[TODO: recap of previous three posts
-Recapping our Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I explained the thing about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I explained the thing about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about
-In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer",
+In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2023/Jul/blanchards-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 post, ["A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/),
In a subsequent–subsequent–subsequent post, "If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them",
[^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.)
[^number-of-things]: Note the striking contrast between ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument), in which the Yudkowsky of 2007 wrote that a campaign manager "crossed the line [between rationality and rationalization] at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it"; and these 2021 Tweets, in which Yudkowsky seems completely nonchalant about "not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping" one side of a cultural dispute, because "this battle just isn't that close to the top of [his] priority list". Well, sure! Any hired campaign manager could say the same: helping the electorate make an optimally informed decision just isn't that close to the top of their priority list, compared to getting paid.
- Yudkowsky's claim to have been focused on nudging people's cognition towards sanity seems incredibly dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors on both political sides. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to proportionately _more_ errors on the "pro-Stalin" side.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", judging by local demographics, it seems much more likely to apply to trans women themselves, than their critics!
+ Yudkowsky's claim to have been focused on nudging people's cognition towards sanity seems incredibly dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors on both political sides. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make proportionately _more_ errors on the "pro-Stalin" side.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", judging by local demographics, it seems much more likely to apply to trans women themselves, than their critics!
The battle that matters—and I've been _very_ explicit about this, for years—is over this proposition eloquently [stated by Scott Alexander in November 2014](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (redacting the irrelevant object-level example):
Because, I did, actually, trust him. Back in 'aught-nine 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)). And of course, it was a joke, but the hero-worship that make the joke funny was real. (You wouldn't make those jokes for your community college physics teacher, even if he was a good teacher.)
-["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
+["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
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