If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but 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 words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_. The policymaking categories we use to make decisions are _closely related_ to the epistemic categories we use to make predictions, and people need to be able to talk about them.
-An illustrative example: like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) at fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "adult human female" category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_≈0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_≈0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_≈0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
+An illustration: like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) at fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm _not very good at it_. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing _cognitive work_: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "adult human female" category, where by "traits" I mean not (just) particularly sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the _conjunction_ of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [_causally downstream_ of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) _and_ Big Five Agreeableness (_d_≈0.5) _and_ Big Five Neuroticism (_d_≈0.4) _and_ short-term memory (_d_≈0.2, favoring women) _and_ white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain _and_ probable socialization history _and_ [any number of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly. (Because it's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning", what _trans women_ are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example.) But it _is_ forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster). Crowing in the public square about how people who object to be forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is _ignoring the interesting part of the problem_. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
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.
-It's true that the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) had to with transgender stuff, but wasn't the reason _Scott_ should care.
+It's true that [the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) had to with transgender stuff, but wasn't the reason _Scott_ should care.
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_.
* 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: minor psych episode in March 2019
+[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/
-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.
+"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) ..."
+]
-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) and wanted something from him, which was bad, because it was treating him as a means rather than an end—but that, despite that regret, I was still really upset about the categories thing and wanted a clarification from him.
+[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
+]
-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.
+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.
+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.
-_Even if_ you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Janie a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the existence of a victim who probably suffered and whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you subsequently reveal that the murder victim was a fetus.
+_Even if_ you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Janie a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the suffering of victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you subsequently reveal that the murder victim was a fetus.
-Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering pattern that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with saying, "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."
+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.
Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I had been taught were great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having _forgotten!_
-I did, eventually, get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonment). We didn't want another bad outcome like that; we really didn't. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep will come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people come in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing is to be calm.
+I did, eventually, get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my [2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/) and [2017](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). We didn't want another bad outcome like that; we really didn't. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep will come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people come in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing was to be calm.
I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
-Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse. I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)").
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for my sanity! Did that matter at all? Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing, if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff? But the _original reason_ it had ever seemed _remotely_ plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the self-designated world-saving good guys", but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the _reason_ that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever; you can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, and suggested that I think of _that_ was what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harrass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that my concerns have merit.
-Scott had been continuing to insist that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand.
+[TODO: Michael jumps in to help, I rebuff him, Michael says WTF and calls me, I take a train home, Alicorn visits with her son—I mean, her son at the time]
-First, if creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? I didn't understand why semantic mind games are OK, but lying is wrong. (Compare: ["If you're going to ignore a probabilistic counterargument, why not ignore a proof, too?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right))
+(Incidentally, the code that I wrote intermittently between 11 _p.m._ and 4 _a.m._ was a horrible mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since, every time someone needs to modify that function, and finds it harder to navigate than it would be if I had been less emotionally overwhelmed in March 2019 and written something sane instead.)
-Second, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, like, why doesn't _my_ mental health matter? Aren't I trans, sort of? What do I have to do in order to qualify? Was my being on hormones for only 5 months not good enough? Or do I have to be part of the political coalition in order for my feelings to count? We had _an entire Sequence_ whose _specific moral_ was that words can be wrong. And of the 37 Ways that Words Can Be Wrong, number 30 was "Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together," and number 31 was, "You use a short word for something that you won't need to describe often, or a long word for something you'll need to describe often." And this was the thing I'd been trying to tell everyone about. But when I tried to talk to Scott about it, he was like, "Doesn't matter, mental health benefits for trans people are more important according to the utilitarian calculus!" And like ... getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I'm trying to use reason to make sense of the world is observably really bad for _my_ mental health! Does that matter at all?
+I think at some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But then when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. (Michael seemed to have a theory that people will only change their bad behavior when they see a victim who is being harmed.)
+I supposed that, in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed obviously true, but I was psychologically limited in how much aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, who I still hero-worshipped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 a.m., and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy.)
+Was the answer just that I needed to accept that there wasn't such a thing in the world as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago, at BABSCon, and I just hadn't made the corresponing mental adjustments.)
+On the other hand, a possible reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name and social identity that wasn't just me being stupid was that _the way I talk_ had been trained really hard on this subculture for _ten years_. Most of my emails during this whole campaign had contained multiple Sequences or _Slate Star Codex_ links that I could just expect people to have read. I could spontaneously use the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro" in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just gave up on "rationalists" being a thing, and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I would lose all that accumulated capital.
+The language I spoke was _mostly_ educated American English, but I relied on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (and so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, likely because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/)", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. That essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in _Quillette_. The links and phraseology were just too context-bound.
-[TODO: proton concession
- *
+Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight a culture war to preserve the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness was having me making crazy decisions.
+[TODO SECTION: proton concession
+ * as it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we got this: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512 (Why now? maybe he saw the "tools have shattered in their hand"; maybe the Quillette article just happened to be timely)
+ * A concession! In the war frame, you'd think this would make me happy
+ * "I did you a favor by Tweeting something obliquely favorable to your object-level crusade, and you repay me by criticizing me? How dare you?!" My model of Sequences-era Eliezer-2009 would never do that, because the species-typical arguments-as-social-exchange
+ * do you think Eliezer is thinking, "Fine, if I tweet something obliquely favorable towards Zack's object-level agenda, maybe Michael's gang will leave me alone now"
+ * If there's some other reason you suspect there might by multiple species of dysphoria, but you tell people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, then you're still kind of misinforming them for political reasons, which is the generalized problem that we're worried about?
+ * Michael's take: not worth the digression; we need to confront the actual crisis
+ * We need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
]
-[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/
+[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]
-"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: wrapping up with Scott; Kelsey; high and low Church https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
-[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
+[TODO: Ben reiterated that the most important thing was explaining why I've written them off; self-promotion imposes a cost on others; Jessica on creating clarity; Michael on less precise is more violent]
+
+[TODO: after some bouncing off the posse, what was originally an email draft became a public _Less Wrong_ post, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" (note, plural)
+ * Wasn't the math overkill?
+ * math is important for appeal to principle—and as intimidation https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/
+ * four simulacra levels got kicked off here
+ * no politics! just philosophy!
+ * Ben on Michael on whether we are doing politics; "friendship, supplication, and economics"
+ * I could see that I'm including subtext and expecting people to only engage with the text, but if we're not going to get into full-on gender-politics on Less Wrong, but gender politics is motivating an epistemology error, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do! I'm pretty constrained here!
+ * I had already poisoned the well with "Blegg Mode" the other month, bad decision
+ * We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!?
]
+------
+
-[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
+[TODO: I was floored; math and wellness month
+ Anna doesn't want money from me
+ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility of No"
+ LessWrong FAQ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+
+]
[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]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff