Ben had previously written a lot about problems with Effective Altruism. Jessica had had a bad time at MIRI, as she had told me back in March, and would [later](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam) [write](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe) [about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards). To what extent were my thing, and Ben's thing, and Jessica's thing, manifestations of "the same" underlying problem? Or had we all become disaffected with the mainstream "rationalists" for our own idiosyncratic reasons, and merely randomly fallen into each other's, and Michael's, orbit?
-I believed that there _was_ a real problem, but didn't feel like I had a good grasp on what it was specifically. Cultural critique is a fraught endeavor: if someone tells an outright lie, you can, maybe, with a lot of effort, prove that to other people, and get a correction on that specific point. (Actually, as we had just discovered, even that might be too much to hope for.) But _culture_ is the sum of lots and lots of little micro-actions by lots and lots of people. If your _entire culture_ has visibly departed from the Way that was taught to you in the late 'aughts, how do you demonstrate that to people who, to all appearances, are acting like they don't remember the old Way, or that they don't think anything has changed, or that they notice some changes but think the new way is better.
+I believed that there _was_ a real problem, but didn't feel like I had a good grasp on what it was specifically. Cultural critique is a fraught endeavor: if someone tells an outright lie, you can, maybe, with a lot of effort, prove that to other people, and get a correction on that specific point. (Actually, as we had just discovered, even that might be too much to hope for.) But _culture_ is the sum of lots and lots of little micro-actions by lots and lots of people. If your _entire culture_ has visibly departed from the Way that was taught to you in the late 'aughts, how do you demonstrate that to people who, to all appearances, are acting like they don't remember the old Way, or that they don't think anything has changed, or that they notice some changes but think the new way is better. It's not as simple as shouting, "Hey guys, Truth matters!"—any ideologue or religious person would agree with _that_.
Ben called it the Blight, after the rogue superintelligence in _A Fire Upon the Deep_: the problem wasn't that people were getting dumber; it's that there was locally coherent coordination away from clarity and truth and towards coalition-building, which was validated by the official narrative in ways that gave it a huge tactical advantage; people were increasingly making decisions that were better explained by their political incentives rather than acting on coherent beliefs about the world.
I thought explaining the Blight to an ordinary grown-up was going to need _either_ lots of specific examples that were way more egregious than this (and more egregious than the examples in "EA Has a Lying Problem" or ["Effective Altruism Is Self-Recommending"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/)), or somehow convincing the ordinary grown-up why "just how the world works" isn't good enough, and why we needed one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world (perhaps a private place) with _unusually high standards_.
-The schism introduced new pressures on my social life. On 20 April, I told Michael that I still wanted to be friends with people on both sides of the factional schism (in the frame where recent events were construed as a factional schism), even though I was on this side. Michael said that we should unambiguously regard Anna and Eliezer as criminals or enemy combatants (!!), and could claim no rights in regards to me or him.
+The schism introduced new pressures on my social life. On 20 April, I told Michael that I still wanted to be friends with people on both sides of the factional schism (in the frame where recent events were construed as a factional schism), even though I was on this side. Michael said that we should unambiguously regard Anna and Eliezer as criminals or enemy combatants (!!), that could claim no rights in regards to me or him.
I don't think I "got" the framing at this time. War metaphors sounded Scary and Mean: I didn't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael explained, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war _aren't_ particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in.
>
> that's ... _arguably_ not my fault
-[TODO: I started drafting a "why I've been upset for five months and have lost faith in the so-called 'rationalist' community" personal-narrative Diary-like post, but I don't think I can finish it because it's too constrained: I don't know how to tell the story without (as I perceive it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.]
+-----
+
+I may have subconsciously pulled off an interesting political thing. In my final email to Yudkowsky on 20 April (Subject: "closing thoughts from me"), I had written—
+
+> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+And as it happened, on 5 May, Yudkowsky reTweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"—the point that group differences aren't a matter of any single variable—which was _sort of_ like the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel a lot less personally aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpet this as another "concession" to me? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
+
+Separately, I visited some friends' house on 30 April saying, essentially (and sincerely), "[Oh man oh jeez](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NivwAQ8sUYQ), Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're _the only ones backing me up_ on this _incredibly basic philosophy thing_ and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to _go_." The ensuring group conversation made some progress, but was mostly pretty horrifying.
+
+In an adorable twist, my friends' two-year-old son was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael _Vassar_.
+
+And as it happened, on 8 May, Kelsey wrote a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my point.
+
+These two datapoints led me to a psychological hypothesis (which was maybe "obvious", but I hadn't thought about it before): when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could _afford_ (_pace_ Upton Sinclair) to not understand the thing about sex being a natural category ("I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints"!!) when it was just me freaking out alone, but "got it" almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to _walk_ (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes) ... and maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Yudkowsky (assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later)?? This probably wouldn't work if you repeated it (or tried to do it consciously)?
+
+----
+
+I started drafting a "why I've been upset for five months and have lost faith in the so-called 'rationalist' community" personal-narrative Diary-like post. Ben said that the target audience to aim for was people like I was a few years ago, who hadn't yet had the experiences I had—so they wouldn't have to freak out to the point of being imprisoned and demand help from community leaders and not get it; they could just learn from me. That is, the actual sympathetic-but-naïve people could learn. Not the people messing with me.
+
+I didn't know how to finish it. I was too psychologically constrained; I didn't know how to tell the Whole Dumb Story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.
+
+I decided to take a break from the religious civil war [for a month](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/) [or two](/2019/May/hiatus/).
+
+My dayjob performance had been suffering terribly for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are _way_ more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough [to make it _common_ knowledge](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/), which is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually [performing at that level](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/fortune/), while also having [read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager](/2017/Sep/neither-as-plea-nor-as-despair/) to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. The "everyone knows I feel guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish me because I'm already doing enough internalized domination to punish myself" dynamic would be unsustainable if it were to evolve into a loop of "feeling gulit _in exchange for_ not doing work" rather than the intended "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work". I didn't think they would actually fire me, but I was worried that they _should_. I asked my boss to temporarily take on some easier tasks, that I could make steady progress on even while being psychologically impaired from a religious war. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired _anyway_, it was better to be upfront about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping that the boss wouldn't notice.
+
+My "intent" to take a break from the religious war didn't take.
+
+[TODO: tussle with Anna]
+[TODO: tussle on "Yes Implies the Possibility of No"]
-[TODO: math and wellness month http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/ /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
+[TODO: tussle on new _Less Wrong_ FAQ]
-[TODO: dayjob performance was awful]
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff