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 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. (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; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
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 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.
(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.)
-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 was that if rationalists in [good standing](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/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 (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").
+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 was that if rationalists in [good standing](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/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_. We had _nothing to be afraid of_ here. 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 (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").
-Again, without revealing any content from private conversations that may or may not have occurred, we did not get any public engagement from Yudkowsky.
+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?
+
+Anyway, again, without revealing any content from 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 ...!?
+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 seem inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that a simple person such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. 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. 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 possible, given that decideratum.
> 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.
+_Should_ I have known that it wouldn't work? _Didn't_ I "already know", at some level? I guess in retrospect, the outcome does seem kind of "obvious"—that it should have been possible to predict in advance and 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. Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire life in this robot cult? But the guy doesn't _market_ himself as being like any other public intellectual in the current year. As Ben put it, Yudkowsky's "claim to legitimacy really did amount to a 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." Call me a sucker, but ... I _actually believed_ Yudkowsky's marketing story. The Sequences _really were just that good_. That's why it took so much fuss and wasted time to generate a likelihood ratio large enough to falsify that story.
+Ben compared Yudkowsky to Eliza the spambot therapist in my story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/). 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. Minds like mine don'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.
-[TODO: Ben on Eliza the bot therapist]
+[TODO: weave in "set in motion a machine" 19 Apr?]
-[TODO: asking Anna to weigh in] (I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my recent habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
+[TODO Jack—
+> Zack sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys (which I think he was correct to do conditional on email happening at all).]
+
+-------
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
"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
+(which I got to cite in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy which I cited in "Schelling Categories")
+
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
-]
+"epistemic defense" meeting
[TODO section on factional conflict:
Michael on Anna as cult leader
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.
]
+8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining
+
+REACH panel
+
+(Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip")
+
+
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.)
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!
-[TODO 2019 activities—
+In August's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
-"epistemic defense" meeting
+[TODO— more blogging 2019
-"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
-"Heads I Win" Sep 2019
"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
-"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
-"Against Lie Inflation"/"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+I was _furious_ at "Against Lie Inflation"—oh, so _now_ you agree that making language less useful is a problem?! But then I realized Scott actually was being consistent in his own frame: he's counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost; but, if everyone _is_ lying, maybe they should be angry!
+"Heads I Win" Sep 2019: I was surprised by how well this did (high karma, later included in the best-of-2019 collection); Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering after I
+
+"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans
+
+]
[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
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.
]
-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, 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
+
+and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.
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).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff