>
> —Zora Neale Hurston
-Recapping our story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric prison once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
+Recapping our story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology, and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric jail once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously _directionally_ correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.
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/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 Blanchard 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.
-So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
+So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat, when I happened to come across [this thread by \@ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
> Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
>
>
> But even ignoring that, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
-Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was—tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastal—that had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_. Let me explain.
-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.
-
-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. This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to carve reality at the joints, even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
+This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was just such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky whom I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to carve reality at the joints, even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
> [S]aying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public. (Despite my misgivings, and the fact that it's basically a running joke at this point, this blog is still published under a pseudonym; it would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to, especially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author.)
-But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and stonewalling with "That's a policy question" when people try to point out the problem?
+But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting political fight about a topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and stonewalling with "That's a policy question" when people try to point out the problem?!
+
+------
---------
+... I didn't have all of that criticism collected so legibly on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I _flipped the fuck out_ when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was—tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective and put it on a pedastal—that had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+
+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.
-I was physically shaking. I remember going downstairs to confide in a senior engineer about the situation. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (And I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed less important given the present crisis.)
+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. 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 sympathetic.
-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 claim are 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.
+I had to do _something_. But if Yudkowsky was _already_ stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (And I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet, although that seemed unimportant in light of the present cause for _flipping the fuck out_.)
-[TODO (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)")]
+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 claim are 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.
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_ on of your posts? 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 it was a way to signal that I _really really didn't want to be ignored_.
+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 as having sound judgement, 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.
-[TODO: and cc'd Michael and Anna as character references]
+Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky, and called me on the phone, whereupon we had a long conversation lamenting that the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
-[TODO: I did successfully interest Michael, who chimed in—Michael called me up and we talked about how the "rationalists" were over]
+As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—well, [again](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-privacy-constraint), I don't think I should say whether he replied to Michael's and my emails, or whether he accepted the 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 we got this addition to the Twitter thread:
-[TODO: as with earlier cheerful price offer, I can't confirm or deny whether Yudkowsky replied or whether he accepted the cheerful price offer]
+> [TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529 ]
-[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession. You might think that should be the end of the matter—but this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder? 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 should be the end of the matter. 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? It would be _greedy_ of me to expect more, right?
-Greedy or not, I wasn't satisfied. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander, asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
+[TODO: but this little "not ontologically confused" at the bottom of the thread was much less visible and loud than the bold, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that GCs are philosophically confused. Was I greedy to want something louder?
+
+Greedy or not, I wasn't satisfied.
+
+
+On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander, asking if there was any chance of an _explicit_ and _loud_ clarification or partial-retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). _Forget_ my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and _not_ the key issue.
The _issue_ is that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful): you want to [draw your category boundaries such that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your [information-theoretically limited budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) of short words on the simplest and most wide-rangingly useful categories.
helping Norton live in the real world
-If any concrete negative consequence of taking gender self-identity categories (e.g., more sexual assaults) is going to be waved away with "Oh, that's a mere policy decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender categories", then I guess I can't argue with that. But I wish I knew what happened to my wallet.
-
Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus."; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious.
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff