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 mostly wasn't); I was angry at them for _making bad arguments_ and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments when they're made.
+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._
[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?
+
+
- * 5 Mar Scott gets back to me after my impulsive cry of pain, 12 short stories about language, I poke Scott a few more times in coming days
- * 17 Mar I propose an in-person meeting, Scott declines
- * I consider replying with a bribe
- [... this probably doesn't need more pre-outlining because it's a sequence of events and I should just start filling based on the email review]
-]
[TODO: proton concession
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff