>
> _Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
-[TODO: Sasha disaster, breakup with Vassar group]
+[TODO: Sasha disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me]
+
+[TODO: NYT affair and Brennan link, prelude to pronouns post
+ * Cade Metz's story came out, and it was pretty bad in the ways you'd expect
+ * notably, the Charles Murray guilt-by-association was a reach on the part of the reporter
+ * What's particularly weird is that if you actually read Scott's work (e.g. "High School Science Project", he's obviously sympathetic to genetic explanations; it's _possible_ for Jews to be smart for genetic reasons but the black/white gap to be fake and environmental
+ * Scott's denial doesn't go into this, of course
+ * Brennan email leak
+ * my comment on bullies and heresy / my Twitter comment on lying
+ * Yudkowsky reopens the conversation?! Why?!
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608
+> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
+
+Oh, this was also on 18 February 2021 (same day as my comment about SneerClub); maybe the conjunction of the two made me more salient
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113
+> Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!
+
+And I think I _would_ have been over it, except—
-[TODO: NYT affair and Brennan link
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article
https://reddragdiva.tumblr.com/post/643403673004851200/reddragdiva-topher-brennan-ive-decided-to-say
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228
Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs, that's utterly discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
-[TODO: discrediting to the community
- * "would have said anything where you could hear it" is _discrediting_
- * I mean, it's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph (or it would have been, if he was still my caliph), but
- * This actually a major life decision for a lot of people in your community! People in this community actually need the right answer here, whatever the right answer turns out to be
- * The "where you could hear it" is also bizarre—don't you people read widely? I'm unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I bring to bear (Kathleen Stock doesn't say anything about Bayesian networks), but my basic points are obvious
-]
+Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If "the community" is _so_ bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one (!?) who can talk about any of the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual Culture War, why would you pay attention to "the community" _at all_? Insofar as "the community" is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the entire world for the practice of reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that moves resources): it needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
-The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+The "where you could hear it" clause is _particularly_ bizarre—as if Yudkowsky takes it as an unexamined and unproblematic assumption 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 transgender identity 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: when people like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell make similar points, they 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/). _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, and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section made that sound like an important and high-status thing to do.
+
+But the promise of Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be _applied to_ everything else you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in "the community" (such as it was) didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students therefore _wouldn't be able to hear it_ (?!?), would be absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, but 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 by selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year.) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year doesn't expect his followers to be able to pick up on obvious points when someone like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell says it, he should notice that he's running a mere cult or fandom rather than anything one would want to dignify by calling it an intellectual community.
+
+Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
]
-[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation]
+[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation
+ * so far, I've been writing this from the perspective of caring about _rationality_ and wanting there to be a rationality movement, the common interest of many causes
+ * e.g., as recently as 2020 I was daydreaming about working for an embryo selection company as part of the "altruistic" (about optimizing the future, rather than about my own experiences) component of my actions
+ * if you have short timelines, and want to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, self-censoring about contradicting the state religion makes sense
+ * you could tell a story in which I'm the villain for undermining Team Singularity with my petty temporal concerns
+]
> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good). _If the world were at stake._
>
> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
[TODO: social justice and defying threats
-
-at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+ * There's _no story_ in which misleading people about this is on Yudkowsky's critical path!! I can cooperate with censorship that doesn't actively interfere with my battle, but Yudkowsky was interfering
+ * I don't pick fights with Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't take a shit on my Something to Protect
+ * back in 'aught-nine, SingInst had made a point of prosecuting Tyler Emerson, citing decision theory
+ * there's a lot of naive misinterpretations of timeless decision theory out there that don't understand the counterfactual dependence thing, but the parsing of social justice as an agentic "threat" to be avoided rather than a rock to be dodged does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics more than infidels
+ * But it matters where you draw the zero point: is being excluded from the coalition a "punishment" to threaten you out of bad behavior, or is being included a "reward" for good behavior?
+ * at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
]
But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read [...] 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"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)),
-
+[TODO cap off chess analogy—
The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio!
+]
-[TODO: the dolphin war, our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014; this is a sign that we're a cult
+[TODO the dolphin war:
+ * Yudkowsky retweeted Soares on dolphins, and I _lost it_; I had specifically covered the dolphin example!!
+ * the memetic dead hand of "... Not Man for the Categories" was very clear in the arguments; it got linked three times in the comments and Nate Liked it
+ * I did, actually, overestimate the probability that Nate was messing with me
+ * I overheated in the comments section in a way that was a huge misplay
+ * nevertheless, the fact that our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014 (even if people who caught the meme weren't thinking about gender); this is a sign that we're a cult rather than having a special engine of reasoning that can re-generate correct beliefs
+ * "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" followup
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
]
-[TODO: sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
+[TODO:
+ * depressed after talking to him at Independence Day party 2021 (I can mention that, because it was outdoors and probably lots of other people saw us, even if I can't talk about content)
+ * It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't trying to sell himself as a religious leader, and profiting from the conflation of rationalist-someone-who-cares-about-reasoning, and rationalist-member-of-robot-cult
+ * But he does, in fact, seem to actively encourage this conflation (contrast to how the Sequences had a litany against gurus)
+ * a specific example that made me very angry in September 2021
+ * the fact that David Xu interpreted criticism of the robot cult as me going "full post-rat" suggests that Yudkowsky's framing had spilled onto others
+sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
+[TODO: address Yudkowsky's clarification in Eliezerfic that it's a strictly first-person exercise]
+
On the offhand chance that Eliezer Yudkowsky happens to be reading this—if someone _he_ trusts (MIRI employees?) genuinely thinks it would be good for the lightcone to bring this paragraph to his attention—he should know that if he _wanted_ to win back _some_ of the trust and respect he's lost from me and everyone I can influence—not _all_ of it, but _some_ of it[^some-of-it]—I think it would be really easy. All he would have to do is come clean about the things he's _already_ misled people about.
-[^some-of-it]: Coming clean _after_ someone writes a 70,000 word memoir explaining how dishonest you've been, engenders less trust than coming clean spontenously of your own accord.
+[^some-of-it]: Coming clean _after_ someone writes a 80,000 word memoir explaining how dishonest you've been, engenders less trust than coming clean spontenously of your own accord.
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.")
... but I'm not, holding my breath. 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".)
+[TODO: I've given up talking to the guy (nearest unblocked strategy sniping in Eliezerfic doesn't count), my last email, giving up on hero-worship I don't want to waste any more of his time. I owe him that much.
+ * 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: I've given up talking to the guy (nearest unblocked strategy sniping in Eliezerfic doesn't count), my last email, giving up on hero-worship I don't want to waste any more of his time. I owe him that much.]
-
-[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe ]
+[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe
+ * when Jessica published her story, the karma took a nosedive when Scott commented blaming all of Jessica's problems on Michael, and Yudkowsky backed up Scott; to me, this looks like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Calilphate, so Caliphate leaders move in to discredit her by association.
+ * (extract points from my conversation about Michael with Scott)
+]
[TODO: the Death With Dignity era
"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
+ * swimming to shore analogy
+
/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * I wrote to him asking if he cared if I said negative things about him, that it would be easier if he wouldn't hold it against me, and explained my understanding of the privacy norm
+ * in retrospect, I was wrong to ask that. I _do_ hold it against him. And if I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
+ * Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? The pronouns post mentions "while you can still get away with disclaimers", referring to sanction from the outside world, as if he won't receive any sanction from his people, because he owns us. That's wrong. Yudkowsky as a person doesn't own me; the Sequences-algorithm does
+
+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
]
-[TODO: regrets and wasted time]
+[TODO: regrets and wasted time
+ * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff