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!
>
>
> I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
-Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand—
+Some of the replies tried explain the problem—and [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)—
> Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.
-—repeatedly:
+—[repeatedly](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
> You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
>
In light of these empirical observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions."
-I spend a few paragraphs picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/), but the point is very general: biological sex actually exists and is sometimes decision-relevant.
+I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are _so_ large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/), but the point is very general: biological sex actually exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime.
Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than a matter of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates_. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists _know_ that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes. If you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street would be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](http://msblairewhite.com/) (an androphilic transsexual who passes very well). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And _in practice_, the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
-If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" idiocy and then not engage with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in high-dimensional configuration space that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman, [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
+If you were actually interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the _drop-dead obvious_ "But, but, clusters in [high-dimensional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman, [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
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 concern, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
<div class="dialogue">
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: "Look at this [adorable cat picture](https://twitter.com/mydogiscutest/status/1079125652282822656)!"</p>
+<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>: "[You're not standing](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. [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."</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>
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 insight 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 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 unto him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact: Murphee wasn't being forced to lie.
-I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have any trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. It is, of course, true as an isolated linguistics fact that saying "peace be unto him" is a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes_. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's _why_ the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone says it: it's harder to atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to talk like an atheist.
+I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have any trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. It is, of course, true as an isolated linguistics fact that saying "peace be unto him" is a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it's _bizarre_ to condescendingly point this out _as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes_. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's _why_ the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone says it: it's a lot harder to atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like an atheist.
-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 at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—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.)
+And that's exactly why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender does not.
+
+Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals! If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And _to their credit_, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are _honest_ about the fact that this is what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_, and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
+
+In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while asserting that people who oppose the policy are ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being either (somewhat implausibly) stupid or (more plausibly) intellectually dishonest: of _course_ the point of speech codes is suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" coalition already know that, and the dumber people in the coalition wouldn't change their coalitional alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distiction would be, _except_ to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" coalition, while putting on a show of being politically "neutral."
+
+It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author. (Despite my misgivings—and the fact that at this point it's more of a genre convention or a running joke, rather than any attempt at all to conceal my identity—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.)
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 tried to point out the problem?!
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 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.
+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.
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.
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 saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
-> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/. Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
+> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
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?
I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried 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 the great Eliezer 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_?
-Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander (ccing a few other people), 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.
+Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December, I wrote to Scott Alexander (cc'ing a few other people), 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.
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 thunder comes first), but that the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma _destroys everyone's ability to think_.
-It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
+It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](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 had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define that category boundary however I want.)
+(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a _convenient rhetorical shorthand_ for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_.
-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 the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+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_.
-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 most 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".
+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 most 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.
-[TODO:
-Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben, and Anna
+But I _did_ end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me with reaching out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail. If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was geniunely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else lost the plot, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case for prosecuting deeper maladies affecting our subculture.
+
+There were times during these weeks where it felt like my mind shut down with the only thought, "What am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
+
+Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument that makes you change your mind, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is _not a counterargument_.
+
+Meanwhile, Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying at some point during our occasional meetings. She told me that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits?
+
+My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+
+There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on-track: if no one overtly gets huffily offended and calls to burn the heretic, then the discussion isn't being warped by the fear of heresy.
+
+I do not hold this view. I think there's a _subtler_ failure mode where people know what the politically-favored bottom line is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be targetedly _uninterested_ in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit the party line. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture they're embedded in."
+
+Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being _very good_ at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the world where Scott Alexander didn't have a traumatizing experience with social justice in college, causing him to dump a ton of anti-social-justice, pro-argumentative-charity antibodies in the "rationalist" collective "water supply" after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.)
+
+I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for being silenced or shouted down (which I wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to think of this as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Even _if_ the other person was being motivatedly dense, giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")
+
+Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronger writer was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to jump up an additional meta level and explain _how_ people were failing to engage. That is, I had a model of "the rationalists" that kept making bad predictions. What's going on there? Something interesting might happen if I try to explain _that_.
+
+(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional three years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by writing this memoir. Sorry, Ben—and thanks.)
+
+
+[TODO SECTION: RIP Culture War thread, and defense against alt-right categorization
+ * I wasn't the only one those life was being wracked with political drama: Scott exiled the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread to /r/TheMotte due to private harrassment
+ * Yudkowsky: "Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A."
+ * Suppose the one were to reply: "Using language in a way you dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (Scott Alexander's explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' 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."
+ * What direct falsehood is being asserted by Scott's detractors? I don't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott identifies as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Sneer Club has been pretty explicit in their criticism
+ * examples:
+ * https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/
+ * https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/
+ * that the Culture War thread harbors racists (&c.) and possibly that Scott himself is a secret racist, with respect to a definition of racism that includes the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences should be discussable somewhere.
+
+And this is just correct: e.g., "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project" favorably cites Cochran et al.'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott is almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him is meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
+
+Of course, Scott is great and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it's plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that is to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims, much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
+
+But political convenience comes at a dire cost to our common interest! There's a proverb you once failed to Google, which runs something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+
+Similarly, once someone is known to vary the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience (even if their private, unshared thoughts continue to be consistently wise)—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility of categorizations being lies when that happens to make them look good ...
+
+Well, you're still somewhat better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas clever arguers who don't tell explicit lies are very constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a blue check and 20K followers. I remain,
+ * (The claim is not that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative; it's about the _response_)
+ * "the degree to which category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion": it's a problem when category boundaries are being made a conscious and deliberate focus of discussion as an isolated-demand-for-rigor because people can't get the conclusion they want on the merits; I only started focusing on the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition part after the autogynephilia discussions kept getting derailed
+ * I know you're very busy; I know your work's important—but it might be a useful exercise? Just for a minute, to think of what you would actually say if someone with social power _actually did this to you_ when you were trying to use language to reason about Something you had to Protect?
+]
+
+
+[TODO SECTION: minor psych episode in March 2019
+
+Without disclosing any _specific content_ from private conversations with Yudkowsky that may or may not have happened, I think I am allowed to say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from him that we were hoping for. (That is, I'm Glomarizing over whether Yudkowsky just didn't reply, or whether he did reply and our posse was not satisfied with the response.) 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.
+
+Meaninwhile, my email thread with Scott got started back up, although I wasn't expecting anything 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) and wanted something from him, which was bad, because it was treating him as a means rather than an end—but that, despite that regret, I was still really upset about the categories thing and wanted a clarification from him.
+
+One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): for example, those who crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into attributing attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" onto what are very noncentral members of those categories.
+
+
+_Even if_ you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Janie a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the existence of a victim who probably suffered and whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you subsequently reveal that the murder victim was a fetus.
+
+Thus, we see that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is really complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering pattern that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with saying, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life."
+
+... Scott still didn't get it. He said that he didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse about what had gone wrong in our attempted outreach to Yudkowsky, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for updateful disagreement-resolution. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
+
+... Scott didn't want to meet. At this point, I considered resorting to the tool of cheerful prices again, which I hadn't yet used against Scott—to say, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day." But that seemed sufficiently psychologically coercive and socially weird that I wasn't sure I wanted to go there. I emailed my posse asking what they thought—and then added that maybe they shouldn't reply until Friday, because it was Monday, and I really needed to focus on my dayjob that week.
+
+This is the part where I began to ... overheat. I tried ("tried") to focus on my dayjob, but I was just _so angry_. Did Scott _really_ not understand the rationality-relevant distinction between "value-dependent categories as a result of only running your clustering algorithm on the subspace of the configuration space spanned by the variables that are relevant to your decisions" (as explained by the _dagim_/water-dwellers _vs._ fish example) and "value-dependent categories _in order to not make my friends sad_"? I thought I was pretty explicit about this? Was Scott _really_ that dumb?? Or is it that he was only verbal-smart and this is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you've ever been good at linear algebra?? Did I need to write a post explaining just that one point in mathematical detail? (With executable code and a worked example with entropy calculations.)
+
+My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I resigned myself to stay at the office late to finish that.
+
+But I was just in so much (psychological) pain. Or at least—as I noted in one of a series of emails to my posse that night—I felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to intepret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, _&c_.), I think I'm still noticeably _incentivizable_: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be either rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated. (Kevin Simler: [tears are a discount on friendship](https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/).)
+
+I [tweeted a Sequences quote](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089) to summarize how I felt (the mention of @ESYudkowsky being to attribute credit; I figured Yudkowsky had enough followers that he probably wouldn't see a notification):
+
+> "—and if you still have something to protect, so that you MUST keep going, and CANNOT resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality— [1/3]
+>
+> "—then you will be ready to start your journey[.] To take sole responsibility, to live without any trustworthy defenses, and to forge a higher Art than the one you were once taught. [2/3]
+>
+> "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." —@ESYudkowsky (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) [end/3]
+
+Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I had been taught were great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having _forgotten!_
+
+I did, eventually, get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonment). We didn't want another bad outcome like that; we really didn't. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep will come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people come in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing is to be calm.
+
+I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
+
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse. I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)").
+
+Scott had been continuing to insist that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand.
+
+First, if creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? I didn't understand why semantic mind games are OK, but lying is wrong. (Compare: ["If you're going to ignore a probabilistic counterargument, why not ignore a proof, too?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right))
+
+Second, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, like, why doesn't _my_ mental health matter? Aren't I trans, sort of? What do I have to do in order to qualify? Was my being on hormones for only 5 months not good enough? Or do I have to be part of the political coalition in order for my feelings to count? We had _an entire Sequence_ whose _specific moral_ was that words can be wrong. And of the 37 Ways that Words Can Be Wrong, number 30 was "Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together," and number 31 was, "You use a short word for something that you won't need to describe often, or a long word for something you'll need to describe often." And this was the thing I'd been trying to tell everyone about. But when I tried to talk to Scott about it, he was like, "Doesn't matter, mental health benefits for trans people are more important according to the utilitarian calculus!" And like ... getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I'm trying to use reason to make sense of the world is observably really bad for _my_ mental health! Does that matter at all?
+
+
+
+
+
+[TODO: proton concession
+ *
+
]
+[TODO SECTION: relying on Michael too much; I'm not crazy
+ * This may have been less effective than it was in my head; I _remembered_ Michael as being high-status
+ * "I should have noticed earlier that my emotional dependence on "Michael says X" validation is self-undermining, because Michael says that the thing that makes me valuable is my ability to think independently."
+ * fairly destructive move
+* _Everyone got it wrong_. there was a comment on /r/slatestarcodex the other week that cited Scott, Eliezer, Ozy, Kelsey, and Rob as leaders of rationalist movement. https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/
-[TODO: ... continue translating email analysis into prose]
+"We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ..."
+]
-[TODO: proton concession]
+[TODO: Anna Michael feud
+ * Anna's 2 Mar comment badmouthing Michael
+ * my immediate response: I strongly agree with your point about "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help fill these functions"! That's why I'm so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserves to be laughed out of the room.
+ * Anna's case against Michael: he was talking to Devi even when Devi needed a break, and he wanted to destroy EA
+ * I remember at a party in 2015ish, asking Michael what else I should invest my money in, if not New Harvest/GiveWell, and his response was, "You"
+ * backstory of anti-EA sentiment: Ben's critiques, Sarah's "EA Has a Lying Problem"—Michael had been in the background
+]
-[TODO: minor psych episode in March 2019]
[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff