>
> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
-[TODO: recap of previous three posts
+Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: [ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky which taught me (amongst many, many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was.](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) [So it came as a huge surprise when, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [A couple years later, after having put some effort into arguing against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word _woman_ (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about the fact that his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join up with a handful of allies to attempt to persuade him to clarify.](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being corrupt led to a series of small misadventures culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy of lanugage issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.
-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
+Really, that should have been the end of the story—and it would have had a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
-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",
-
-]
+That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.
On 13 February 2021, ["Silicon Valley's Safe Space"](https://archive.ph/zW6oX), the _New York Times_ piece on _Slate Star Codex_ came out. It was ... pretty lame? (_Just_ lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while [pushing hard on the subtext](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310) to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of _Slate Star Codex_. ["Nominally"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally)?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed to me more like a critique of the "many"'s reading comprehension, rather than Alexander's writing.
So the _New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]
-[^deny-everything]: Or rather, people are distributed on a spectrum between disingenuously denying everything and sincerly accepting that Charles Murray is Actually Bad, with the older and more skilled among us skewed somewhat more towards disingenuous denial.
+[^deny-everything]: Or rather, people are distributed on a spectrum between disingenuously denying everything and sincerely accepting that Charles Murray is Actually Bad, with the older and more skilled among us skewed somewhat more towards disingenuous denial.
-It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the cover-up.
+It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the coverup.
-As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a handful of East and South Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.[^survey-data]
+As it happens, in our world, the defensive coverup consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a handful of East and South Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.[^survey-data]
[^survey-data]: We go from 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results) to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)—although the [2020 EA survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics) says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we."
[^brennan-condemnation-edits]: The post was subsequently edited a number of times in ways that I don't think are relevant to my discussion here.
-I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote [a comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WJ2h9CRnqzrenpccajdU6SYJkT4967KCstW5dqESt4ArJLjjGHY7yZMk6mjar15Sl?comment_id=10159410429909228) (which ended up yielding 49 Like and Heart reactions): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_.
+I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote [a comment](/images/davis-why_they_say_they_hate_us.png) (which ended up yielding 49 Like and Heart reactions): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_.
If you listened to why _they_ said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seemed to be trending towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."
In the Brennan–Alexander case, 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 [commented that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl?comment_id=10159410429909228&reply_comment_id=10159410753284228) everyone (including, for example, organizers of science fiction conventions) had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable Kolmogorov complicity problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.
+Yudkowsky [commented that](/images/yudkowsky-we_need_to_exclude_evil_bullies.png) everyone (including, for example, organizers of science fiction conventions) had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable Kolmogorov complicity problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.
To this, I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. Psychology is complicated, and people have more than one reason for doing things: I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.
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 of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an artifact of accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about at the risk of offending someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous.
-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 the truth. 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 of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point 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. I think the point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, 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 interpetation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
+On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky ... does not obviously _disagree_ with this interpetation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png):
> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
>
But the promise of the 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" didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students therefore _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 anything one should 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 as to what's going on here](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+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 as to what's going on here](/images/yudkowsky-people_might_be_able_to_speak_that.png):
> 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.
And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_ (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans or even gender-dysphoric if they lived in a different subculture.
-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 been telling you about how I wasted the last six years of my life on this, I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: 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.)
+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 been telling 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: 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 the [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](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
+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 the [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.
>
Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
-Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
+Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png):
> 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 [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation with progressives, as is sometimes personally prudent.
-Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I occasionally engage in a bit of what could be called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with my interlocutor than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+<a id="concern-trolling"></a>Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I occasionally engage in a bit of what could be called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with my interlocutor than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
That is, my bad faith concern-trolling gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
It was a good post! Though Yudkowsky was merely using the sex change example to illustrate [a more general point about the difficulties of applied transhumanism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), "Changing Emotions" was hugely influential on me; I count myself much better off for having understood the argument.
-But then, in a March 2016 Facebook post, Yudkowsky [proclaimed that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women."
+But later, in a March 2016 Facebook post, Yudkowsky [proclaimed that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women."
This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in "Changing Emotions"! The two posts weren't _necessarily_ inconsistent, _if_ you assumed gender identity is an objectively real property synonymous with "brain sex", and that "Changing Emotions"'s harsh (almost mocking) skepticism of the idea of true male-to-female sex change was directed at the sex-change fantasies of _cis_ men (with a male gender-identity/brain-sex), whereas the 2016 Facebook post was about _trans women_ (with a female gender-identity/brain-sex), which are a different thing.
-But this potential unification seemed very dubious to me, especially if "actual" 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_.
+But this potential unification seemed very dubious to me, especially if "actual" 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) (offering to pay $1000 under the [cheerful price protocol](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether he accepted and any such conversation occured.
-[TODO recap cont'd—
+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 would eventually go on to [clarify his position in Septembmer 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).
- * October 2016, I wrote to Yudkowsky noting that he seemed to have made an a massive update and asked to talk about it (for $1000, under the [cheerful price protocol](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price))
- * because of the privacy rules I'm following under this document, can't confirm or deny whether he accepted
- * November 2018, "hill of validity" Twitter thread
- * with the help of Michael/Sarah/Ben/Jessica, I wrote to him multiple times trying to clarify
- * I eventually wrote "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", which includes a verbatim quotes explaining what's wrong with the "it is not a secret"
- * we eventually got a clarification in September 2020
- * I was satisfied, and then ...
- * February 2021, "simplest and best proposal"
- * But this is _still_ wrong, as explained in "Challenges"
-]
+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.
-At the start, I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface 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.
+End recap.
At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards to sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying 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_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually 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 something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface 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.
+
In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff