https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
-I once wrote [a post humorously suggesting that trans women owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was a joke, not a serious proposal.
+I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
-But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a crazy idea; I think _something has been lost_ when women who want them can't have female-only spaces that are actually female-only.
+But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a suspect idea; I think _something of value has been lost_ when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
+
+At Valinor's 2022 Smallpox Eradication Day party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
+
+[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
+
+I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+
+My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+
+If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+
+The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+
+I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+
+From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I _know some things_ about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in _a world that makes sense_.
]
[TODO: the Death With Dignity era April 2022
-"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
+"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability but that FAI was "impossible", and now he says the probability is ~0
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
* swimming to shore analogy
]
[TODO:
- * January 2022
- * 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?
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? 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
-
]
-After the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I updgraded my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block", to avoid the temptation to pick more fights.
+After the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I upgraded my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block", to avoid the temptation to pick more fights.
-I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we weren't actually going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time; I owed him that much.
+I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't need to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time; I owed him that much.
[TODO last email and not bothering him—
+ * Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was wasting cycles
+ * January 2022, 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 (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
+ * 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?
+]
-Although, as I struggled to write, I noticed I was
-
-(Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?")
-
+[TODO "Challenges"
+ * the essential objections: you can't have it both ways; we should _model the conflict_ instead of taking a side in it while pretending to be neutral
+ * eventually shoved out the door in March
+ * I flip-flopped back and forth a lot about whether to include the coda about the political metagame, or to save it for the present memoir; I eventually decided to keep the post object-level
+ * I felt a lot of trepidation publishing a post that said, "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth"
+ * Critical success! Oli's comment
+ * I hoped he saw it (but I wasn't going to email or Tweet at him about it, in keeping with my intent not to bother the guy anymore)
]
[TODO background on Planecrash, medianworlds, dath ilan, Keepers, masochism coverup—
+ * Yudkowsky's new fiction project is about Keltham out of dath ilan dying in a plane crash and waking up in the world of _Pathfinder_, and Dungeons-and-Dragons-alike setting.
+ * dath ilan came out of a 2014 April Fool's Day post, which listed BDSM and macroeconomics as something Earth was doing write
+ * later retconned to be a Yudkowsky medianworld (use my notes from "Another Me I haven't Met" to explain this), the Word of God calls them the "eliezera"
+ * Glowfic is a collaborative fiction format initiated by Alicorn; it was originally hosted on dreamwidth (a LiveJournal clone), but they've since got their own website built
+ * dath ilan's Society is steered by Keepers of Unpleasant Truths That Sometimes Important to Know; everyone in this Society receives rationality training, but Keepers receive special training that would damage most people's humanity or happiness
+ * Keltham discovers that he's an obligate sexual sadist, but dath ilan has hidden this from him for his own happiness
(The title is a pun, referring to both the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond).)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff