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? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably 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 however I want.)
+(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.)
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_.
... Scott didn't get it.
[TODO:
-Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben, and Anna
+ * Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben—and with Anna
+
+[TODO:
+on ostracism—
+ * There's a view that says, as long as everyone is being polite, there's no problem
+ * I think there's a problem where the collective discourse is biased, even if it's surface-level polite
+ * Berkley rats are very good at not being persecutory (we might not have been if Scott hadn't a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college)
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Ben thought the bullshit nitpicking was meaningfully anti-epistemic: the game is that I have to choose between infinite interpretive labor, or being cast as "never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections
+ * I was inclined to meet the objections, to say, "well, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly" rather than "you're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me"; by meeting the objections I become a stronger writer
+ * Ben thought that being a better writer by responding to nitpicks from people who are trying not to understand was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to explain how people were failing to engage, rather than continuing to press the object-level itself—like, I had a model of "the rationalists" that keeps making bad predictions, what's going on there?
+ * I guess I'm only now, years later, taking Ben's advice on this. Sorry, Ben.
+
+[TODO:
+ * 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?"
+ * There have been times when I thought, "What the Hell am I doing?" [...]
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Anna and intellectual property
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff