Why do I keep repeatedly bringing this up, that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ reader)?
+[TODO: Scott also named Murray as Welfare Czar in an "If I were president ..." post!!! https://archive.vn/xu7PX]
+
Because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalist" Caliphate and mainstream progressives, the "rationalists"' defensive strategy is one of deception.
Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much most of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a generous handful of Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but it turns out that survey data doesn't back this up. (From 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results), to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/).)
+[TODO: 2020 EA survey says 71% male, so it depends on what group you measure, really https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics ]
+
But _trans!_ We have plenty of trans people to trot out as a shield to definitively prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys! (Alexander joked in April 2016 that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).) Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong"](https://archive.is/SlJo1), wrote one.
Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I'm telling you this 80,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
-In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+<a id="thellim-vs-jane-austen"></a>In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.
[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: address Yudkowsky's clarification in Eliezerfic that it's a strictly first-person exercise]
+
On the offhand chance that Eliezer Yudkowsky happens to be reading this—if someone _he_ trusts (MIRI employees?) genuinely thinks it would be good for the lightcone to bring this paragraph to his attention—he should know that if he _wanted_ to win back _some_ of the trust and respect he's lost from me and everyone I can influence—not _all_ of it, but _some_ of it[^some-of-it]—I think it would be really easy. All he would have to do is come clean about the things he's _already_ misled people about.
* like a crazy ex-girlfriend (["I have no underlying issues to address / I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8))
]
-[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
+[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe October 2021
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards December 2021
* when Jessica published her story, the karma took a nosedive when Scott commented blaming all of Jessica's problems on Michael, and Yudkowsky backed up Scott; to me, this looks like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Calilphate, so Caliphate leaders move in to discredit her by association.
* (extract points from my conversation about Michael with Scott)
+
]
-[TODO: the Death With Dignity era
+[TODO: the Death With Dignity era April 2022
"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
]
[TODO:
+ * January 2022
* I wrote to him asking if he cared if I said negative things about him, that it would be easier if he wouldn't hold it against me, and explained my understanding of the privacy norm
* in retrospect, I was wrong to ask that. I _do_ hold it against him. And if I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
* Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? The pronouns post mentions "while you can still get away with disclaimers", referring to sanction from the outside world, as if he won't receive any sanction from his people, because he owns us. That's wrong. Yudkowsky as a person doesn't own me; the Sequences-algorithm does
]
+[TODO: fighting in Eliezerfic]
+
[TODO: regrets and wasted time
* Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff