... 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/).
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."
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, often listening to a cover of it on loop to numb the pain. ("And I tell myself to let the story end / And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's.)
+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.
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. 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.
+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.
+
+[^schelling]: _Strategy of Conflict_, Ch. 2, "An Essay on Bargaining"
+
+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?
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:
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. Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult?
-
-But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in his robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that the "hill of validity in defense of meaning" Twitter performance was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be 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.
+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 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 considered 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.
_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 written a lot about problems with Effective Altruism. Jessica had had a bad time at MIRI, as she had told me back in March, and would [later](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam) [write](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe) [about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards). To what extent were my thing, and Ben's thing, and Jessica's thing, manifestations of "the same" underlying problem? Or had we all become disaffected with the mainstream "rationalists" for our own idiosyncratic reasons, and merely randomly fallen into each other's, and Michael's, orbit?
+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_.
+I believed that there _was_ a real problem, but didn't feel like I had a good grasp on what it was specifically. Cultural critique is a fraught endeavor: if someone tells an outright lie, you can, maybe, with a lot of effort, prove that to other people, and get a correction on that specific point. (Actually, as we had just discovered, even that might be too much to hope for.) But _culture_ is the sum of lots and lots of little micro-actions by lots and lots of people. If your _entire culture_ has visibly departed from the Way that was taught to you in the late 'aughts, how do you demonstrate that to people who, to all appearances, are acting like they don't remember the old Way, or that they don't think anything has changed, or that they notice some changes but think the new way is better? It's not as simple as shouting, "Hey guys, Truth matters!"—any ideologue or religious person would agree with _that_.
-Ben called it the Blight, after the rogue superintelligence in _A Fire Upon the Deep_: the problem wasn't that people were getting dumber; it's that there was locally coherent coordination away from clarity and truth and towards coalition-building, which was validated by the official narrative in ways that gave it a huge tactical advantage; people were increasingly making decisions that were better explained by their political incentives rather than acting on coherent beliefs about the world.
+Ben called it the Blight, after the rogue superintelligence in _A Fire Upon the Deep_: the problem wasn't that people were getting dumber; it's that there was locally coherent coordination away from clarity and truth and towards coalition-building, which was validated by the official narrative in ways that gave it a huge tactical advantage; people were increasingly making decisions that were better explained by their political incentives rather than acting on coherent beliefs about the world, 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" about the launch of OpenAI, 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."
+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" 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_.
+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.
> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
-And as it happened, on 5 May, Yudkowsky reTweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"—the point that group differences aren't a matter of any single variable—which was _sort of_ like the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel a lot less personally aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpet this as another "concession" to me? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
+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 8 May, Kelsey wrote a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my point.
+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)?
----
-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 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.
[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
-[TODO: December tussle with Scott, and, a Christmas party—
+[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
-I snapped 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=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
+
+> 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
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) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
+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_.
(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.
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. 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."](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97) 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."
+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):
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).
]
-[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).
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