[TODO: recap of previous three posts
-Recapping our Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I explained the thing about how I've always (since puberty)
+Recapping our Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I explained the thing about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about
In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer",
-In a subsequent–subsequent post "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"
-In a subsequent–subsequent–subsequent post "If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them",
+In a subsequent–subsequent post, "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning",
+
+In a subsequent–subsequent–subsequent post, "If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them",
+
+And now, the conclusion—
]
... except that Yudkowsky _reopened the conversation_ four days later on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions, and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
-(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention?)
+(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention, despite the fact that I'm generally not that important?)
-I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title] but I find myself still having more left to analyze. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a _fascinating_ document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.
+I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title], but that post focused on the object-level arguments; I have more to say here (that I decided to cut from "Challenges") about the meta-level political context. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a _fascinating_ document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.
[^challenges-title]: The form of the title is an allusion to Yudkowsky's ["Challenges to Christiano's Capability Amplification Proposal"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal).
So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to _make sense_, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, and not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
-That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science writing was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (an informal internship in 'aught-nine, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
+That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science blogging was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (an informal internship in 'aught-nine, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
-At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
-Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution during that time. Yudkowsky seemed particularly spooked by AlphaGo and AlphaZero in 2016–2017.
+Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution.[^second-half] Yudkowsky seemed particularly [spooked by AlphaGo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=gQzA8a989ZyGvhWv2) [and AlphaZero](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/20/alphago/) in 2016–2017, not because superhuman board game players were dangerous, but because of what it implied about the universe of algorithms.
+
+There had been a post in the Sequences that made fun of "the people who just want to build a really big neural net." These days, it's increasingly looking like just building a really big neural net ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
+
+[^second-half]: In an unfinished slice-of-life short story I started writing _circa_ 2010, my protagonist (a supermarket employee resenting his job while thinking high-minded thoughts about rationality and the universe) speculates about "a threshold of economic efficiency beyond which nothing human could survive" being a tighter bound on future history than physical limits (like the heat death of the universe), and comments that "it imposes a sense of urgency to suddenly be faced with the fabric of your existence coming apart in ninety years rather than 10<sup>90</sup>."
+
+ But if ninety years is urgent, what about ... nine? Looking at what deep learning can do in 2023, the idea of Singularity 2032 doesn't seem self-evidently _absurd_ in the way that Singularity 2019 seemed absurd in 2010 (correctly, as it turned out).
-[TODO: specifically, AlphaGo seemed "deeper" than minimax search so you shouldn't dimiss it as "meh, games", the way it rocketed past human level from self-play https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1536364192441040896]
+My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of that week in January 2021). Previous AI milestones, like GANs for a _fixed_ image class, were easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the _details_, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to _combine_ concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of examples of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.[^qualitatively-new]
-My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of that week in January 2021). Previous AI milestones, like GANs for a _fixed_ image class, were easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands and thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the _details_, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to _combine_ concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.
+[^qualitatively-new]: By mid-2022, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were generating much better pictures, but that wasn't surprising. Seeing AI being able to do a thing at all is the model update; AI being able to do the thing much better 18 months later feels "priced in."
[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the great common task. Existing companies working on embryo selection [boringly](https://archive.is/tXNbU) [market](https://archive.is/HwokV) their services as being about promoting health, but [polygenic scores should work as well for maximizing IQ as they do for minimizing cancer risk](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection).[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos; the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
-But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's starting to look unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is on track to end the world in twenty years, we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
+But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's starting to look unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is [on track to end the world in twenty years](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
-[It's ironic that "longtermism" got some traction as the word for the "EA" cause of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future work out to extreme short-termism.
+[It's ironic that "longtermism" got traction as the word for the "EA" cause area of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future, end up working out to extreme _short_-termism. Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a recognizable world of humans in 2123—_would_ care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone _better_ if Galileo had declined to publish for pre-emptive fear of the Inquisition.
-Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a world of recognizable humans in 2123—_would_ care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone _better_ if Galileo had declined to publish his works for fear of the Inquisition.
+But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what large tech companies are doing as they build transformative AI, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have _time_ to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_. If the progressive machine marks you as a transphobic bigot, the machine's functionaries at OpenAI or Meta AI Research are less likely to listen to you when you explain why their safety plan won't work (or why they should have a safety plan at all).
-But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have _time_ to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_.
+(I remarked to "Wilhelm" in June 2022 that DeepMind changing its Twitter avatar to a rainbow variant of their logo for Pride month was a bad sign.)
-[...]
+So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain, willfully damaging humanity's chances of survival by picking unimportant culture-war fights in the xrisk-reduction social sphere, when _I know_ that the sphere needs to keep its nose clean in the eyes of the progressive egregore? _That's_ why Yudkowsky said the arguably-technically-misleading things he said about my Something to Protect: he _had_ to, to keep our nose clean. The people paying attention to contemporary politics don't know what I know, and can't usefully be told. Isn't it better for humanity if my meager talents are allocated to making AI go well? Don't I have a responsibility to fall in line and take one for the team? If the world is at stake.
-> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
+As usual, the Yudkowsky of 2009 has me covered. In his short story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), our protagonist Hirou wonders why the powerful wizard Dolf lets other party members risk themselves fighting, when Dolf could have protected them:
+
+> _Because Dolf was more important, and if he exposed himself to all the risk every time, he might eventually be injured_, Hirou's logical mind completed the thought. _Lower risk, but higher stakes. Cold but necessary–_
+>
+> _But would you_, said another part of his mind, _would you, Hirou, let your friends walk before you and fight, and occasionally die, if you_ knew _that you yourself were stronger and able to protect them? Would you be able to stop yourself from stepping in front?_
>
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good)
+> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
+>
+> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
+
+That is, there's _no story_ under which misleading people about trans issues is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. _I'd_ prefer him to have free speech, but if _he_ thinks he can't afford to be honest about things he [_already_ got right in 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), he could just—not issue pronouncements on topics where he intends to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds!_
-[TODO: social justice and defying threats
-
- * There's _no story_ in which misleading people about transgender is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. _I'd_ prefer him to have free speech, but if he can't afford to be honest about things he already got right in 2009, he could just—not bring up the topic!
+In [a Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+> Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at _all_ the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a _lot_ of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
- * I can totally cooperate with censorship that doesn't actively intefere with my battle! I agree that there are plenty of times in life where you need to say "No comment." But if that's the play you want to make, you have to actually _not comment_. "20% of the ones with penises" is no "No comment"! "You're not standing in defense of truth" is not "No comment"! "The simplest and best proposal" is not "No comment"!
+Sure. But if that's your story, I think you need to _actually not comment_. ["[A]t least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) is _not "no comment"._ ["[Y]ou're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) is _not "no comment"_. We did get a clarification on that one—but then, within a matter of months, he turned around and came back with his "simplest and best proposal" about how the "important things [...] would be all the things [he's] read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", _which is also not "no comment."_
+
+[TODO: defying threats, cont'd—
* I don't pick fights with Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano isn't trying to be a religious leader. If he has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them.
I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's _clearly labeled as such_ would be fine. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
-What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_. That's _not_ "no commment"! Having _already_ chosen to comment, he can't reasonably expect any self-respecting rationalist to take his "epistemic hero" bluster seriously if he's not going to reply to the obvious objections to have been made with standing and warrant.
+What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_.
- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
-
- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+[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)
- * In a comment on his February 2021 Facebook post on pronoun reform, Yudkowsky [claims that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228) "in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where [...] you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, 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". Some interesting potential counterevidence to this "not community-harmful" claim comes in the form of [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror of my rebuttal. Habryka writes:
+]
-> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
->
-> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
->
-> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+[TODO:
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
-Again, that's the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!). Is that ... _not_ a form of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
+ * Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
+]
-... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker" is what I _would_ say, if I hadn't given up.
+At the end of the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I [said that I was upgrading my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block"](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435468183268331525). Better to just leave, rather than continue to hang around in his mentions trying (consciously or otherwise) to pick fights, 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: finish that thought ...]
+I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time (valuable time, _limited_ time); I owed him that much.
-If Yudkowsky _wants_ to reply—if he _wants_ to try to win back some of the trust and respect he's lost from me—he's totally _welcome_ to. (_I_ don't censor my comment sections of people whom it "looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with".)
+Leaving a personality cult is hard. As I struggled to write, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of cycles worrying about what he'd think of me, rather than saying the things I needed to say. I knew it was pathetic that my religion was so bottlenecked on _one guy_—particularly since the holy texts themselves (written by that one guy) [explicitly said not to do that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus)—but unwinding those psychological patterns was still a challenge.
+An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an EA forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative."
-[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)
+I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does _not_ make sense to be reassured that _Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it_. That's just being a personality-cultist.
+[TODO last email and not bothering him—
+ * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles worrying about what he'd think of me
+ * 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 (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
+ * 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?
]
+In February 2022, I finally managed to finish a draft of ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (A year after the post it replies to! I did other things that year, probably.) It's long (12,000 words), because I wanted to be thorough and cover all the angles. (To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at Eliezer Yudkowsky, _you must kill him._)
+
+If I had to compress it by a factor of 200 (down to 60 words), I'd say my main point was that, given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's no "right answer", but we can at least be objective in _describing what the conflict is about_, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that; his "simplest and best proposal" favored the interests of some parties to the dispute (as was seemingly inevitable), _without admitting he was doing so_ (which was not inevitable).[^describing-the-conflict]
+
+[^describing-the-conflict]: I had been making this point for four years. [As I wrote in February 2018's "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#describing-the-conflict), "If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word [...] rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_."
+
+In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or save it for the memoir, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
+
+I asked secret posse member for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
+
+Secret posse member said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) They said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
+
+"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded secret posse member. "I don't know what you're afraid of."
+
+I was afraid of taking irrevocable war actions against the person who taught me everything I know. (And his apparent conviction that the world was ending _soon_, made it worse. Wouldn't it feel petty, if the last thing you ever said to your grandfather was calling him a liar in front of the whole family, even if he had in fact lied?)
+
+I wanted to believe that if I wrote all the words dotting every possible _i_ and crossing every possible _t_ at all three levels of meta, then that would make it [a description and not an attack](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/)—that I could have it both ways if I explained the lower level of organization beneath the high-level abstractions of "betraying his principles and being dishonest." If that didn't work because [I only had five words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words), then—I didn't know what I'd do. I'd think about it.
+
+After a month of dawdling, I eventually decided to pull the trigger on publishing "Challenges", without the extended political coda.[^coda] The post was a little bit mean to Yudkowsky, but not so mean that I was scared of the social consequences of pulling the trigger. (Yudkowsky had been mean to Christiano and Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah in the recent MIRI dialogues; I didn't think this was worse than that.)
+
+[^coda]: The text from the draft coda would later be incorporated into the present post.
+
+I cut the words "in this domain" from the go-for-the-throat concluding sentence that I had been worried about. "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth," full stop.
+
+The post was a _critical success_ by my accounting, due to eliciting a [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror. Habryka wrote:
+
+> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+Brutal! Recall that Yudkowsky's justification for his behavior had been that "it is sometimes personally prudent and _not community-harmful_ to post your agreement with Stalin" (emphasis mine), and here we had the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!).
+
+Is that ... _not_ evidence of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
+
+... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker", is what I fantasized about being able to say to Yudkowsky, if I hadn't already expressed an intention not to bother him anymore.
+
[TODO: the Death With Dignity era April 2022
"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability but that FAI was "impossible", and now he says the probability is ~0
/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
]
+Meanwhile, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth in which the ideas Yudkowsky presented to this world as his own, were commonplace.
-[TODO:
-Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
-
- * Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
-]
-
-After the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I upgraded my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block", to avoid the temptation to pick more fights.
-
-I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time; I owed him that much.
-
-[TODO last email and not bothering him—
- * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles
- * 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 (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
- * 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?
-]
+The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled _Planecrash_,[^planecrash-title] in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy in dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and wakes up in the world of Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game.
-[TODO "Challenges"
- * the essential objections: you can't have it both ways; we should _model the conflict_ instead of taking a side in it while pretending to be neutral
- * eventually shoved out the door in March
- * I flip-flopped back and forth a lot about whether to include the coda about the political metagame, or to save it for the present memoir; I eventually decided to keep the post object-level
- * I felt a lot of trepidation publishing a post that said, "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth"
- * Critical success! Oli's comment
- * I hoped he saw it (but I wasn't going to email or Tweet at him about it, in keeping with my intent not to bother the guy anymore)
-]
+[^planecrash-title]: The title is a pun, referring to both the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond).
-[TODO background on Planecrash, medianworlds, dath ilan, Keepers, masochism coverup—
- * Yudkowsky's new fiction project is about Keltham out of dath ilan dying in a plane crash and waking up in the world of _Pathfinder_, and Dungeons-and-Dragons-alike setting.
- * dath ilan came out of a 2014 April Fool's Day post, which listed BDSM and macroeconomics as something Earth was doing write
+[TODO background on Planecrash &c. cont'd—
* later retconned to be a Yudkowsky medianworld (use my notes from "Another Me I haven't Met" to explain this), the Word of God calls them the "eliezera"
- * Glowfic is a collaborative fiction format initiated by Alicorn; it was originally hosted on dreamwidth (a LiveJournal clone), but they've since got their own website built
* dath ilan's Society is steered by Keepers of Unpleasant Truths That Sometimes Important to Know; everyone in this Society receives rationality training, but Keepers receive special training that would damage most people's humanity or happiness
* Keltham discovers that he's an obligate sexual sadist, but dath ilan has hidden this from him for his own happiness
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff