That's why I'm so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserves to be laughed out of the room.
+ * Anna's case against Michael: he was talking to Devi even when Devi needed a break, and he wanted to destroy EA
+ * I remember at a party in 2015ish, asking Michael what else I should invest my money in, if not New Harvest/GiveWell, and his response was, "You"
+ * backstory of anti-EA sentiment: Ben's critiques, Sarah's "EA Has a Lying Problem"—Michael had been in the background
+ * Anna had any actual dirt on him, you'd expect her to use it while trashing him in public, but her only example basically amounts to "he gave people career advice I disagree with"
+ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/why-i-am-no-longer-supporting-reach/
+ He ... flatters people? He ... didn't tell people to abandon their careers? What?!
+]
+
+
+I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that it would hope help curb some of the harrassment he had been receiving.
+
+The problem with hosting an open discussion, Alexander explained, wasn't the difficulty of moderating obvious spam or advocacy of violence.
+
+The pro
+
+
+
[TODO SECTION: RIP Culture War thread, and defense against alt-right categorization
+
* I wasn't the only one those life was being wracked with political drama: Scott exiled the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread to /r/TheMotte due to private harrassment
- * Yudkowsky: "Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A."
+
+> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
+
+
+
+
* Suppose the one were to reply: "Using language in a way you dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (Scott Alexander's explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
* What direct falsehood is being asserted by Scott's detractors? I don't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott identifies as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Sneer Club has been pretty explicit in their criticism
* examples:
* I know you're very busy; I know your work's important—but it might be a useful exercise? Just for a minute, to think of what you would actually say if someone with social power _actually did this to you_ when you were trying to use language to reason about Something you had to Protect?
]
-Without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I am allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from him that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.) Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
-
-[TODO SECTION: relying on Michael too much; I'm not crazy
- * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; I _remembered_ Michael as being high-status
- * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently."
- * fairly destructive move
-* _Everyone got it wrong_. there was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex the other week that cited Scott, Eliezer, Ozy, Kelsey, and Rob as leaders of rationalist movement. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/
-"We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ..."
-]
+Without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I am allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.)
-[TODO: Anna Michael feud
- * Anna's 2 Mar comment badmouthing Michael
- * my immediate response: I strongly agree with your point about "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions"! That's why I'm so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserves to be laughed out of the room.
- * Anna's case against Michael: he was talking to Devi even when Devi needed a break, and he wanted to destroy EA
- * I remember at a party in 2015ish, asking Michael what else I should invest my money in, if not New Harvest/GiveWell, and his response was, "You"
- * backstory of anti-EA sentiment: Ben's critiques, Sarah's "EA Has a Lying Problem"—Michael had been in the background
-]
+Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we consider him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
-Meaninwhile, my email thread with Scott got started back up, although I wasn't expecting anything to come out of it. I expressed some regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like psych hospitals, or—something else) and wanted something from him, which was bad, because it was treating him as a means rather than an end—and then, despite that regret, continued prosecuting the argument.
+Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott got started back up, although I wasn't expecting anything to come out of it. I expressed some regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like psych hospitals, or—something else) and wanted something from him, which was bad, because it was treating him as a means rather than an end—and then, despite that regret, continued prosecuting the argument.
One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): for example, those who crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into attributing attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" onto what are very noncentral members of those categories.
Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life."
-... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse about what had gone wrong in our attempted outreach to Yudkowsky, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for updateful disagreement-resolution. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
+... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse about what we might have done wrong in our attempted outreach to Yudkowsky, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for updateful disagreement-resolution. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
... Scott didn't want to meet. At this point, I considered resorting to the tool of cheerful prices again, which I hadn't yet used against Scott—to say, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day." But that seemed sufficiently psychologically coercive and socially weird that I wasn't sure I wanted to go there. I emailed my posse asking what they thought—and then added that maybe they shouldn't reply until Friday, because it was Monday, and I really needed to focus on my dayjob that week.
* We need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
]
+
+
+
[TODO: Jessica joins the coalition; she tell me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards); Michael said that me and Jess together have more moral authority]
[TODO: wrapping up with Scott; Kelsey; high and low Church https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff