[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?!
+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.) 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 are surprising to read from someone who has 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.
+Although the many's poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that can only attack you over things that look bad when quoted out of context, can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that the mob can't read. The _Times_ article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:
-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.
+> In one post, [Alexander] [aligned himself with Charles Murray](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[^sloppy]
-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!
+[^sloppy]: It was oddly sloppy of the _Times_ to link the first post, ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), but not the second, ["Against Murderism"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/)—especially since "Against Murderism" is specifically about Alexander's reasons for being skeptical of "racism" as an explanatory concept, and therefore contains "objectively" more compelling sentences to quote out of context than a passing reference to Charles Murray. Apparently, the _Times_ couldn't even be bothered to smear Scott with misinterpretations of his actual ideas, if guilt-by-association did the trick with less effort on behalf of both journalist and reader.
-And I think I _would_ have been over it, except—
+But the sense in which Alexander "aligned himself with Murray" in ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/) in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on alleviate poverty, doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity. (It being difficult to lift people up from poverty is difficult doesn't mean poverty is "genetic": a couple years earlier, Alexander wrote that ["Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/).)
-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
+[Alexander's reply statement](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article) pointed out the _Times_'s obvious chicanery, but (I claim) introduced a distortion of its own—
-Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
-https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
-> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray's offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
-]
+It _is_ a weirdly brazen invalid _inference_. But by calling it a "falsehood", Alexander heavily implies this means he disagrees with Murray's offensive views on race: in invalidating the _Times_'s charge of guilt-by-association with Murray, Alexander validates Murray's guilt.
+
+But ... anyone who's actually read _and understood_ Scott's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds genetically-mediated group differences plausible (as a value-free matter of empirical Science with no particular normative implications): his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from twin studies for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III. of his ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) indicates that he accepts genetics as an explantion for group differences in intelligence (in the case of Ashkenazi Jews).
+
+There are a lot of standard caveats that go here that Scott would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: [the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't itself imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats). It is without a doubt _entirely conceivable_ that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white gap is fake and environmental.[^bet] Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.
+
+[^bet]: It's just—how much do you want to bet on that? How much do you think _Scott_ wants to bet on that?
+
+But ... anyone who's actually read _and understood_ Charles Murray's work, knows that Murray _also_ includes the standard caveats! (Even though the one about group differences not implying anything about individuals is [actually](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average) [wrong](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/).) The _Times_'s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist _like Charles Murray_ seems like a "[Gettier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to justify the charge to distracted _New York Times_ readers is completely bogus.
+
+Why do I keep repeatedly bringing this up, that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy for _New York Times_ readers to decode)?
+
+Because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalist" Caliphate and mainstream progressives, the "rationalists"' defensive strategy is one of deception. The _New York Times_ accuses us of being racists like Charles Murray. Instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach by being sensible, we disingenuously 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 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.
+
+[...]
... except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation in February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions and concluding that, "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
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 "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.
+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 basic 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. When similar points are made by people like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell—or for that matter Steve Sailer—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.
+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 takes for granted that his readers _don't read Steve Sailer_, 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):
* swimming to shore analogy
+ * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+
+ * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan
+
/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff