Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the _Slate Star Codex_ links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. At this point, I was _disappointed_ with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that.
-... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war involving other people who had much more important things to do with their time.
+... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war involving other people who you'd expect to have much more important things to do with their time.
The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.
My _hope_ was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad ([Red](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that actually works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing about it. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
-After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (Subject: "[redacted for privacy-norm-adherence reasons]; and, discourse on categories and the fourth virtue"), cc'ing the posse, who chimed in afterwards.
+After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), cc'ing the posse, who chimed in afterwards.
Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be _either_ (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
[I pointed out that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120) the people who smear him as a right-wing Bad Guy do so _in order to_ extract these kinds of statements of political alignment as concessions; his own timeless decision theory would seem to recommend ignoring them rather than paying even this small [Danegeld](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-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?
+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/) in my replies, 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?
The paragraph from "Kolmogorov Complicity" that I was thinking of was (bolding mine):
> 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 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.
+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.
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](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/).
[^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.
+Did Yudkowsky get _new information_ about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter sometime between 2019, 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.
+
+However it happened, it didn't seem like the brain damage was limited to "political" topics, either. In November, we saw another example of Yudkowsky destroying language for the sake of politeness, this time the non-Culture-War context of him [_trying to wirehead his fiction subreddit by suppressing criticism-in-general_](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/).
+
+That's _my_ characterization, of course: the post itself is about "reducing negativity". [In a comment, Yudkowsky wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/) (bolding mine):
+
+> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. **Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."**
+
+But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me"[^pleonasm] and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from the algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try). [If my character is actually quite stupid, I want to believe that my character is actually quite stupid.](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski)
+
+[^pleonasm]: The pleonasm here ("to me" being redundant with "I thought") is especially galling coming from someone who's usually a good writer!
+
+It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ made a pattern click. If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby threaten them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work, like good literary criticism. A rationalist space _needs to be able to talk about the territory_.
+
+I understand that Yudkowsky wouldn't agree with that characterization: to be fair, the same comment I quoted also lists "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced. But I think (_I_ think) it's also fair to note that (as we had seen on _Less Wrong_ earlier that year), lip service is cheap. It's easy to _say_, "Of course I don't think politeness is more important than truth," while systematically behaving as if you did.
+
+[TODO—
+
+"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors", Yudkowsky says in the post on reducing negativity, correctly pointing out that if a work's true level of [finish math]
+
+ * I can imagine some young person who really liked _Harry Potter and the Methods_ being intimidated by the math notation,
+ * But a somewhat less young person
+ * I would expect a real rationality teach to teach the general lesson, "model selection effects"
+
+"Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private", says Yudkowsky.
+
+ * I agree that public criticism isn't meant to solely help the author (because if it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it)
+ * But other readers also benefit!
+ * And if you're going to talk about incentives, you _want_ people to be rewarded for making good criticism
+
+Crocker's rules
+
+ * it's true and important that Crocker's rules were meant to be declared by the speaker; it's not a license to be mean to other people who might not want that
+ * But there's still something special about a culture that has "Crocker's rules" as an available concept, that's completely absent from modern Yudkowsky
+
+]
-----
Also in November 2019, 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 call them 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_."
+The reason it _should_ have been safe to write was 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.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.
[^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).
+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.
[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
-[TODO: help from Jessica for "Unnatural Categories"]
+On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
-[TODO: 2 June, I send an email to Cade Metz, who had DMed me on Twitter
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/09/11/update-on-my-situation/
-]
+He never got back to me.
+
+[TODO: three weeks later, Slate Star Codex went down]
+
+------
+
+I continued to work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis. The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:
+
+> I had hoped that the Israel/Palestine example above made it clear that you have to deal with the consequences of your definitions, which can include confusion, muddling communication, and leaving openings for deceptive rhetorical strategies.
+
+This is certainly an _improvement_ over the original text without the note, but I took the use of the national borders metaphor here to mean that Scott still hadn't really gotten my point about there being underlying laws of thought underlying categorization: mathematical principles governing _how_ definition choices can muddle communication or be deceptive. (But that wasn't surprising; [by Scott's own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/).)
+
+Category "boundaries" are a useful _visual metaphor_ for explaining the cognitive function of categorization: you imagine a "boundary" in configuration space containing all the things that belong to the category.
+
+If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous U.S. states. It may be _inconvenient_ that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, and we have to deal with the consequences of that, but there's no sense in which it's _wrong_ that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.
+
+But if you _do_ have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is not a particularly deep or informative one.
+
+A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of what government.
+
+In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure is useful for making probabilistic inferences: you can use your observastions of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
+
+But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get _close_ to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
+
+The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people _do_ with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be _illustrated_ in a diagram as a closed region in two-dimensional space, but philosophically, they're very different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to explain why gerrymandered categories were allegedly okay, showed that he Didn't Get It.
+
+I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone _want_ a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign _higher utility_ to doing it this way", had to be messing with you. Where would such a utility function come from? Intuitively, it had to be precisely _because_ squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would _realistically_ want to do that would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold."
+
+That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of _closeness_ that made some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
+
+Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I _wanted_ to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's _more useful_ than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`—but that would require the numbers in Y to be _numbers_ rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from lg 8 = 3 to lg 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter "which" three states they were.
+
+How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the _variance_ of my features conditional on category-membership? Was "connectedness" intrinsically the what I wanted, or was connectedness only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness _was_ intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are _similar enough to make similar decisions about_.
+
+I put the question to a few friends (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't.
+
+------
+
+[TODO: blowing up at a stray remark; robot cult to stop tricking me]
[TODO: "out of patience" email]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff