> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
-Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how ["weak men are superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/): speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position, in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments for the position (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by _just_ slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his readers (who trusted him to argue against ideas honestly) into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.
+Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how ["weak men are superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/): speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position, in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments for the position (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by _just_ slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his faithful students (who trusted him to argue against ideas honestly) into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.
To be sure, it imposes a cost on speakers to not be able to Tweet about one specific annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for [endless disclaimers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html) about related but stronger arguments that they're _not_ addressing. But the fact that [Yudkowsky disclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032) he wasn't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that he _didn't_ have an aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings.
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'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/). (For example, what the [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ [2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf) means is that a woman as strong as the _average_ man is _at the 99.5th percentile_ for women.) 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.
+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/). (For example, what the [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ [2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf) means is that a woman as strong as the _average_ man is _at the 99.5th percentile_ for women.) 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. It would be an absurdly [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) to expect someone to pass a graduate exam about the cognitive function of categorization before they can talk about sex.
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.
Had Yudkowsky been thinking that maybe if he Tweeted something favorable to my agenda, then me and the rest of Michael's gang would be satisfied and leave him alone?
-But ... if there's some _other_ reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you _tell_ people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. (Someone who trusted you as a source of wisdom about rationality might try to apply your _fake_ "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties" rationality lesson in some other context, and get the wrong answer.) Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is _not okay_, and it still wasn't okay in this case just because in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from _me_.
+But ... if there's some _other_ reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you _tell_ people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. (Someone who trusted you as a source of wisdom about rationality might try to apply your _fake_ "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties" rationality lesson in some other context, and get the wrong answer.) Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is _not okay_, and the fact that in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from _me_, didn't make it okay.
I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, which was that dread was tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence was still being denied.
As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what [verbal behaviors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the _orcs themselves_. For one thing, how do you _know_ that serving evil-Melkior is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible, in the bowels of Christ, that someone has given you _misleading information_ about that? Moreover, you _can't_ just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to [cripple their _general_ ability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their _general_ ability to do arithmetic. We weren't not talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified (like telling someone their dead dog is in heaven); the orcs _already know_ the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to _understand_ it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason, in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences, don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without ourselves _wanting to be lied to_. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!
-I _also_ had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Eliezer would _have_ to understand even if Scott didn't. (Scott had claimed that he could use gerrymandered categories and still be just as good at making predictions—but that's not true if we're talking about the _internal_ use of categories as a [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms), rather than mere verbal behavior: it's always easy to _say_ "_X_ is a _Y_" for arbitrary _X_ and _Y_ if the stakes demand it.)
+I _also_ had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Eliezer would _have_ to understand even if Scott didn't. (Scott had claimed that he could use gerrymandered categories and still be just as good at making predictions—but that's just not true if we're talking about the _internal_ use of categories as a [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms), rather than mere verbal behavior: it's always easy to _say_ "_X_ is a _Y_" for arbitrary _X_ and _Y_ if the stakes demand it, but if you're _actually_ using that concept of _Y_ internally, that does have effects on your world-model.)
But after consultation with the posse, I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time; the philosophy argument would work better as a public _Less Wrong_ post. So my revised Category War to-do list was:
But _given_ a subspace of interest, the _technical_ criterion of drawing category boundaries around [regions of high density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the mutual information between the job title and properties of the job.
-(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ ended up getting published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own in [future posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) by [other authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/).)
+(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ ended up getting published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), and ended up taking on a life of its own [in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) [future](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) [posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra) [a](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3) [number](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy) [of](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) [posts](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/) [by](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) [other](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/) [authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/).)
Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say? I thought the math was _really important_ as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it is written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically-contentious object-level topic which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-foot pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier and [leave a line of retreat](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) for Yudkowsky to correct the philosophy of language error. And then if someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
-I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I'm supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
+I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include subtext and then expect people to engage with the text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do! I was pretty constrained here!
-(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the trainwreck in the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
+(I did regret having accidentally "poisoned the well" the previous month by impulsively sharing the previous year's ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" as not-politically-threatening philosophy, if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the 60+-comment trainwreck on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
-----
I had thought of the "false-positives are better than false-negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't bother to track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for _what_ variables you paid attention to, to be motivated by consequences. But _given_ the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an epistemically legitimate clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. The only reason value-dependent gerrymandered category boundaries seem like a good idea if you're not careful about philosophy is because it's _wireheading_. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
-Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues potentially arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.
+Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is _because_ probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be _derived_ from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues _potentially_ arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics—
-But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't tile and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places. I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me the way almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)
+But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't tile and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places. I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me the way almost everyone else in Berkeley including up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky was trying to mess with me.)
Also in November, I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My _plan_ had been that it should have been possibly to tell the story of the Category War while glomarizing about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly characterize them as having been intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the /r/TheMotte culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water) and not be a mentally-dominated cultist.
The reason it _should_ be safe to write is because Explaining Things is Good. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to carefully _tell the true story_ about why, as a matter of cause-and-effect, I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
-So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because it's wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, _suddenly_ escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor is horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment!](https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/) carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke!), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
+So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because it's wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, _suddenly_ escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor is horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment!](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html) carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke!), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to try to split off whatever _generalizable insights_ that would have been part of the story into their own posts that don't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about, without making it personal, even if, secretly, it actually was personal.
It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _also_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just psychologically abusive.
-If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
+If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your conclusion, after the fact.
-The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
+The best explanation of this I know of was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
>
But the substance of my accusations is not about Yudkowsky's _conscious subjective narrative_. I don't have a lot of uncertainty about Yudkowsky's _theory of himself_, because he told us that, very clearly: "it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment." I don't doubt that that's [how the algorithm feels from the inside](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside).
-But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is _doing_ in Stalin's service, not about how it _feels_; I'm talking about a pattern of _publicly visible behavior_ stretching over years. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but _it does not therefore follow_ that no one ever looks terrible.
+But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is _doing_ in Stalin's service, not about how it _feels_; I'm talking about a pattern of _publicly visible behavior_ stretching over years. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but _it does not therefore follow_ that no one ever does anything terrible.
-I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing`. (People get very invested in their own stories.) But if you have the _receipts_ of the Other repeatedly doing `terrible_thing` in public over a period of years, maybe yelling about it to _everyone else_ might help _them_ stop getting defrauded by the Other's bogus story.
+I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing`. (People get very invested in their own stories.) But if you have the _receipts_ of the Other repeatedly doing `terrible_thing` in public over a period of years, maybe yelling about it to _everyone else_ might help _them_ stop getting suckered by the Other's fraudulent story.
Let's recap.
If we're talking about overt _gender role enforcement attempts_—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband", or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.
-(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm betting on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt-out of the default buckets, without causing too much trouble.)
+(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt-out of the default buckets, without causing too much trouble.)
-But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.5; your expectation that I toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to tell me, "As a male, you're risk for prostate cancer," it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
+But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.5; your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to tell me, "As a male, you're at risk for prostate cancer," it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
While piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not have merit. The post continues (bolding mine):
> In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
>
-> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.
+> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.
-So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention.
+So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
-But _given_ the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be refered to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me!
+But taking as given the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be refered to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me!
-It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's a case of _genuine_ nuance brought on by a _genuine_ complication and challenge to a system that assumes discrete hair colors.
+It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of _genuine_ nuance brought on by a _genuine_ challenge to a system that _falsely_ assumes discrete hair colors.
-But ... "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer, are, today, going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.
+But ... "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? There's nothing ambiguous about these cases: if you haven't, in fact, changed your hair color, then your hair is, in fact, its original color. The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer, are, today, going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.
-Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is planning to get hair surgery—that is, they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we should go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.
+Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.
-But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is _absurd_. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless—
+But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is _absurd_. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive for insisting on complication and nuance is as an obfuscation tactic—unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
-Unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
+Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. [My previous hopeless ideological war—before this one—was against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I hated being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all. But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that _I didn't like it_, but reasons that the bucket was _actually wrong on the empirical merits_: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition; the system was _actually in the wrong_ for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".
+And _because_ my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to _update_ to the extent that the empirical merits showed that I was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.
+
+In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a _C_. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts", and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.
+
+_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a Jane Austen character in this situation doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related, in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
+
+I knew better than to behave like that—and to the extent that I was tempted, I retained my ability to notice and snap out of it. My failure _didn't_ mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it _did_ mean that I had been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Perhaps, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this), while _also_ [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)
+
+Someone who uncritically validated my not liking to be tossed into the Student Bucket, instead of assessing my _reasons_ for not liking to be tossed into the Bucket and whether those reasons had merit, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, rather than my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than trying to deny it or run away from it or claim that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism _could_ match the standard set by schools. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When applying for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on being given the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
+
+If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the right solution to "student dysphoria", it should be obvious why the same is true of gender dysphoria. The principle that _truth matters_ is very general!
+
+In an article titled ["Actually, I Was Just Crazy the Whole Time"](https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole), detransitioner Michelle Alleva contrasts her beliefs at the time of deciding to transition, with her current beliefs. While transitioning, she accounted for many pieces of evidence about herself ("dislike attention as a female", "obsessive thinking about gender", "didn't fit in with the girls", _&c_.) in terms of the theory "It's because I'm trans." But now, Alleva writes, she thinks she has a variety of better explanations that, all together, cover everything on the original list: "It's because I'm autistic", "It's because I have unresolved trauma", "It's because women are often treated poorly" ... including "That wasn't entirely true" (!!).
+
+This is a _rationality_ skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she _revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence_. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can updated using the _same_ methods that you would use for anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)
+
+[TODO: I'm praising the form of the inference; not the conclusion; homosexual transsexuals who update to "born in the wrong body" at least have a case; for people like me, and separately people like Alleva, it's just not true; if you coddle "Female Bucket" sentiments, you're outlawing updates]
+
+This also isn't a particularly _advanced_ rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices grasp during their early steps along the Way.
+
+There was an exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky back during the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I still hadn't grown out of [my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism). Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I passive-aggressively [asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
+
+[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):
+
+> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—**or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is [not _necessarily_ something to integrate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me).**
+
+_I knew_. Even then, _I knew_ I had to qualify
+
+
+[TODO: charity— I think it's deliberately ambiguous. (And if it's not deliberate, it's optimized)]
-[TODO: student dysphoria—I hated being put in the box as student
-/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/
-]
[TODO section Feelings vs. Truth
Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is very explicit about only acting in the capacity of some guy with a blog. You can tell that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is great. I feel bad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
-Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that can be unambigously proven false.
+Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he knows to be unambiguously false.
+
+
+
Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader.
The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio!
+
+As the traditional rationalist saying goes: once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. _Three times is enemy optimization_.
+
]
Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
-Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level _and_ the meta level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level _and_ the meta level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up to the meta-meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
(Obviously, if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
David Xu writes (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
-> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is the proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
+> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is [to] proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
>
> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
>
> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
-At this point, I'm inclined to say it's not a "disagreement" at all. It's a _conflict_. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want people to tell the truth, and the Caliphate wants people to not tell the truth. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+After everything I've been through over the past six years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
+
+It's a _conflict_. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want people to tell the truth, and the Caliphate wants people to not tell the truth. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
At this point, I imagine defenders of the Caliphate are shaking their heads in disappointment at how I'm doubling down on refusing to Other-model. But—_am_ I? Isn't this just a re-statement of Xu's first proposed crux, except reframed as a "values difference" rather than a "disagreement"?
-Is the problem that my use of the phrase "tell the truth", which has positive valence in our culture, functions to sneak in normative connotations favoring my side?
+Is the problem that my use of the phrase "tell the truth" (which has positive valence in our culture) functions to sneak in normative connotations favoring "my side"?
-Fine. Objection sustained. I'm happy to use to Xu's language. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop), and the Caliphate wants to _not_ facilitate people making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because facilitating inferences _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to make inferences_.
+Fine. Objection sustained. I'm happy to use to Xu's language: I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop), and the Caliphate wants to _not_ facilitate people making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because facilitating inferences _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to make inferences_ (for example, because they cause more harm than benefit).
+Better? Perhaps, to some 2022-era rats and EAs, this formulation makes my position look obviously in the wrong: I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_ (!). Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
-[TODO:
-"massive psychological damage to some subset of people",
-that's _not my problem_. I _don't give a shit_.]
+One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased).
+
+The Yudkowsky of 2007 starts by quoting a passage from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record). Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
+
+The Yudkowsky of 2007 continues—it's again worth quoting at length—
+
+> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
+>
+> Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
+>
+> You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
+>
+> The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know _what_ you don't know, you don't know how _much_ you don't know, and you don't know how much you _needed_ to know.
+>
+> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
+
+Looking back on this from 2022, the only criticism I have is that Yudkowsky was too optimistic to "doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen." In some ways, people's actual behavior is _worse_ than what Orwell depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph _before_ denying memory of it, because it would be _too_ absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
+
+In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year _doesn't even bother covering its tracks_. Turns out, it doesn't need to! People mostly just don't remember things!
+
+The [flexibility of natural language is a _huge_ help here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). If the caliph were to _directly_ contradict himself in simple, unambiguous language—to go from "Oceania is not at war with Eastasia" to "Oceania is at war with Eastasia" without any acknowledgement that anything had changed—_then_ too many people might notice that those two sentences are the same except that one has the word _not_ in it. What's a caliph to do, if he wants to declare war on Eastasia without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the decision to do so?
+
+The solution is simple: just—use more words! Then if someone tries to argue that you've _effectively_ contradicted yourself, accuse them of being uncharitable and failing to model the Other. You can't lose! Anything can be consistent with anything if you apply a sufficiently charitable reading; whether Oceania is at war with Eastasia depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of "at war."
+
+Thus, O'Brien should envy Yudkowsky: burning the photograph turns out to be unnecessary!
+
+["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say. I claim that these posts _effectively_ contradict each other. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are _not only_ out of luck given forseeable technology, but _also_ that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, _already_ be women in some unspecified psychological sense.
+
+_Technically_, these don't _strictly_ contradict each other: I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one includes the word _not_. (And even if there were such sentences, I wouldn't be able to prove that the other words were being used in the same sense in both sentences.) One _could_ try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing.
+
+_Realistically_ ... no. These two posts _can't_ both be right. In itself, this isn't a problem: people change their minds sometimes, which is great! But when people _actually_ change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even _acknowledge the change_, that's pretty Orwellian, like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
+
+And if a little bit of Orwellianism on specific, narrow, highly-charged topics might be forgiven—because everyone else in your Society is doing it, and you would be punished for not playing along, an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) that no one actor has the power to defy—might we not expect the father of the "rationalists" to stand his ground on the core theses of his ideology, like whether telling the truth is good?
+
+I guess not! ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
+
+I don't doubt Yudkowsky could come up with some clever casuistry why, _technically_, the text he wrote in 2007 and the text he endorsed in 2021 don't contradict each other. But _realistically_ ... again, no.
+
+[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
[TODO: if he's reading this, win back respect— reply, motherfucker]
I don't, actually, know how to prevent the world from ending. Probably we were never going to survive. (The cis-human era of Earth-originating intelligent life wasn't going to last forever, and it's hard to exert detailed control over what comes next.) But if we're going to die either way, I think it would be _more dignified_ if Eliezer Yudkowsky were to behave as if he wanted his faithful students to be informed. Since it doesn't look like we're going to get that, I think it's _more dignified_ if his faithful students _know_ that he's not behaving like he wants us to be informed. And so one of my goals in telling you this long story about how I spent (wasted?) the last six years of my life, is to communicate the moral that **I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth, and I don't think you should trust him, either**—and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.
-Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But if it helps—he didn't create me to not say mean things. As far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007–9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But he didn't create me to not say mean things. If it helps—as far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007–9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff