Title: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
+Date: 2023-01-01 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
Status: draft
> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
... 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 involving other people who had much more important things to do with their time.
-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]
+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 previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.
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 and 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 [@BlanchardPhd](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD) 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](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/how-we-may-mesh/).
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—
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
<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>
</div>
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
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 knowledge 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—the _same_ people—would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Meghan Murphee had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that [Yudkowsky's analogue in that world](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) then posted that Murphee's supporters were ontologically confused to object on free inquiry grounds: [saying "peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_honorifics#Applied_to_Muhammad_and_his_family) is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact. In banning Murphee for repeatedly speaking about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as if he were just some guy, the platform was merely ["enforcing a courtesy standard"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880); Murphee wasn't being forced to _lie_.
But trusting Eliezer Yudkowsky—whose writings, more than any other single influence, had made me who I am—_did_ seem reasonable. If I put him on a pedastal, it was because he had earned the pedastal, for supplying me with my criteria for how to think—including, as a trivial special case, [how to think about what things to put on pedastals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC3ArwKM8xhNjYqQK/on-things-that-are-awesome).
-So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this _and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it_ (!!!), that was intolerable, inexplicable, incomprehensible—like there _wasn't a real world anymore_.
+So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this _and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it_ (!!!), that was intolerable, inexplicable, incomprehensible—like there _wasn't a real world anymore_. I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democrat—not just about the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole _thing_ of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was noncommittally sympathetic; he told me an anecdote about him accepting a trans person's correction of his pronoun usage, with the thought that different people have their own beliefs, and that's OK.
-But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (Also, I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed unimportant in light of the present cause for flipping out.)
+If Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (Also, I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed unimportant in light of the present cause for flipping out.)
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 claimed were 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—and that I was cc'ing my friends Anna Salamon and Michael Vassar as a character reference (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)"). Then I texted Anna and Michael begging them to chime in and vouch for my credibility.
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.
-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_ one of your posts? What? Why? 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, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely a simple person such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
+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_ one of your posts? What? Why? 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, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, who I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really really really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. Surely an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at _all_, about _anything_, if I didn't have Something to Protect.
Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
I think commonsense privacy-norm-adherence intuitions actually say _No_ here: the text of Alice's messages makes it too easy to guess that sometime between 5 and 6, Bob probably said that he couldn't come to the party because he has gout. It would seem that Alice's right to talk about her own actions in her own life _does_ need to take into account some commonsense judgement of whether that leaks "sensitive" information about Bob.
-In part of the Dumb Story that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I and others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, does not in this case leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (_e.g._, because he was busy with more existentially important things and didn't check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)
+In part of the Dumb Story that follows, I'm going to describe several times when I and others emailed Yudkowsky to try to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied, or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgement will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made, does not in this case leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened: I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (_e.g._, because he was too busy with more existentially important things to check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the futher emails with followup arguments that I describe; I don't think I'm leaking any sensitive bits that aren't already easy to infer from what's been said (and not said) in public. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)
-It seems particularly important to lay out these principles of adherence to privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone else can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the Dumb Story that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander in the same way. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have _expected_ Scott to perform well in this situation.)
+It seems particularly important to lay out these principles of adherence to privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Carol exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you try talking to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Carol, particularly, but so that everyone _else_ can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Carol says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself. In the Dumb Story that follows, I _also_ describe some of my correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander in the same way. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have _expected_ Scott to perform well in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
In accordance with the privacy-norm-adherence policy just described, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor ([again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint)) whether he accepted the cheerful price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occured would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
Look at that! The great Eliezer Yudkowsky said that my position is "not ontologically confused." That's _probably_ high praise coming from him!
-You might think that that should have been the end of the story. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion, I already had a related objection written up, and he acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right?
+You might think that that should have been the end of the story. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion, I already had a related objection written up, and he publicly acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right?
I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried deep in the replies was _much less visible_ than the bombastic, arrogant top level pronouncement insinuating that resistance to gender-identity claims _was_ confused. (1 Like on this reply, _vs._ 140 Likes/21 Retweets on start of thread.) I expected that the typical reader who had gotten the impression from the initial thread that Yudkowsky thought that gender-identity skeptics didn't have a leg to stand on, would not, actually, be disabused of this impression by the existence of this little follow-up. Was it greedy of me to want something _louder_?
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 lightning comes first), but that [the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [_destroys everyone's ability to think_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
+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 title was a [pun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) referencing computer scientist Scott Aaronson's post advocating ["The Kolmogorov Option"](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376), serving the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on specific 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_.) Alexander had explained that the problem with Kolmogorov Option strategies isn't so much the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to _directly_ make use of the fact that lightning comes first), but that [the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [_destroys everyone's ability to think_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
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.
If our vaunted rationality techniques resulted in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I didn't think that I was a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) wasn'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 were _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 November 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says that the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+[If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 November 2014, but in retrospect, _maybe_ it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says that the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
And the reason to write this as 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 Alexander and Yudkowsky rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs some 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."
Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we didn't. If Scott didn't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that was _totally fine_; I liked 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 needed to _die_, and he alone could kill it.
-... Scott didn't get it. We agreed that self-identity-, natal-sex-, and passing-based gender categories each had their own pros and cons, and that it's uninteresting to focus on whether something "really" belongs to a category, rather than on communicating what you mean. Scott took this to mean that what convention to use is a pragmatic choice that we can make on utilitarian grounds, and that being nice to trans people is worth a little bit of clunkiness.
+... Scott didn't get it. We agreed that self-identity-, natal-sex-, and passing-based gender categories each had their own pros and cons, and that it's uninteresting to focus on whether something "really" belongs to a category, rather than on communicating what you mean. Scott took this to mean that what convention to use is a pragmatic choice that we can make on utilitarian grounds, and that being nice to trans was worth a little bit of clunkiness, that the mental health benefits to trans people were obviously enough to tip the first-order uilitarian calculus.
-But I considered myself to be prosecuting _not_ the object-level question of which gender categories to use, but the meta-level question of what normative principles govern which categories we should use, for which, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't an answer, because (I claimed) the principles exclude "just be nice" from being a relevant consideration. I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) 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 could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.
+I didn't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" was obvious, but more importantly, I considered myself to be prosecuting _not_ the object-level question of which gender categories to use, but the meta-level question of what normative principles govern which categories we should use, for which (I claimed) "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't an answer, because (I claimed) the principles exclude "just be nice" from being a relevant consideration.
["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) had concluded with a section on Emperor Norton, a 19th century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not difficult or costly for the citizens of San Francisco to _address_ Norton as "Your Majesty" as a courtesy or a nickname. But there's more to being the Emperor of the United States than people calling you "Your Majesty." Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not _actually_ functioning in the role of emperor—at least not according to the currently generally-understood meaning of the word "emperor."
On 5 January, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with [Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/) and [Gwen](https://everythingtosaveit.how/), who were considering suing CfAR for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because Michael approved of CfAR's behavior, but because involving lawyers makes everything worse.
-Ziz recounted [her story](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative) story of Anna's alleged discrimination, engaging in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (I remember at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
+Ziz recounted [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) [story of Anna's alleged discrimination](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative), engaging in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (I remember at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
Probably the most ultimately significant part of this meeting for future events was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee who had put up a website slandering them. I don't actually know the details of the alleged settlement. (I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than particularly remembering that part of the conversation clearly; I don't know what Michael knew.)
But _Michael thought I was in the right_—not just intellectually on the philosophy issue, but morally in the right to be _prosecuting_ the philosophy issue with our leaders, and not accepting stonewalling as an answer. That social proof gave me a lot of bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster up—even though it would have been better if I could have propagated the implications of the observation that my dependence on him was self-undermining, because Michael himself said that the thing that made me valuable was my ability to think independently.
-The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that had been a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of Effective Altruism, which he saw as preying on the energies of the smartest and most scrupulous people around with bogus claims about how to do good in the world. (I remember being at a party in 2015 and asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering. I was surprised when his answer was, "You.")
+The social proof was probably more effective in my own head, than it was with anyone we were arguing with. _I remembered_ Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that had been a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011; and apparently, some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years, the details of which had never been explained to me.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of the Effective Altruism movement, which he saw as using bogus claims about how to do the most good to prey on the energies of the smartest and most scrupulous people around. (I remember being at a party in 2015 and asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering. I was surprised when his answer was, "You.")
Another blow to Michael's "community" reputation was dealt on 27 February, when Anna [published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD), which I found pretty disappointing—more so as I began to realize the implications.
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.
-[I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqamOOSdeHs) [settled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF18bz2j5PM) [on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hny1prRDE3I) [Sara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) [Barellies's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZMQ0OKVO80&t=112s) ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists. ("And I tell myself to let the story end / And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's—"My 'why not me?' philosophy began" ...)
+I settled on Sara Barellies's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. ("And I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement—"And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's.)[^breakup]
+
+[^breakup]: In general, I'm proud of my careful choices of breakup songs. For example, my breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013).
+
+ The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with abstract institutional perceived-authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone.
Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott got started back up again, although I wasn't expecting anything public 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.
(Incidentally, the code that I wrote intermittently between 11 _p.m._ and 4 _a.m._ was a horrible bug-prone mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since, every time someone needs to modify that function and finds it harder to make sense of than it would be if I had been less emotionally overwhelmed in March 2019 and written something sane instead.)
-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. Ben pointed out that [making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way. And even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.
+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. Ben pointed out that [making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way—and even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.
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 overt 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: either one of those things could make sense, but not _both_.)
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"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you) in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just gave up on the "rationalists" being a thing, and went out into the world to make friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates, then I would lose all that accumulated capital.
+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"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you) in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just gave up on the "rationalists" being a thing, and went out into the world to make friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates, then I would lose all that accumulated capital. Here, I had a _massive_ home territory advantage because I could appeal to Yudkowsky's writings about the philosophy of language from 10 years ago, and people couldn't say, "Eliezer _who?_ He's probably a Bad Man."
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.
Ultimately, I think this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 'aught-eight. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking useful thought about the _exact, precise_ ways that _specific, definite_ things are _in fact_ relative to other specific, definite things.
-I told him I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue, and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.
+I told Scott I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue, and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.
On Discord in January, Kelsey Piper had told me that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion for importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.
Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was _creating clarity about behavioral patterns_. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
-Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone: for example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient for you is a threat to your marketing story and therefore a threat to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up power gradients: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Eliezer Yudkowsky's narcissistic delusions.
+Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone: for example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient for you is a threat to your marketing story and therefore a threat to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up power gradients: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky's narcissistic delusions.
But _selectively_ creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—just like how selectively criticizing arguments with politically unfavorable conclusions only reinforces your current political beliefs. I shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that [calling non-exclusively-androphilic trans women delusional perverts](/2017/Mar/smart/) is okay on the grounds that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but that calling out Alexander and Yudkowsky would be unjustified on the grounds of starting a war or whatever. If I was being cowardly or otherwise unprincipled, I should own that instead of generating spurious justifications. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not on board with a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, but then emits spurious excuses for not following that effort where it leads.
Polishing the advanced categories argument from earlier email drafts into a solid _Less Wrong_ post didn't take that long: by 6 April, I had an almost-complete draft of the new post, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), that I was pretty happy with.
-The title (note: "boundaries", plural) was a play off of ["Where to the Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's original Sequence on the ways in which words can be wrong. In "... Boundary?", Yudkowsky asserts (without argument, as something that all educated people already know) that dolphins don't form a natural category with fish ("Once upon a time it was thought that the word 'fish' included dolphins [...] you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list"). But Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) directly contradicts this, asserting that there's nothing wrong with with biblical Hebrew word _dagim_ encompassing both fish and cetaceans (dolphins and whales). So who's right, Yudkowsky (2008) or Alexander (2014)? Is there a problem with dolphins being "fish", or not?
+The title (note: "boundaries", plural) was a play off of ["Where to the Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's [original Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) on the [37 ways in which words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). In "... Boundary?", Yudkowsky asserts (without argument, as something that all educated people already know) that dolphins don't form a natural category with fish ("Once upon a time it was thought that the word 'fish' included dolphins [...] Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list"). But Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) directly contradicts this, asserting that there's nothing wrong with with biblical Hebrew word _dagim_ encompassing both fish and cetaceans (dolphins and whales). So who's right, Yudkowsky (2008) or Alexander (2014)? Is there a problem with dolphins being "fish", or not?
In "... Boundaries?", I unify the two positions and explain how both Yudkowsky and Alexander have a point: in high-dimensional configuration space, there's a cluster of finned water-dwelling animals in the subspace of the dimensions along which finned water-dwelling animals are similar to each other, and a cluster of mammals in the subspace of the dimensions along which mammals are similar to each other, and dolphins belong to _both_ of them. _Which_ subspace you pay attention to can legitimately depend on your values: if you don't care about predicting or controlling some particular variable, you have no reason to look for clusters along that dimension.
-But _given_ a subspace of interest, the _technical_ criterion of drawing category boundaries around [regions of high density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the mutual information between the job title and properties of the job.
+But _given_ a subspace of interest, the _technical_ criterion of drawing category boundaries around [regions of high density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster in ℝ³, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the [mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) between the job title and properties of the job.
-(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ ended up getting published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own [in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) [future](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) [posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra) [a](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3) [number](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy) [of](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) [posts](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/) [by](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) [other](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/) [authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/).)
+(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ got published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own [in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) [future](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) [posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra) [a](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3) [number](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy) [of](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) [posts](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/) [by](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) [other](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/) [authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/).)
-Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it is written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
+Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it was written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", "Using language in a way _you_ dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret"), and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").
-My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. Then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
+My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. And then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", the reputable people could stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
-I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
+Another reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
-(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the 60+-comment trainwreck on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
+I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
------
+But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing case that a lot of people were making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. As Ben pointed out, if someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I probably _would_ put some serious thought into it.
-[TODO: Jessica on corruption—
-> I am reminded of someone who I talked with about Zack writing to you and Scott to request that you clarify the category boundary thing. This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
-]
+I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include political subtext and then only expect people to engage with the politically-clean text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
-[TODO small section: concern about bad faith nitpicking—
+(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/), as evidenced by the 60-plus-entry trainwreck of a comments section. It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
-One reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
+On 13 April, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could _either_ publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong; and, that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of spoons, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive? The reason I thought this was important, I explained, was that if rationalists in [good standing](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/) find themselves in a persistent disagreement _about rationality itself_—in this case, my disagreement with Scott Alexander and others about the cognitive function of categories—that seemed like a major concern for [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), something we should be very eager to _definitively settle in public_ (or at least _clarify_ the current state of the disagreement). In the absence of an established "rationality court of last resort", I feared the closest thing we had was an appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal judgement. Despite the context in which the dispute arose, _this wasn't a political issue_. The post I was asking for his comment on was _just_ about the [_mathematical laws_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) governing how to talk about, _e.g._, dolphins. We had _nothing to be afraid of_ here. (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").
-I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
+I got some pushback from Ben and Jessica about claiming that this wasn't "political". What I meant by that was to emphasize (again) that I didn't expect Yudkowsky or "the community" to take a public stance _on gender politics_; I was 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 didn't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps?
-But, well, I thought I had made a pretty convincing that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would actually be justified here. If someone had put _this much_ effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I think I _would_ put some serious thought into it.
+Anyway, again without revealing any content from the other side of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred, we did not get any public engagement from Yudkowsky.
-]
+It seemed that the Category War was over, and we lost.
+We _lost?!_ How could we _lose?!_ The philosophy here was _very clear-cut_. This _shouldn't_ be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky ...!?
+I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (I would have humbly given up much sooner if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and secret posse member and Jessica.)
+But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even _more_ inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. The game theorist Thomas Schelling once wrote about the use of clever excuses to help one's negotiating counterparty release themselves from a prior commitment: "One must seek [...] a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."[^schelling] This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "... Boundaries?" By making the post be about dolphins, I was trying to deny myself too great of a reward _on the gender-politics front_. I _don't_ think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to _be correct about the cognitive function of categorization_. (If not, why pretend to have a "rationality community" at all?) I was _trying_ to be as accomodating as I could, short of just letting him (us?) be wrong.
-[TODO: We lost?! How could we lose??!!?!? And, post-war concessions ...
+[^schelling]: _Strategy of Conflict_, Ch. 2, "An Essay on Bargaining"
-curation hopes ... 22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
+Maybe that's not how politics works? Could it be that, somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that weren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument (categories are arbitrary) for a true conclusion (trans people are OK)", _were_ smart enough to connect the dots between my broader agenda and my (correct) abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs didn't think they could endorse my _correct_ philosophy argument, without it being _construed as_ an endorsement of me and my detailed heresies?
-"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/
-"Yes Requires the Possibility of No" 19 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
-scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander requesting that they clarify the category boundary thing. This person described having a sense that I should have known that wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right. I thought Jessica's takeaway was very poignant:
-]
+> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
-Since arguing at the object level had failed (["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), and arguing at the strictly meta level had failed (["... Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)), the obvious thing to do next was to jump up to the meta-meta level and tell the story about why the "rationalists" were Dead To Me now, that [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) was not being met. (Just like Ben had suggested in December and in April.)
+_Should_ I have known that it wouldn't work? _Didn't_ I "already know", at some level?
-I found it trouble to make progress on. I felt—constrained. I didn't know how to tell the story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise "the rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
+I guess in retrospect, the outcome does seem kind of "obvious"—that it should have been possible to predict in advance, and to make the corresponding update without so much fuss and wasting so many people's time.
+But ... it's only "obvious" if you _take as a given_ that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year.[^any-other-public-intellectual]
-[TODO 2019 activities—
-"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019, "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019, "Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019, "Heads I Win" Sep 2019, "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
-"epistemic defense" meeting
+[^any-other-public-intellectual]: And really, that's the _charitable_ interpretation. The extent to which I still have trouble entertaining the idea that Yudkowsky _acutally_ drunk the gender ideology Kool-Aid, rather than merely having pretended to, is a testament to the thoroughness of my indoctrination.
-bitter comments about rationalists—
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
+Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult? Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of validity in defense of meaning" thread—I have respected it a solidly above-average philosophy performance, before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year, was not really in my hypothesis space. It took some _very large_ likelihood ratios to beat it into my head the thing that was obviously happenening, was actually happening.
-]
+Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone, who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, _maybe_ there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it must have just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
+
+One might wonder why this was such a big deal to us. Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for transparently political reasons, and couldn't be moved to clarify in public even after me and my posse spent an enormous amount of effort trying to explain the problem. So what? Aren't people wrong on the internet all the time?
+
+Ben explained: Yudkowsky had set in motion a marketing machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on the claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he, almost uniquely, was not. "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically. If the claim was _true_, it was important to make, and to actually extract that labor.
+
+But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a _extremely high_ standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, then we had a right to talk in public about what we thought was going on.
+
+This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
+
+Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the _initial intent_, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't surive long-run in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry instead of playing savvy Kolmogorov games to survive, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+
+-------
+
+Given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing, and the operators of the marketing machine for the old thing.
+
+_I_ had been hyperfocused on prosecuting my Category War, but the reason Michael and Ben and Jessica were willing to help me out on that, was not because they particularly cared about the gender and categories example, but because it seemed like a manifestation of a _more general_ problem of epistemic rot in "the community".
+
+Ben had [previously](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/givewell-and-partial-funding/) [written](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/) a lot [about](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/) [problems](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-responsibility/) [with](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-neglectedness/) 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? It's not as simple as shouting, "Hey guys, Truth matters!"—any ideologue or religious person would agree with _that_. It's not feasible to litigate every petty epistemic crime in something someone said, and if you tried, someone who thought the culture was basically on track could accuse you of cherry-picking. If "culture" is a real thing at all—and it certainly seems to be—we are condemned to grasp it unclearly, relying on our brain's pattern-matching faculties to sum over thousands of little micro-actions as a _gestalt_, rather than having the kind of robust, precise representation a well-designed AI could compute with.
+
+Ben called the _gestalt_ he saw 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—using and construing claims about facts as moves in a power game, albeit sometimes subject to genre constraints under which only true facts were admissible moves in the game.
+
+When I asked him for specific examples of MIRI or CfAR leaders behaving badly, he gave the example of [MIRI executive director Nate Soares posting that he was "excited to see OpenAI joining the space"](https://intelligence.org/2015/12/11/openai-and-other-news/), despite the fact that [_no one_ who had been following the AI risk discourse](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/) [thought that OpenAI as originally announced was a good idea](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/). Nate had privately clarified to Ben that the word "excited" wasn't necessarily meant positively, and in this case meant something more like "terrified."
+
+This seemed to me like the sort of thing where a particularly principled (naive?) person might say, "That's _lying for political reasons!_ That's _contrary to the moral law!_" and most ordinary grown-ups would say, "Why are you so upset about this? That sort of strategic phrasing in press releases is just how the world works, and things could not possibly be otherwise."
+
+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"](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.html) 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 (!!), 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:[^soldiers] their actions are being directed by the Power they're embedded in.
+
+[^soldiers]: At least, not blameworthy _in the same way_ as someone who committed the same violence as an individual.
+
+I wrote to Anna:
+
+> I was _just_ trying to publicly settle a _very straightforward_ philosophy thing that seemed _really solid_ to me
+>
+> if, in the process, I accidentally ended up being an unusually useful pawn in Michael Vassar's deranged four-dimensional hyperchess political scheming
+>
+> that's ... _arguably_ not my fault
+
+-----
+
+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 4 May, Yudkowsky [reTweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922)—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 7 May, Kelsey wrote [a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my point](https://www.facebook.com/julia.galef/posts/pfbid0QjdD8kWAZJMiczeLdMioqmPkRhewcmGtQpXRBu2ruXq8SkKvw5yvvSH2cWVDghWRl?comment_id=10104430041947222&reply_comment_id=10104430059182682).
+
+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)?
+
+----
-[TODO section on factional conflict:
-Michael on Anna as cult leader
-Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
-24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
-me being regarded as Michael's pawn
-assortment of agendas
-mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
+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, was thinking of writing a public reply to her comment against Michael]
+
+[TODO: tussle on "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019 ]
+
+[TODO: tussle on new _Less Wrong_ FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk ]
+
+[TODO: more philosophy-of-language blogging! and bitter grief comments
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FT9Lkoyd5DcCoPMYQ/partial-summary-of-debate-with-benquo-and-jessicata-pt-1/comment/vPekZcouSruiCco3c
]
+[TODO: 17– Jun, "LessWrong.com is dead to me" in response to "It's Not the Incentives", comment on Ray's behavior, "If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us"; Bill Brent, "Casual vs. Social Reality", I met with Ray 29 Jun; https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself ; calling out the abstract pattern]
+
+[TODO: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
+
+[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam", within-group debate on what is a "scam" or "fraud", Pope]
+
+[TODO: epistemic defense meeting; the first morning where "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us"]
+
+[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip; make sure to include the part about Michael threatening to sue]
+
+[TODO: various tussling with Steven Kaas]
+
[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
]
-
-
In November, I received an interesting reply on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifer for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, it's very important for evolved prey animals to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an epistemically legitimate clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
-Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics—
+Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.
But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't tile and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places. I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me the way almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
+[TODO: Ziz's protest]
+
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
[TODO:
+Scott asked me who to ask about survey design on 20 December, I recommended Tailcalled
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/30/please-take-the-2020-ssc-survey/
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/
+
Scott replies on 21 December https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E
-> since these are not about factual states of the world (eg what the definition of "lie" REALLY is, in God's dictionary) we have nothing to make those decisions on except consequences
+on Christmas Eve, I gave in to the urge to blow up at him
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF
-I snapped https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7
+> Like, sibling comments are _very_ not-nice, but I argue that they meet the Slate Star commenting policy guidelines on account of being both true and necessary.
+
+December tussle with Scott, and, a Christmas party—
Christmas party
playing on a different chessboard
A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
-motivation deflates after Christmas victory
-5 Jan memoir as nuke
-]
+memoir motivation deflates after Christmas victory
+5 Jan memoir as nuke]
+-------
There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
-Here I again need to make a digression about privacy norms. Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason as AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), explicit constraints on behavior face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive that what we would colloquially think of as the "content" of a message.
+Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent the constraint. The intent of privacy norms restricting what things you're allowed to say, is to conceal information. But _information_ in Shannon's sense is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text, what we would colloquially think of as the explicit "content" of a message.
+If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information, but also wants to comply with privacy norms, has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm, that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay _just_ shy of being that egregious.
+Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against "lying", I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."
-[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common"]
+Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent many hours in the first half of 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occured to me.
+
+Previously, I had _already_ thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence the rearing of gender-non-conforming children, that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of _behavior_ (_e.g._, social play styles) for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very feminine boys. Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at _d_ ≈ 1.31 for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).) A solid supermajority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would get affirmed into a cross-sex identity (and being a lifelong medical patient) much earlier, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
+
+What made this crazy, in my view, was not just that child transition is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though the vast supermajority of trans adults were in the AGP taxon and therefore _had never resembled_ these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions of _guys like me_.
+
+That much was obvious to anyone who's had their Blanchardian enlightenment, and wouldn't have been worth the effort of writing a special private Document about. The disturbing hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020 was that, in the culture of the current year, affirmation of a cross-sex identity might happen to kids _who weren't even HSTS-taxon at all_.
+
+Very small children who are just learning what words mean say a lot of things that aren't true (I'm a grown-up; I'm a cat; I'm a dragon), and grownups tend to play along _in the moment_ as a fantasy game, but they don't _coordinate to make that the permanent new social reality_. Ten years ago, if an otherwise ordinary three-year-old boy had occasionally claimed to be a girl, I think his nice smart liberal unschooling grownups would treat it about the same way as when the kid claims to be a cat. (I'm going with the MtF case with only a little loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to "trans" females at this age.)
+
+But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore evidence that the kid "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that _would not have existed_ if not for their belief in it.
+
+Crucially, if innate gender identity _isn't_ a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [_Toddlers_ are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play styles tend to emerge within a few years. (Did you know the [sex difference in preference for toy cars is _d_ ≈ 2.44?!](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf)) What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as "a girl", only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the [many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) where people are using "gender" (percieved sex) to make a prediction or decision?
+
+Some might protest, "But what's the harm? She can always change her mind later if she decides she's actually a boy." I don't doubt that if the child were to clearly and distinctly insist, "I'm definitely a boy," the nice smart liberal grown-ups would unhesitatingly accept that.
+
+But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that hurts to not be respected. (What _is_ an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously verbally asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy."
+
+Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). A culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans, and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, has concept-shaped holes that make it hard to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution of juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans", even if it's true.
+
+... anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and not a professional scientist. (And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who was "actually trans", whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.)
+
+For some reason, it seemed really important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. If I get around to it, I might clean it up and publish it as a blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data").
+
+Given that I spent so many hours on this little research/writing project in early 2020, I think it makes sense for me to mention at this point in the memoir, where it fits in chronologically. I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my research interests obviously doesn't violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else's family, or criticizing someone's parenting decisions.
+
+(Only—you two have such beautiful children!)
+
+-----
+
+[TODO: "Human Diversity" review; all swans are white!]
+
+[TODO: pandemic starts]
+
+[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
[TODO: help from Jessica for "Unnatural Categories"]
]
[TODO: "out of patience" email]
+
+> To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]>
+> Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: 13 September 2020 2:24 _a.m._
+> Subject: out of patience
+>
+>> "I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason: you must say it, because it is true."
+>> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
+>
+> Dear Eliezer (cc Anna as mediator):
+>
+> Sorry, I'm getting _really really_ impatient (maybe you saw my impulsive Tweet-replies today; and I impulsively called Anna today; and I've spent the last few hours drafting an even more impulsive hysterical-and-shouty potential _Less Wrong_ post; but now I'm impulsively deciding to email you in the hopes that I can withhold the hysterical-and-shouty post in favor of a lower-drama option of your choice): **is there _any_ way we can resolve the categories dispute _in public_?! Not** any object-level gender stuff which you don't and shouldn't care about, **_just_ the philosophy-of-language part.**
+>
+> My grievance against you is *very* simple. [You are *on the public record* claiming that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
+>
+>> you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
+>
+> I claim that this is _false_. **I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning, when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred usage does a better job of "carving reality at the joints" and the one bringing my usage into question doesn't have such an argument. And in particular, "This word usage makes me sad" doesn't count as a relevant argument.** I [agree that words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution), but precisely _because_ words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings, there's no _reason_ to challenge someone's word usage except _because_ of the hidden probabilistic inference it embodies.
+>
+> Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, "Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!" And you replied: "No, I'm not! That's a lie." And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive and piped up, "You are _ontologcially confused_ if you think that's a false assertion. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on words, such _white supremacist_, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." Suppose you emailed Jaynes about it, and he brushed you off with, "But I didn't _say_ you were a white supremacist; I was only targeting a narrow ontology error." In this hypothetical situation, I think you might be pretty upset—perhaps upset enough to form a twenty-one month grudge against someone whom you used to idolize?
+>
+> I agree that pronouns don't have the same function as ordinary nouns. However, **in the English language as actually spoken by native speakers, I think that gender pronouns _do_ have effective "truth conditions" _as a matter of cognitive science_.** If someone said, "Come meet me and my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her", and then that friend turned out to look like me, **you would be surprised**.
+>
+> I don't see the _substantive_ difference between "You're not standing in defense of truth (...)" and "I can define a word any way I want." [...]
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> As far as your public output is concerned, it *looks like* you either changed your mind about how the philosophy of language works, or you think gender is somehow an exception. If you didn't change your mind, and you don't think gender is somehow an exception, is there some way we can _get that on the public record **somewhere**?!_
+>
+> As an example of such a "somewhere", I had asked you for a comment on my explanation, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (with non-politically-hazardous examples about dolphins and job titles) [... redacted ...] I asked for a comment from Anna, and at first she said that she would need to "red team" it first (because of the political context), and later she said that she was having difficulty for other reasons. Okay, the clarification doesn't have to be on _my_ post. **I don't care about credit! I don't care whether or not anyone is sorry! I just need this _trivial_ thing settled in public so that I can stop being in pain and move on with my life.**
+>
+> As I mentioned in my Tweets today, I have a longer and better explanation than "... Boundaries?" mostly drafted. (It's actually somewhat interesting; the logarithmic score doesn't work as a measure of category-system goodness because it can only reward you for the probability you assign to the _exact_ answer, but we _want_ "partial credit" for almost-right answers, so the expected squared error is actually better here, contrary to what you said in [the "Technical Explanation"](https://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) about what Bayesian statisticians do). [... redacted]
+>
+> The *only* thing I've been trying to do for the past twenty-one months
+is make this simple thing established "rationalist" knowledge:
+>
+> (1) For all nouns _N_, you can't define _N_ any way you want, [for at least 37 reasons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+>
+> (2) *Woman* is such a noun.
+>
+> (3) Therefore, you can't define the word *woman* any way you want.
+>
+> (Note, **this is _totally compatible_ with the claim that trans women are women, and trans men are men, and nonbinary people are nonbinary!** It's just that **you have to _argue_ for why those categorizations make sense in the context you're using the word**, rather than merely asserting it with an appeal to arbitrariness.)
+>
+> This is **literally _modus ponens_**. I don't understand how you expect people to trust you to save the world with a research community that _literally cannot perform modus ponens._
+>
+> [redacted ...] See, I thought you were playing on the chessboard of _being correct about rationality_. Such that, if you accidentally mislead people about your own philosophy of language, you could just ... issue a clarification? I and Michael and Ben and Sarah and [redacted] _and Jessica_ wrote to you about this and explained the problem in _painstaking_ detail, **and you stonewalled us.** Why? **Why is this so hard?!**
+>
+> [redacted]
+>
+> No. The thing that's been driving me nuts for twenty-one months is that <strong><em><span style="color: #F00000;">I expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth</span></strong></em>. I remain,
+>
+> Your heartbroken student,
+> [...]
+
+I followed it up with another email after I woke up the next morning:
+
+> To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]>
+> Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: 13 September 2020 11:02 _a.m._
+> Subject: Re: out of patience
+>
+> [... redacted] The sinful and corrupted part wasn't the _initial_ Tweets; the sinful and corrupted part is this **bullshit stonewalling** when your Twitter followers and me and Michael and Ben and Sarah and [redacted] and Jessica tried to point out the problem. I've _never_ been arguing against your private universe [... redacted]; the thing I'm arguing against in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (and **my [unfinished draft sequel](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Category_War/blob/cefa98c3abe/unnatural_categories_are_optimized_for_deception.md)**, although that's more focused on what Scott wrote) is the **_actual text_ you _actually published_, not your private universe.**
+>
+> [... redacted] you could just **publicly clarify your position on the philosophy of language** the way an intellectually-honest person would do if they wanted their followers to have correct beliefs about the philosophy of language?!
+>
+> You wrote:
+>
+>> [Using language in a way](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243) _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying.
+>
+>> [Now, maybe as a matter of policy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297), you want to make a case for language 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.
+>
+> The problem with "it's a policy debate about how to use language" is that it completely elides the issue that some ways of using language _perform better_ at communicating information, such that **attempts to define new words or new senses of _existing_ words should come with a justification for why the new sense is _useful for conveying information_, and that _is_ a matter of Truth.** Without such a justification, it's hard to see why you would _want_ to redefine a word _except_ to mislead people with strategic equivocation.
+>
+> It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
+>
+> It is _literally true_ that 2 + 2 = 6 (if I'm allowed to define '2' as •••-many).
+>
+> You wrote:
+>
+>> [The more technology advances, the further](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096) we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts.
+>
+> That's kind of like defining Solomonoff induction, and then saying, "Having said this, we've built AGI." No, you haven't said all the facts! Configuration space is _very high-dimensional_; we don't have _access_ to the individual points. Trying to specify the individual points ("say all the facts") would be like what you wrote about in ["Empty Labels"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)—"not just that I can vary the label, but that I can get along just fine without any label at all." Since that's not possible, we need to group points into the space together so that we can use observations from the coordinates that we _have_ observed to make probabilistic inferences about the coordinates we haven't. But there are _mathematical laws_ governing how well different groupings perform, and those laws _are_ a matter of Truth, not a mere policy debate.
+>
+> [... redacted ...]
+>
+> But if behavior at equilibrium isn't deceptive, there's just _no such thing as deception_; I wrote about this on Less Wrong in ["Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) (drawing on the academic literature about sender–reciever games). I don't think you actually want to bite that bullet?
+>
+> **In terms of information transfer, there is an isomorphism between saying "I reserve the right to lie 5% of the time about whether something is a member of category C" and adopting a new definition of C that misclassifies 5% of instances with respect to the old definition.**
+>
+> Like, I get that you're ostensibly supposed to be saving the world and you don't want randos yelling at you in your email about philosophy. But **I thought the idea was that we were going to save the world [_by means of_ doing unusually clear thinking?**](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy)
+>
+> [Scott wrote](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (with an irrelevant object-level example redacted): "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life." (Okay, he added a clarification after I spent Christmas yelling at him; but I think he's still substantially confused in ways that I address in my forthcoming draft post.)
+>
+> [You wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048): "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning."
+>
+> I think I've argued pretty extensively this is wrong! **I'm eager to hear counterarguments if you think I'm getting the philosophy wrong.** But ... **"people live in different private universes" is _not a counterargument_.**
+>
+> **It makes sense that you don't want to get involved in gender politics. That's why I wrote "... Boundaries?" using examples about dolphins and job titles, and why my forthcoming post has examples about bleggs and artificial meat.** This shouldn't be _expensive_ to clear up?! This should take like, five minutes? (I've spent twenty-one months of my life on this.) Just one little _ex cathedra_ comment on Less Wrong or _somewhere_ (**it doesn't have to be my post, if it's too long or I don't deserve credit or whatever**; I just think the right answer needs to be public) affirming that you haven't changed your mind about 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong? Unless you _have_ changed your mind, of course?
+>
+> I can imagine someone observing this conversation objecting, "[...] why are you being so greedy? We all know the _real_ reason you want to clear up this philosophy thing in public is because it impinges on your gender agenda, but Eliezer _already_ threw you a bone with the ['there's probably more than one type of dypshoria' thing.](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) That was already a huge political concession to you! That makes you _more_ than even; you should stop being greedy and leave Eliezer alone."
+>
+> But as [I explained in my reply](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) criticizing why I think that argument is _wrong_, the whole mindset of public-arguments-as-political-favors is _crazy_. **The fact that we're having this backroom email conversation at all (instead of just being correct about the philosophy of language on Twitter) is _corrupt_!** I don't want to strike a deal in a political negotiation; I want _shared maps that reflect the territory_. I thought that's what this "rationalist community" thing was supposed to do? Is that not a thing anymore? If we can't do the shared-maps thing when there's any hint of political context (such that now you _can't_ clarify the categories thing, even as an abstract philosophy issue about bleggs, because someone would construe that as taking a side on whether trans people are Good or Bad), that seems really bad for our collective sanity?! (Where collective sanity is potentially useful for saving the world, but is at least a quality-of-life improver if we're just doomed to die in 15 years no matter what.)
+>
+> **I really used to look up to you.** In my previous interactions with you, I've been tightly [cognitively constrained](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/57) by hero-worship. I was already so starstruck that _Eliezer Yudkowsky knows who I am_, that the possibility that _Eliezer Yudkowsky might disapprove of me_, was too terrifying to bear. I really need to get over that, because it's bad for me, and [it's _really_ bad for you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why). I remain,
+>
+> Your heartbroken student,
+> [...]
+
+
+
[TODO: Sep 2020 categories clarification from EY—victory?!
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228
+_ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule, only 1 year and 8 months after asking for it
]
-[TODO: briefly mention breakup with Vassar group]
+[TODO: Sasha disaster, breakup with Vassar group]
[TODO: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"
somehow accuracy seems more fundamental than power or resources ... could that be formalized?
]
-
And really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. At the trifling cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that. I was satsified. I still published "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" in January 2021, but if I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
[TODO: NYT affair and Brennan link
https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+
]
... except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation in February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt-out of the default buckets, without causing too much trouble.)
-But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.5; your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
+But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.4; your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
While piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not have merit. The post continues (bolding mine):
Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.
-But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is _absurd_. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive for insisting on complication and nuance is as an obfuscation tactic—unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
+But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is _absurd_. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive for insisting on complication and nuance is as an obfuscation tactic—
+
+Unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. [My previous hopeless ideological war—before this one—was against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I _hated_ being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.
This is a _rationality_ skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she _revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence_. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)
-(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michaell Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
+(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michalle Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
This also isn't a particularly _advanced_ rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or at least, if it does have any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.
-At this point, some people would argue that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post does also explicitly say that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the one that doesn't make sense?
+At this point, some people would argue that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post does _also_ explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I _agree_ that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the one that doesn't make sense?
-I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. Yudkowsky is just _too talented of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an artifact of unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous. When smart people act dumb, [it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. The point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point out as a "lie."
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just _too talented of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an accidental artifact of unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous. When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point out as a "lie."
Consider the implications of Yudkowsky giving as a clue as to the political forces as play in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a metaphor for a large negative utility, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation! And _any other partisan hack could say exactly the same_, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.
-If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low." If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
* ...
]
-
-
I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.)
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say, are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up!
-Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob 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?
+
+Does ... does he expect the rest of us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
But I don't, think that everybody knows. And I'm not, giving up that easily. Not on an entire subculture full of people.
Yudkowsky [defends his behavior](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176):
-> I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle...
->
-> ...just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.
+> I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.
+
+[TODO: first of all, "A Rational Arugment" is very explicit about "not have been as willing to Tweet a truth helping the side" meaning you've crossed the line; second of all, it's if anything more plausible that trans women will matter to AGI, as I pointed out in my email]
But the battle that matters—the battle with a Right Side and a Wrong Side—isn't "pro-trans" _vs._ "anti-trans". (The central tendency of the contemporary trans rights movement is firmly on the Wrong Side, but that's not the same thing as all trans people as individuals.) That's why Jessica joined our posse to try to argue with Yudkowsky in early 2019. (She wouldn't have, if my objection had been, "trans is fake; trans people Bad".) That's why Somni—one of the trans women who [infamously protested the 2019 CfAR reunion](https://www.ksro.com/2019/11/18/new-details-in-arrests-of-masked-camp-meeker-protesters/) for (among other things) CfAR allegedly discriminating against trans women—[understands what I've been saying](https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind).
If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.
-Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is very explicit about only acting in the capacity of some guy with a blog. You can tell from his writings that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is great. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
+Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is [very explicit about only acting in the capacity of some guy with a blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). You can tell from his writings that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is great. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he knows to be unambiguously false.
-
-
-
+[TODO— finish Yudkowsky trying to be a religious leader
Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader.
If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
]
-
-
-[TODO section stakes, cooperation
-
-at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation]
> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good). _If the world were at stake._
>
> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
+[TODO: social justice and defying threats
+
+at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+]
I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
]
-[TODO: sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?!
+[TODO: sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
-[TODO: if he's reading this, win back respect— reply, motherfucker]
+On the offhand chance that Eliezer Yudkowsky happens to be reading this—if someone _he_ trusts (MIRI employees?) genuinely thinks it would be good for the lightcone to bring this paragraph to his attention—he should know that if he _wanted_ to win back _some_ of the trust and respect he's lost from me and everyone I can influence—not _all_ of it, but _some_ of it[^some-of-it]—I think it would be really easy. All he would have to do is come clean about the things he's _already_ misled people about.
-[TODO: the Death With Dignity era]
+[^some-of-it]: Coming clean _after_ someone writes a 70,000 word memoir explaining how dishonest you've been, engenders less trust than coming clean spontenously of your own accord.
-I don't, actually, know how to prevent the world from ending. Probably we were never going to survive. (The cis-human era of Earth-originating intelligent life wasn't going to last forever, and it's hard to exert detailed control over what comes next.) But if we're going to die either way, I think it would be _more dignified_ if Eliezer Yudkowsky were to behave as if he wanted his faithful students to be informed. Since it doesn't look like we're going to get that, I think it's _more dignified_ if his faithful students _know_ that he's not behaving like he wants us to be informed. And so one of my goals in telling you this long story about how I spent (wasted?) the last six years of my life, is to communicate the moral that **I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth, and I don't think you should trust him, either**—and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.
+I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's _clearly labeled as such_ would be fine. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
+
+What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_. That's _not_ "no commment"! Having _already_ chosen to comment, he can't reasonably expect any self-respecting rationalist to take his "epistemic hero" bluster seriously if he's not going to reply to the obvious objections to have been made with standing and warrant. To wit—
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] 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." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+
+ * In a comment on his February 2021 Facebook post on pronoun reform, Yudkowsky [claims that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228) "in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where [...] you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment". Some interesting potential counterevidence to this "not community-harmful" claim comes in the form of [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror of my rebuttal. Habryka writes:
+
+> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+Again, that's the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!). Is that ... _not_ a form of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
+
+... but I'm not, holding my breath. If Yudkowsky _wants_ to reply—if he _wants_ to try to win back some of the trust and respect he's lost from me—he's totally _welcome_ to. (_I_ don't censor my comment sections of people whom it "looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with".)
+
+
+[TODO: I've given up talking to the guy (nearest unblocked strategy sniping in Eliezerfic doesn't count), my last email, giving up on hero-worship I don't want to waste any more of his time. I owe him that much.]
+
+[TODO: the Death With Dignity era
+
+"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+
+]
-Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But he didn't create me to not say mean things. If it helps—as far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007–9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+[TODO: regrets and wasted time]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff