Thus, if the extension of common words like 'woman' and 'man' is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so was Twitter's anti-misgendering policy—and if it _isn't_ (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I wasn't sure what was _left_ of the "Human's Guide to Words" Sequence if the [37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) needed to be retracted.
-I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, a previous Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
+I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at "carving reality at the joints", and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question doesn't have such an argument. As such, I didn't see the _practical_ difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning", and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, an earlier Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
>
Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of _Atlas Shrugged_ (judging by [an offhand remark by our protagonist in _Harry Potter and the Methods_](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20)), but I kept thinking of the scene[^atlas-shrugged] where our heroine Dagny Taggart entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce [an egregiously deceptive but technically-not-lying statement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) by the State Science Institute, whose legitimacy derives from its association with his name. Stadler has become cynical in his old age and demurs, disclaiming all responsibility: "I can't help what people think—if they think at all!" ... "How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public?"
-[^atlas-shrugged]: In Part One, Chapter VII, "The Exploiters and the Exploited"
+[^atlas-shrugged]: In Part One, Chapter VII, "The Exploiters and the Exploited".
At this point, I still trusted Yudkowsky to do better than an Ayn Rand villain; I had faith that _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ could deal in truth when he deals with the public.
Ziz recounted [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) story [of Anna's discrimination](https://sinceriously.fyi/net-negative), how she engaged in [conceptual warfare](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to falsely portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (I remember at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect how Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not just a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
-Probably the most ultimately significant part of this meeting for future events was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up a website slandering them. I don't actually know the details of the alleged settlement. (I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than particularly remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid the former employee as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then, whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee, that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
+Probably the most ultimately significant part of this meeting for future events was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up a website slandering them. I don't actually know the details of the alleged settlement. (I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than particularly remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid Helm as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then, whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee, that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
----
Somewhat apologetically, I replied that the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and _named individuals_ still seemed very significant to me?—and that avoiding leaking info from private conversations seemed like an important obligation, too. I would be way more comfortable writing [a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists"](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/), than about a specific person not adhering to good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private. I thought I was consistent about this: contrast my writing to the way that some anti-trans writers name-and-shame particular individuals. (The closest I had come was [mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#photo-of-danielle-muscato)—and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done in desperation of other ways to make the point having failed.) I had to acknowledge that criticism of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women in general _implied_ criticism of Jessica, and criticism of "rationalists" in general _implied_ criticism of Yudkowsky and Alexander and me, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seemed useful for making the speech act less of an attack? Was I wrong?
-Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person", he would try to be curious, but if they don't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people", he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people that get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
+<a id="less-precise-is-more-violent"></a>Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person", he would try to be curious, but if they don't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people", he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people that get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
-----
----
-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" memoir-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 continue 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.
Despite Math and Wellness Month and my "intent" to take a break from the religious civil war, I kept reading _Less Wrong_ during May 2019, and ended up scoring a couple of victories in the civil war (at some cost to Wellness).
-MIRI researcher Scott Garabrant wrote a post on the theme of how ["Yes Requires the Possibility of No"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no).
+MIRI researcher Scott Garrabrant wrote a post about how ["Yes Requires the Possibility of No"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no). Information-theoretically, a signal sent with probability one transmits no information: you can only learn something from hearing a "Yes" if there was some chance that the answer could have been "No". I saw an analogy to my philosophy-of-language thesis, and commented about it: if you want to believe that _x_ belongs to category _C_, you might try redefining _C_ in order to make the question "Is _x_ a _C_?" come out "Yes", but you can only do so at the expense of making _C_ less useful.
+[TODO: explain scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility"—
-(Information-theoretically, a signal sent with probability one transmits no information: you only learn something from observing the outcome if it could have gone the other way.)
+ * Vanessa comment on hobbyhorses and feeling attacked
+ * my reply about philosophy got politicized, and MDL/atheism analogy
+ * Ben vs. Said on political speech and meta-attacks; Goldenberg on feelings
+ * 139-comment trainwreck got so bad, the mods manually moved the comments into their own thread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+ * based on the karma scores and what was said, this went pretty well for me and I count it as a victory
+
+]
+On 31 May 2019, a [draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for) included a link to "... Not Man for the Categories" as one of Scott Alexander's best essays. I argued that it would be better to cite _almost literally_ any other _Slate Star Codex_ post (most of which, I agreed, were exemplary). I claimed that the following disjunction was true: _either_ Alexander's claim that "There's no rule of rationality saying that [one] shouldn't" "accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life" was a blatant lie, _or_ one had no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way. The mod [was persuaded on reflection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for?commentId=oBDjhXgY5XtugvtLT), and "... Not Man for the Categories" was not included in the final FAQ. Another "victory."
+[TODO:
+"victories" weren't comforting when I resented this becoming a political slapfight at all—a lot of the objections in the Vanessa thread were utterly insane
+I wrote to Anna and Steven Kaas (who I was trying to "recruit" onto our side of the civil war) ]
+In "What You Can't Say", Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what _is_ one's real work. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except for this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve our collective ability to reason, should probably be doing _more_ fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improving our collective ability to reason", in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."
+[TODO: I don't know if you caught the shitshow on Less Wrong, but isn't it terrifying that the person who objected was a goddamned _MIRI research associate_ ... not to demonize Vanessa because I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008 (/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard#hair-trigger-antisexism), but in 2008 we had a culture that could _beat it out of me_]
+[TODO: Steven's objection:
+> the Earth's gravitational field directly hurts NASA's mission and doesn't hurt Paul Graham's mission, but NASA shouldn't spend any more effort on reducing the Earth's gravitational field than Paul Graham.
+I agreed that tractability needs to be addressed, but ...
+]
+
+I felt like—we were in a coal-mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I was freaking out about this, and represenatives of the Caliphate (Yudkowsky, Alexander, Anna, Steven) were like, Sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; you'll get over it; it's not really that important to the coal-mining mission.
-[TODO: tussle on new _Less Wrong_ FAQ 31 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+And I was like, I agree that I was unreasonably emotionally attached to that particular bird, which is the direct cause of why I-in-particular am freaking out, but that's not why I expect _you_ to care. The problem is not the dead bird; the problem is what the bird is _evidence_ of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claim to have spotted their own dead canaries. I feel like the old-timer Rationality Elders should be able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
-A draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ was to include a link to "... Not Man for the Categories".
+Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was [a fragment of group theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), and [some probability/information theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that [actually turned out to super-relevant to understanding sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point). So much for taking a break.
+[TODO:
+ * I had posted a linkpost to "No, it's not The Incentives—it's You", which generated a lot of discussion, and Jessica (17 June) identified Ray's comments as the last straw.
+
+> LessWrong.com is a place where, if the value of truth conflicts with the value of protecting elites' feelings and covering their asses, the second value will win.
+>
+> Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a _lot_ of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it).
+
+ * posting on Less Wrong was harm-reduction; the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to _a whole new worldview_; Jessica proposed the idea of a new discussion forum
+ * Ben thought that trying to discuss with the other mods would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; talking to other mods might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice"; Ben is less optimistic about harm reduction; "Drowning Children Are Rare" was barely net-upvoted, and participating was endorsing the karma and curation systems
+ * David Xu's comment on "The Incentives" seems important?
+ * secret posse member: Ray's attitude on "Is being good costly?"
+ * Jessica: scortched-earth campaign should mostly be in meatspace social reality
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * _Atlas Shrugged_ Bill Brent vs. Dave Mitchum scene
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+ * Ben: we should be creating clarity about "position X is not a strawman within the group", rather than trying to scapegoat individuals
+ * my scuffle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
+ * it gets worse: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality#NbrPdyBFPi4hj5zQW
+ * Ben's comment: "Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings."
+ * Jessica: "tone arguments are always about privileged people protecting their feelings, and are thus in bad faith. Therefore, engaging with a tone argument as if it's in good faith is a fool's game, like playing chess with a pigeon. Either don't engage, or seek to embarrass them intentionally."
+ * there's no point at being mad at MOPs
+ * me (1 Jul): I'm a _little bit_ mad, because I specialize in cognitive and discourse strategies that are _extremely susceptible_ to being trolled like this
+ * "collaborative truth seeking" but (as Michael pointed out) politeness looks nothing like Aumann agreement
+ * 2 Jul: Jessica is surprised by how well "Self-consciousness wants to make everything about itself" worked; theory about people not wanting to be held to standards that others aren't being held to
+ * Michael: Jessica's example made it clear she was on the side of social justice
+ * secret posse member: level of social-justice talk makes me not want to interact with this post in any way
]
+[TODO: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
+[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam"
+ * I still sympathize with the "mainstream" pushback against the scam/fraud/&c. language being used to include Elephant-in-the-Brain-like distortions
+ * Ben: "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you? Investigations of financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp."
+ * 11 Jul: I think the law does count _mens rea_ as a thing: we do discriminate between vehicular manslaughter and first-degree murder, because traffic accidents are less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies
+ * call with Michael about GiveWell vs. the Pope
+]
-I saw an analogy to my thesis about categories: to say that _x_ belongs to category _C_ is meaningful because _C_ imposes truth conditions; just defining _x_ to be a _C_ by fiat would be uninformative.
+[TODO: secret thread with Ruby; "uh, guys??" to Steven and Anna; people say "Yes, of course criticism and truthseeking is important; I just think that tact is important, too," only to go on and dismiss any _particular_ criticism as insufficiently tactful.]
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+[TODO: "progress towards discussing the real thing"
+ * Jessica acks Ray's point of "why are you using court language if you don't intend to blame/punish"
+ * Michael 20 Jul: court language is our way of saying non-engagement isn't an option
+ * Michael: we need to get better at using SJW blamey language
+ * secret posse member: that's you-have-become-the-abyss terrifying suggestion
+ * Ben thinks SJW blame is obviously good
+]
-the intent of "MIRI Research Associate ... doesn't that terrify you" is not to demonize or scapegoat Vanessa, because I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008, but in 2008 we had a culture that could _beat it out of me_
+[TODO: epistemic defense meeting;
+ * I ended up crying at one point and left the room for while
+ * Jessica's summary: "Zack was a helpful emotionally expressive and articulate victim. It seemed like there was consensus that "yeah, it would be better if people like Zack could be warned somehow that LW isn't doing the general sanity-maximization thing anymore"."
+ * Vaniver admitting LW is more of a recruiting funnel for MIRI
+ * I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me; the first morning where "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us"
+]
+[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip; make sure to include the part about Michael threatening to sue]
+[TODO: State of Steven]
-In "What You Can't Say", Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what _is_ one's real work. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except for this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve our collective ability to reason, should probably be doing _more_ fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improving our collective ability to reason", in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."
+I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constraint; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
-Steven's objection:
-> the Earth's gravitational field directly hurts NASA's mission and doesn't hurt Paul Graham's mission, but NASA shouldn't spend any more effort on reducing the Earth's gravitational field than Paul Graham.
+In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
-we're in a coal-mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I'm freaking out about this, and Anna/Scott/Eliezer/you are like, "Sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; you'll get over it; it's not really that important to the coal-mining mission." And I'm like, "I agree that I was unreasonably emotionally attached to that particular bird, which is the direct cause of why I-in-particular am freaking out, but that's not why I expect you to care. The problem is not the dead bird; the problem is what the bird is evidence of." Ben and Michael and Jessica claim to have spotted their own dead canaries. I feel like the old-timer Rationality Elders should be able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
+In September 2019's "Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists" [TODO: ... I was surprised by how well this did (high karma, later included in the best-of-2019 collection); Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering]
-such is the way of the world; what can you do when you have to work with people?" But like ... I thought part of our founding premise was that the existing way of the world wasn't good enough to solve the really hard problem?
+In October 2019's "Algorithms of Deception!", I explained [TODO: ...]
-]
+Also in October 2019, in "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" [TODO: ... I was _furious_ at "Against Lie Inflation"—oh, so _now_ you agree that making language less useful is a problem?! But then I realized Scott actually was being consistent in his own frame: he's counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost; but, if everyone _is_ lying, maybe they should be angry!]
+------
-[TODO: 17– Jun, "LessWrong.com is dead to me" in response to "It's Not the Incentives", comment on Ray's behavior, "If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us"; Bill Brent, "Casual vs. Social Reality", I met with Ray 29 Jun; https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself ; calling out the abstract pattern]
+I continued to take note of signs of contemporary Yudkowsky visibly not being the same author who wrote the Sequences. In August 2019, [he Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600):
-[TODO: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
+> I am actively hostile to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.
-[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam", within-group debate on what is a "scam" or "fraud", Pope]
+[TODO: I objected that he shouldn't pay the Danegeld like this]
-[TODO: epistemic defense meeting; the first morning where "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us"]
+When I emailed the posse about it begging for Likes (Subject: "can't leave well enough alone"), Jessica said she didn't get my point. If people are falsely accusing you of something (in this case, of being a right-wing Bad Guy), isn't it helpful to point out that the accusation is actually false? It seemed like I was advocating for self-censorship on the grounds that speaking up helps the false accusers. But it also helps bystanders (by correcting the misapprehension), and hurts the false accusers (by demonstrating to bystanders that the accusers are making things up). By linking to ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), I seemed to be insinuating that Yudkowsky was under some sort of duress, but this wasn't spelled out: if Yudkowsky would face social punishment for advancing right-wing opinions, did that mean he was under such duress that saying anything at all would be helping the oppressors?
-[TODO: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip; make sure to include the part about Michael threatening to sue]
+The paragraph from "Kolmogorov Complicity" that I was thinking of was (bolding mine):
-[TODO: transition about still having trouble with memoir? double-check Git log to make sure this is right chronologically]
+> Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, "If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?" **Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won't be very convincing.** Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
-I found it trouble to make progress on. I felt—constrained. I didn't know how to tell the story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise "the rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
+I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy feel an incentive to buy their own safety by denouncing _other_ heretics: not just _disagreeing_ with the other heretics _because those other heresies are in fact mistaken_, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
-In August's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
+Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though he'd [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) [exhaustively](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) about the correct way, and he and I have a common enemy in the social-justice egregore): _he couldn't afford to_. He'd already spent his Overton budget on anti-feminism.
-[TODO— more blogging 2019
+Scott (and Yudkowsky and Anna and the rest of the Caliphate) seemed to accept this as an inevitable background fact of existence, like the weather. But I saw a Schelling point off in the distance where us witches stick together for Free Speech, and it was _awfully_ tempting to try to jump there. (Of course, it would be _better_ if there was a way to organize just the good witches, and exclude all the Actually Bad witches, but the [Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) on witch Badness made that hard to organize without falling back to the falling back to the one-heresy-per-thinker equilibrium.)
-"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
+Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" _facts_.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad (and that it would be bad if I were doing that without "intending" to). I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had _learned stuff_ from reading far-right authors (most notably Moldbug), and from talking with my very smart neoreactionary (and former _Less Wrong_-er) friend. I was starting to appreciate [what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April](#less-precise-is-more-violent) (when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists").
-"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+Jessica asked if my opinion would change depending on whether Yudkowsky thought neoreaction was intellectually worth engaging with. (Yudkowsky [had said years ago](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs) that Moldbug was low quality.)
-I was _furious_ at "Against Lie Inflation"—oh, so _now_ you agree that making language less useful is a problem?! But then I realized Scott actually was being consistent in his own frame: he's counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost; but, if everyone _is_ lying, maybe they should be angry!
+I did believe that Yudkowsky believed that neoreaction was not worth engaging with. I would never fault anyone for saying "I vehemently disagree with what little I've read and/or heard of this-and-such author." I wasn't accusing Yudkowsky of being insincere.
-"Heads I Win" Sep 2019: I was surprised by how well this did (high karma, later included in the best-of-2019 collection); Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering after I
+What I _did_ think was that the need to keep up appearances of not-being-a-right-wing-Bad-Guy was a pretty serious distortion on people's beliefs, because there are at least a few questions-of-fact where believing the correct answer can, in today's political environment, be used to paint one as a right-wing Bad Guy. I would have hoped for Yudkowsky to _notice that this is a rationality problem_, and to _not actively make the problem worse_, and I was counting "I do not welcome support from those quarters" as making the problem worse insofar as it would seem to imply that the extent to which I think I've learned valuable things from Moldbug, made me less welcome in Yudkowsky's fiefdom.
-"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans
-]
+Yudkowsky certainly wouldn't endorse "Even learning things from these people makes you unwelcome" _as stated_, but "I do not welcome support from those quarters" still seemed like a _pointlessly_ partisan silencing/shunning attempt, when one could just as easily say, "I'm not a neoreactionary, and if some people who read me are, that's _obviously not my fault_."
-[TODO: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus; tragedy of recursive silencing
-15 Sep Glen Weyl apology
-]
+Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to _also_ to acknowledge, _e.g._, racial IQ differences?
+
+I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
+
+It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor, and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and _my_ incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) in the forbidden zone and I was a good programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves being pushed to the "Say Nothing" attractor.
+
+It was instructive to compare this new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013 (quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d)[^linkrot]), in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:
+
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot).
+
+> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
+>
+> Also to be clear: I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity. However I found Scott Alexander's takedown of neoreaction convincing and thus I shrugged and didn't bother to investigate further.
+
+My "negotiating with terrorists" criticism did _not_ apply to the 2013 statement. "More Right" _was_ brand encroachment on Anissimov's part that Yudkowsky had a legitimate interest in policing, _and_ the "I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand" disclaimer importantly avoided legitimizing the McCarthyist persecution.
+
+The question was, what had specifically happened in the last six years to shift Eliezer's opinion on neoreaction from (paraphrased) "Scott says it's wrong, so I stopped reading" to (verbatim) "actively hostile"? Note especially the inversion from (both paraphrased) "I don't support neoreaction" (fine, of course) to "I don't even want _them_ supporting _me_" [(_?!?!_)](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164329446314135552).[^them-supporting-me]
+
+[^them-supporting-me]: Humans with very different views on politics nevertheless have a common interest in not being transformed into paperclips!
+
+Did Yudkowsky get new information about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter, or did moral coercion on him from the left intensify (because Trump and [because Berkeley](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/))? My bet was on the latter.
+
+-----
In November 2019, I received an interesting reply on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifer for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, it's very important for evolved prey animals to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
-[TODO: Ziz's protest]
+[TODO: Ziz's protest; Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
+
+[TODO: rude maps]
[TODO: a culture that has gone off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver]
-[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick]
+[TODO: complicity and friendship]
-[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/
+[TODO: affordance widths]
+
+[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019
+pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone]
+
+[TODO: "Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans]
+
+[TODO: plan to reach out to Rick 14 December
+Anna's reply 21 December
+22 December: I ask to postpone this
+Michael asks for me to acknowledge that my sense of opportunity is driven by politics
+discussion of what is "political"
+mention to Anna that I was postponing in order to make it non-salesy
+
+]
+
+------
+
+On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking about asking about autogynephilia on next _Slate Star Codex_ survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or a suggestion of who to consult on "the other side" of the issue. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being painful for me ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/), who I thought was more qualified. (Tailcalled had a lot of experience running surveys, and had a better grasp than me of the science of sexology and transgenderism, in constrast to my preoccupation with the philosophical and political aspects of the problem.)
+
+The next day (I assume while I happened to be on his mind), Scott also [commented on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E) "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist", my post from back in October replying to his "Against Lie Inflation."
+
+I was ... frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account considerations that I had already covered. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I [succumbed to](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7) [the temptation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH) [to blow up at him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF) in the comments.
+
+After commenting, I noticed that maybe Christmas Eve wasn't the best time to blow up at someone like that, and added a few more messages to our Discord chat—
+
+> okay, maybe speech is sometimes painful
+> the _Less Wrong_ comment I just left you is really mean
+> and you know it's not because I don't like you
+> you know it's because I'm genuinely at my wit's end
+> after I posted it, I was like, "Wait, if I'm going to be this mean to Scott, maybe Christmas Eve isn't the best time?"
+> it's like the elephant in my brain is gambling that by being socially aggressive, it can force you to actually process information about philosophy which you otherwise would not have an incentive to
+> I hope you have a merry Christmas
+
+And then, as an afterthought—
+
+> oh, I guess we're Jewish
+> that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat
+
+Scott messaged back the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed, and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convincingly-to-me demonstrate his sincerity, and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).
-Scott replies on 21 December https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist?commentId=LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E
+I explained that the reason I accused him of being motivatedly dumb was that I _knew_ he knew about strategic equivocation, because he taught everyone else about it (as in his famous posts about [the motte-and-bailey doctrine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), or [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)). And so when he acted like he didn't get it when I pointed out that this also applied to "trans women are women", that just seemed _implausible_.
-on Christmas Eve, I gave in to the urge to blow up at him
+He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses," being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted [an article from the nationally prominent progressive magazine _The Nation_](https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/): "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women are in fact women." Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).
-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
+I didn't think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as _I_ could before being allowed to object to these kinds of Shenanigans. I thought "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running the clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to "wireheading" (optimizing someone's map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) and "war" (optimizing someone's map to not reflect the territory, in order to gain an advantage over them). If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it actually wasn't. That's ... not actually a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
-> 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.
+Scott thought that trans people had some weird thing going on in their brain such that it being referred to as their natal sex was intrinsically painful, like an electric shock. The thing wasn't an agent, so the [injunction to refuse to give in to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) didn't apply. Having to use a word other than the one you would normally use in order to not subject someone to painful electric shocks was worth it.
-December tussle with Scott, and, a Christmas party—
+I claimed that I knew things about the etiology of transness such that I didn't think the electric shock was inevitable, but I didn't want the conversation to go there if it didn't have to, because I didn't have to ragequit the so-called "rationalist" community over a complicated empirical thing; I only had to ragequit over bad philosophy.
-Christmas party
-playing on a different chessboard
-people reading funny GPT-2 quotes
+Scott said he might agree with me if he thought the world-model-clarity _vs._ utilitarian benefit tradeoff was unfavorable—or if he thought it had the chance of snowballing like in his "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lighting".
-A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
+... I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.
-memoir motivation deflates after Christmas victory
-5 Jan memoir as nuke]
+I had technical reasons to be very skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs ... doesn't seem like a nice place to live, right? Doesn't seem like a culture that can solve AI alignment, right?
+
+I linked to Zvi Mowshowitz's post about how [the claim that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) gets used an excuse to silence people trying to point out the thing (because they don't see people behaving as if it were common knowledge): "'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from the male multivariate distribution rather than the female multivariate distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out?" But I didn't think that everyone knew. I thought the people who sort-of knew were being intimidated into doublethinking around it. I thought this was bad for clarity.
+
+At this point, Scott mentioned that he wanted to go to the Event Horizon Christmas party, and asked if I wanted to come and continue the discussion there. I assented, and thanked him for his time; it would be really exciting if we could avoid a rationalist civil war. (I thought my "you need accurate models before you can do utilitarianism" philosophy was also near the root of Ben's objections to the EA movement.)
+
+When I arrived at the party, people were doing a reading of the "Hero Licensing" dialogue from _Inadequate Equilibria_. Yudkowsky himself was, playing the part of the Mysterious Stranger in the dialogue. At some point, Scott and I retreated upstairs to continue our discussion. By the end of it, I was at least feeling more assured of Scott's sincerity (rather than him being coerced into not saying anything incriminating over email). Scott said he would edit in a disclaimer note at the end of "... Not Man for the Categories".
+
+If I also got the chance to talk to Yudkowsky for a few minutes, I don't think I would be allowed to recount any details of that here due to the privacy rules I'm following in this document.
+
+The rest of the party was nice. People were reading funny GPT-2 quotes from their phones. At one point, conversation happened to zag in a way that let me show off the probability fact I had learned during Math and Wellness Month. A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
+
+All in all, I was feeling less ragequitty about the rationalists[^no-scare-quotes] after the party—as if by credibly _threatening_ to ragequit, the elephant in my brain had managed to extort more bandwidth from our leadership. The note Scott added to the end of "... Not Man for the Categories" still betrayed some philosophical confusion, but I now felt hopeful about addressing that in a future blog post explaining my thesis that unnatural category boundaries were for "wireheading" or "war", rather than assuming that anyone who didn't get the point from "... Boundaries?" was lying or retarded.
+
+[^no-scare-quotes]: Enough to not even scare-quote the term here.
+
+It was around this time that someone told me that I wasn't adequately taking into account that Yudkowsky was "playing on a different chessboard" than me. (A public figure focused on reducing existential risk from artificial general intelligence, is going to sense different trade-offs around Kolmogorov complicity strategies, than an ordinary programmer or mere worm focused on _things that don't matter_.) No doubt. But at the same time, I thought Yudkowsky wasn't adequately taking into account the extent to which some of his longtime supporters (like Michael or Jessica) were, or had been, counting on him to uphold certain standards of discourse (rather than chess).
+
+Another effect of my feeling better after the party was that my motivation to keep working on my memoir of the Category War vanished—as if I was still putting weight on a [zero-sum frame](https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/) in which the memoir was a nuke that I only wanted to use as an absolute last resort.
+
+Ben wrote:
+
+> It seems to that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir _privately_ feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create _internal_ clarity around a thing.
+>
+> I think this has to mean _either_
+> (a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated
+> _or_
+> (b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.
+
+Or, I pointed out, (c) I had ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind _to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular_, and while I had made a lot of progress unwinding this, I was still, still not done, and seeing him at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit.
+
+Secret posse member reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be clarifying and cathartic _for me_. If people in the Caliphate came to their senses, I could either not publish it, or give it a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.
+
+(It does not, actually, have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)
-------
-----
-[TODO: "Human Diversity" review; all swans are white!]
-
[TODO: pandemic starts]
[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff