### A Leaked Email Non-Scandal (February 2021)
-On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan, disapproving of the community's deceptive defense against the _Times_, [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/) on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
+On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan, disapproving of the community's defense against the _Times_, [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/) on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. He said that biologically mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's intelligentsia is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing _vis á vis_ the neoreactionaries and his own popularity. But again, none of it is surprising if you know Scott from his writing.
But if "sexism" included "It's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's ["Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)), then the "_Slate Star Codex_ _et al._ are crypto-sexists" charge was absolutely correct. (Crypto-racist, crypto-fascist, _&c._ left as an exercise for the reader.)
-You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've been trained in using empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes. People whose education came from California public schools plus Tumblr didn't already know that. ([I didn't know that](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".
+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've been trained in using empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes. People whose education came from California public schools plus Tumblr didn't already know that. ([I didn't know that](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone who was more preoccupied by the wrong of bigotry than the right to privacy might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".[^no-promises]
-Indeed, it seems important to note (though I didn't at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
+[^no-promises]: It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
-To see why the lack of a promise is significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or [stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy)) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the whistleblower and against "privacy".
+ To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or [stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy)) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter.
Here, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's because I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our actual problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because [the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)", but we thought our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!
### Yudkowsky Doubles Down (February 2021)
-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.
+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]. Briefly: given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's not going to be a "right answer", but we can at least be objective in describing what the conflict is about, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that. Given that we can't coordinate a switch to universal singular _they_, the pronouns _she_ and _he_ continue to have different meanings in the minds of native English speakers, in the sense that your mind forms different probabilistic expectations of someone taking feminine or masculine pronouns. That's _why_ trans people want to be referred to by the pronoun corresponding to their chosen gender; if there were literally no difference in meaning, there would be no reason to care. Thus, making the distinction on the basis of gender identity rather than sex [has consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences); by proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best, Yudkowsky was [falsely portraying the policy debate as one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided).
[^challenges-title]: 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).
+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.
+
Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.
But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was because the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).
>
> 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_.
-I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great. The people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
+I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color seems pretty bad. The people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
But taking the convention as given, a demand to be referred to as having a hair color _that one does not have_ seems 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 an example of genuine nuance brought on by a genuine complication 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? 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_.
+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_.[^pronoun-roles]
+
+[^pronoun-roles]: If the problem is with the pronoun implying stereotypes and social roles in the language as spoken, such that another pronoun should be considered more correct despite that lack of corresponding hair color, you should be making that case on the empirical merits, not appealing to hypothetical surgeries.
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.
At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post also explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?
-I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just too talented a writer for me to excuse his words as accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about despite someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's ambiguous for a reason.
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) If Yudkowsky just wanted to post about how gendered pronouns are unnecessary and bad as an apolitical matter of language design, he could have written a post just making that narrow point. What ended up happening is that he wrote a post featuring sanctimonious flag-waving about the precious feelings of people "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", and concluding with a policy proposal that gives the trans activist coalition everything they want, proclaiming this "the simplest and best protocol" without so much as acknowledging the real arguments on [the other side of the policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided). I don't think it's crazy for me to assume this was the intended result, and to ask who benefitted.
-When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
+When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky does not obviously disagree with this interpretation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png):
The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky assumes that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.
-I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as [Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock) or [Corinna Cohn](https://corinnacohn.substack.com/) or [Aaron Terrell](https://aaronterrell.substack.com/)—or for that matter [Steve Sailer](https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/)—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without [the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
+I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as [Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock) or [Corinna Cohn](https://corinnacohn.substack.com/) or [Aaron Terrell](https://aaronterrell.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-my-agp-normalization)—or for that matter [Steve Sailer](https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/)—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without [the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be applied to everything you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in the community didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students wouldn't be able to hear it, would have been rightfully seen as absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's [resentment of the tyranny of schools](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) by [selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users).) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his faithful students _don't read Steve Sailer_, he should notice that he's running a cult or a fandom rather than an intellectual community.
I claim that (a′) and (b′) are overwhelmingly likely to be true. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story [I've](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [been](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [telling](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) you about how I wasted the last seven years of my life on this, I'm going to guess that the answer is broadly No: "we" can't talk about that. (I can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)
-But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's actually going on with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in his [November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](/images/yudkowsky-wrong_place_to_pack_it.png):
+But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's actually going on with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole post in a different light: making sense of the discussion requires analyzing what _isn't_ being said.
+
+In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in his [November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](/images/yudkowsky-wrong_place_to_pack_it.png):
> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
>
He [later clarified on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403), "It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy."
-But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you _shouldn't_ mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic. He's playing on a different chessboard.
+But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you _shouldn't_ mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic; he's not going to tell us about reasons not to transition. He's playing on a different chessboard.
-### A Fire of Inner Life
+### People Who Are Trying to Be People Want to Improve Their Self-Models
"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky claims. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is enacting that policy the right thing to do?
Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to take actions _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... speech? I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character_.
-### This Isn't About Subjective Intent
+### Criticism of Public Statements Is About the Public Statements, Not Subjective Intent
This is the part where Yudkowsky or his flunkies accuse me of being uncharitable, of [failing at perspective-taking](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435617576495714304) and [embracing conspiracy theories](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242). Obviously, Yudkowsky doesn't _think of himself_ as trying to transform his faithful students into Jane Austen characters. Perhaps, then, I have failed to understand his position? [As Yudkowsky put it](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially if trans women were purported to be "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!) in some population. After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_. So in October 2016, [I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occurred.
-Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning". But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). After attempts to clarify via email failed, I eventually wrote ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the relevant error in general terms, and Yudkowsky eventually [clarified his position in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).
+Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning". But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+
+(And this November 2018 reversal on the philosophy of language was much, much worse than the March 2016 reversal on the psychology of sex, because the latter is a complicated empirical question about which reasonable people might read new evidence differently and change their minds. In contrast, there's no plausible good reason for him to have reversed course on whether words can be wrong.)
+
+After attempts to clarify via email failed, I eventually wrote ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the relevant error in general terms, and Yudkowsky eventually [clarified his position in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).
But then in February 2021, he reopened the discussion to proclaim 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", the problems with which post I explained in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) and above.
On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
-On "my turn", I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically making any unambiguously false atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was substantively misleading compared to what any serious person would say if they were trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+On "my turn", I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [perhaps not technically making any unambiguously false atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was substantively misleading compared to what any serious person would say if they were trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
At the start, I never expected to end up arguing about the minutiæ of pronoun conventions, which no one would care about if contingencies of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point for things people do care about. The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was trying to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
What makes all of this especially galling is that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing or foreseeable technology because of how complicated humans (and therefore human sex differences) are? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was in the Sequences as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries [compress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) your [anticipated experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-Seriously, do you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this independently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year are almost entirely things he already said, that anyone could just look up!
+Seriously, do you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this independently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still cared about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year are almost entirely things he already said, that anyone could just look up!
I guess the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're playing the part well enough today, no one cares what you said in 2009?
### The Battle That Matters
-Yudkowsky [defended his behavior in February 2021](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176):
+In February 2021, Yudkowsky [defended his behavior](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176) (referring back to [his November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter statement](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)):
> I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.
In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't claim to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.
-If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, and refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign), and keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising. His marketing bluster was designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.
+If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, and refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign), and keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising.[^gould-analogy] His marketing bluster was designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.[^gullible]
-Because, I did, actually, trust him. Back in 2009 when _Less Wrong_ was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic ["Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) (in the style of [Chuck Norris facts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts)). ["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts/comment/Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
+[^gould-analogy]: Yudkowsky [once wrote of Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould) that "[c]onsistently self-serving scientific 'error', in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud." I think the same standard applies here.
-Part of what made him so trustworthy back then was that he wasn't asking for trust. He clearly _did_ think it was [unvirtuous to just shut up and listen to him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus): "I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science). He was always arrogant, but it was tempered by the expectation of being held to account by arguments rather than being deferred to as a social superior. "I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why).
+[^gullible]: Perhaps some readers will consider this post to be more revealing about my character rather than Yudkowsky's: that [everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) his bluster wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, so I have no more right to complain about "false advertising" than purchasers of a ["World's Best"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) ice-cream who are horrified (or pretending to be) that it may not objectively be the best in the world.
-He visibly [cared about other people being in touch with reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business). "I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before," [he wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY). (I can testify that this is true: while sharing a car ride with Anna Salamon in 2011, he told me I had B.O.)[^bo-heroism]
+ Such readers may have a point. If _you_ [already knew](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info) that Yudkowsky's pose of epistemic superiority was phony (because everyone knows), then you are wiser than I was. But I think there are a lot of people in the "rationalist" subculture who didn't know (because we weren't anyone). This post is for their benefit.
-[^bo-heroism]: A lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in [noticing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.
+Perhaps he thinks it's unreasonable for someone to hold him to higher standards. As he [wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984) [on](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976) in February 2021:
- What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to publicly proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
+> It's strange and disingenuous to pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history, must all have been blurting out everything they knew in public, at all times, on pain of not possibly being able to retain their Art otherwise. I doubt Richard Feynman was like that. More likely is that, say, he tried to avoid telling outright lies or making public confusions worse, but mainly got by on having a much-sharper-than-average dividing line in his mine between peer pressure against saying something, and that thing being _false_.
-That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing.
+I've read _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_. I cannot imagine Richard Feynman trying to get away with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" excuse. I think if there were topics Richard Feynman didn't think he could afford to be honest about, he—or really, anyone who valued their intellectual integrity over their public image as a religious authority—would just not issue sweeping public proclamations on that topic while claiming the right to ignore counterarguments on the grounds of having "some confidence in [their] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [themself] before speaking".
-I think he knows it. In a November 2022 Discord discussion, [he remarked](/images/yudkowsky-i_might_have_made_a_fundamental_mistake.png):
+The claim to not be making public confusions worse might be credible if there were no other public figures doing better. But other science educators in the current year such as [Richard Dawkins](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments), University of Chicago professor [Jerry Coyne](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/08/27/on-helen-joyces-trans/), or ex-Harvard professor [Carole Hooven](https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard) _have_ been willing to stand up for the scientific truth that biological sex continues to be real even when it hurts people's feelings.
-> I might have made a fundamental mistake when I decided, long ago, that I was going to try to teach people how to reason so that they'd be able to process my arguments about AGI and AGI alignment through a mechanism that would discriminate true from false statements.
->
-> maybe I should've just learned to persuade people of things instead
+If Yudkowsky thinks he's too important for that (because his popularity with progressives has much greater impact on the history of Earth-originating intelligent life than Carole Hooven's), that might be the right act-consequentialist decision, but one of the consequences he should be tracking is that he's forfeiting the trust of everyone who expected him to live up to the epistemic standards successfully upheld by UChicago or Harvard biology professors.
+
+It looks foolish in retrospect, but I did trust him much more than that. Back in 2009 when _Less Wrong_ was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic ["Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) (in the style of [Chuck Norris facts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts)). ["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts/comment/Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
+
+Part of what made him so trustworthy back then was that he wasn't asking for trust. He clearly _did_ think it was [unvirtuous to just shut up and listen to him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus): "I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science). He was always arrogant, but it was tempered by the expectation of being held to account by arguments rather than being deferred to as a social superior. "I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why).
-I got offended. I felt like a devout Catholic watching the Pope say, "Jesus sucks; I hate God; I never should have told people about God."
+He visibly [cared about other people being in touch with reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business). "I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before," [he wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY). (I can testify that this is true: while sharing a car ride with Anna Salamon in 2011, he told me I had B.O.)[^bo-heroism]
+
+[^bo-heroism]: A lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in [noticing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.
-Later, I felt the need to write another message clarifying exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
+ What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people who do not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket, which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
-[He put a check-mark emoji reaction on it](/images/davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png), indicating agreement or approval.
+That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing. Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or may not have happened, I think he knows it.
-If the caliph has lost his faith in the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better results than propaganda.
+If the caliph has lost his [belief in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1) the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better consequences than propaganda.
-But since I haven't relinquished my faith, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
+But since I haven't lost my belief in honesty, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
The modern Yudkowsky [writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
I notice that this advice fails to highlight the possibility that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show (judged to be personally prudent and not community-harmful), rather than a misperception on your part. I am left shaking my head in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) sadness about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and disgust at his duplicity. **If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambiguously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.**
-A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless [boo light](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights). I specifically and literally mean it in [_Merriam-Webster_'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud)—and I think I've made my case. Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, [rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism).
+A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless [boo light](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights). I specifically and literally mean it in [_Merriam-Webster_'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud)—and I think I've made my case. (The "epistemic hero" posturing isn't compatible with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" prevarication; he needs to choose one or the other.) Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, [rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism).
-Second, it's a conditional: _if_ Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, _then_ he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean—if he decided after all that he wanted it to be common knowledge in his Caliphate that gender-dysphoric people can stand what is true, because we are already enduring it—he could do so at any time.
+Second, it's a conditional: _if_ Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, _then_ he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean, he could do so at any time.
He probably won't. We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff