>
> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
-[TODO: recap of previous three posts]
+[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
+
+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",
+
+]
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.
[^sloppy]: It was unevenly 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 damning 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 misconstruals of his actual ideas, if guilt-by-association did the trick with less effort on behalf of both journalist and reader.
-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 poverty, doesn't automatically imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity. (A couple of years earlier, Alexander had written that ["Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/): pessimism about our Society's ability to intervene to alleviate poverty, does not amount to the claim that poverty is "genetic.")
+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 the etiology of poverty, doesn't automatically imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity. (A couple of years earlier, Alexander had written that ["Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/): pessimism about our Society's ability to intervene to alleviate poverty, does not amount to the claim that poverty is "genetic.")
[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—
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 read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically-mediated ancestry-group differences in socially-relevant traits (as a value-free matter of empirical Science with no particular normative implications): for example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#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 the particular case of cognitive ability in Ashkenazi Jews.
+But ... anyone who's read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically-mediated ancestry-group differences in socially-relevant traits (as a value-free matter of empirical Science with no particular normative implications): for example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#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 the particular case of cognitive ability in Ashkenazi Jews.[^murray-alignment]
+
+[^murray-alignment]: And as far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, it's notable that Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in [a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post](https://archive.vn/xu7PX).
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 IQ 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.
[^murray-caveat]: For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of _The Bell Curve_, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other."
-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 to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ reader)?
+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 to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ readers)?
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.
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.
-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 generous handful of 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 it turns out that survey data doesn't back this up. (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/).)
+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 generous handful of 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."
But _trans!_ We have plenty of trans people to trot out as a shield to definitively prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys! (Alexander joked in April 2016 that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).) Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
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.
-But I think it's also important to _notice both problems_, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy on account of Brennan being an evil bully.
+But I think it's also important to _notice both problems_, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy.
It's one thing to believe that people should keep promises that they, themselves, explicitly made. But instructing commenters not to link to the email seems to imply not just that Brennan should keep _his_ promises, but that _everyone else_ is obligated to participate in a conspiracy to conceal information that Alexander would prefer concealed. I can see an ethical case for it, analogous to returning stolen property after it's already been sold, and expecting buyers not to buy items that they know have been stolen. (If Brennan had obeyed Alexander's confidentiality demand, we wouldn't have an email to link to, so if we wish Brennan had obeyed, we can just _act as if_ we don't have an email to link to.) But also I think expecting people to _pretend not to know things_ is a _big ask_, not something you can casually demand.
... except that Yudkowsky _reopened the conversation_ four days later on 22 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_."
-(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention?)
+(_Why!?_ Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? I guess my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying-by-implicature temporarily brought me and my concerns to the top of his attention, despite the fact that I'm generally not that important?)
-I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title] but I find myself still having more left to analyze. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a _fascinating_ document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.
+I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title], but that post focused on the object-level arguments; I have more to say here (that I decided to cut from "Challenges") about the meta-level political context. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a _fascinating_ document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.
[^challenges-title]: The form of the title is an allusion to Yudkowsky's ["Challenges to Christiano's Capability Amplification Proposal"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal).
I just—would have hoped that abandoning the intellectual legacy of his Sequences, would be a price too high for such a paltry benefit?
-Michael Vassar [said](https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098), "Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
-
-If the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+Michael Vassar [said](https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098), "Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments." By accepting that soldiers are arguments ("I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), Yudkowsky is accepting the end of rationalism in this sense. If the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I'm telling you this 80,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
-In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+<a id="thellim-vs-jane-austen"></a>In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.
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_.
-In October 2016, I wrote to Yudkowsky
-
-(under the [cheerful price protocol](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price))
-
-
[TODO recap cont'd—
-* November 2018, "You're not standing in defense of truth ..."
-* I spend an absurd amount of effort correcting that, and he eventually clarified in
-
-* February 2021, "simplest and best proposal"
-
+ * 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"
]
-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.
+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.
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_.
(Obviously, if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly mendaciously arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
-What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing or forseeable technology because of how complicated humans (and therefore human sex differences) are? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries [compress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) your [anticipated experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say, are almost entirely things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up!
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year, are almost entirely things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up!
I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009?
[^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 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 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):
This is a battle between Feelings and Truth, between Politics and Truth.
-In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him). You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class, is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him). And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female _with respect to_ a female/male "sex" concept that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).
+In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him).
+
+You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class, is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him).
+
+And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female _with respect to_ a female/male "sex" concept that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).
If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.
Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't really hold that against him, because Scott is [very explicit about only speaking in the capacity of some guy with a blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). You can tell from his writings that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened to him on accident because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is great. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
-Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he knows to be unambiguously false.
-
-But Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself as a master of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition, who ["aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608).
+Eliezer Yudkowsky ... did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he consciously knows to be unambiguously false. And the reason I can hold it against _him_ is because Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself as a master of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition, who ["aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608).
In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't _claim_ to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.
-If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, _and_ refuses to acknowledge corrections _and_ keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising. His marketing bluster was optimized to trick people like me, even if my being _dumb enough to believe him_ is one me.
+If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, _and_ refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign) _and_ keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising. His marketing bluster was optimized to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being _dumb enough to believe him_ is on me.
-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 decent teacher.)
+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.
> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
-I notice that this advice leaves out a possibility: that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show, rather than a misperception on your part. I am left in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) shaking my head sadly about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and shaking my head in disgust at his craven duplicity. If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
-
--------
-
-[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation
-
- * At least, that's what I would say, if there weren't—potentially mitigating factors—or at least, reasons why being a fraud might be a good idea (since I don't want the definition of "fraud" to change depending on whether the world is at stake)
-
- * So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring about human rationality, [the common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Wanting the world to make sense, and expecting the "rationalists" specifically to _especially_ make sense.
-
- * But Yudkowsky wrote the Sequences as a recursive step (/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) for explaining the need for Friendly AI ("Value Is Fragile"); everything done with an ulterior motive has to be done with a pure heart, but the Singularity has always been his no. 1 priority
-
- * Fighting for good epistemology is a long battle, and makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off.
-
- * Back in the 'aughts, it looked like we had time. We had abstract high-level arguments to worry about AI, and it seemed like it was going to happen this century, but it felt like the _second_ half of the 21st century.
-
- * Now it looks like we have—less time? (The 21st century is one-fifth over!) Yudkowsky flipped out about AlphaGo and AlphaZero, and at the time, a lot of people probably weren't worried (board games are a shallow domain), but now that it's happening for "language" (GPT) and "vision" (DALL-E), a lot of people including me are feeling much more spooked (https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1536364192441040896)
-
- * [Include the joke about DALL-E being the most significant news event of that week in January 2021]
-
- * [As recently as 2020](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) 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—I don't feel like there's time for that anymore
-
- * 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. There's no time to win a culture war; we need to grab hold of the Singularity now!!
-
- * So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain for not falling in line and accepting orders? Aren't I causing damage, losing dignity points for our Earth, by criticizing Yudkowsky so harshly, when actually the rest of the world should listen to him more about the coming robot apocalypse?
-
-]
-
-> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
->
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good)
-
-[TODO: social justice and defying threats
-
- * There's _no story_ in which misleading people about transgender is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. _I'd_ prefer him to have free speech, but if he can't afford to be honest about things he already got right in 2009, he could just—not bring up the topic!
-
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
-
- * I can totally cooperate with censorship that doesn't actively intefere with my battle! I agree that there are plenty of times in life where you need to say "No comment." But if that's the play you want to make, you have to actually _not comment_. "20% of the ones with penises" is no "No comment"! "You're not standing in defense of truth" is not "No comment"! "The simplest and best proposal" is not "No comment"!
-
- * I don't pick fights with Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano isn't trying to be a religious leader. If he has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them.
-
- * The cowardice is particularly puzzling in light of his timeless decision theory, which says to defy extortion.
-
- * Of course, there's a lot of naive misinterpretations of TDT that don't understand counterfactual dependence. There's a perspective that says, "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears", because the bear's response isn't calculated based on our response. /2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/
-
- * You could imagine him mocking me for trying to reason this out, instead of just using honor. "That's right, I'm appealing to your honor, goddamn it!"
-
- * back in 'aught-nine, SingInst had made a point of prosecuting Tyler Emerson, citing decision theory
-
- * 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?
-
- * Curtis Yarvin has compared Yudkowsky to Sabbatai Zevi (/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/), and I've got to say the comparison is dead-on. Sabbatai Zevi was facing much harsher coercion: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
-
-]
-
-I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
-
-I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)).
-
-I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
-
-But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—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", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
-
------
-
-In June 2021, MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares [wrote a Twitter thread aruging that](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) "[t]he definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering", which [Yudkowsky retweeted](https://archive.is/Ecsca).[^not-endorsements]
-
-[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
-
-Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), which post I had just dedicated _more than three years of my life_ to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), _specifically using dolphins as my central example_—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky (who retweeted Soares) definitely did. (Soares's [specific reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander.) [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
-
-The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't _immediately_ see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which was _hostile to my interests_. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed _implausible_ that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
-
-After a little more thought, I decided the thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"!), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar _in general_. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
-
-(Somehow, it felt appropriate to use a quote from Arthur Jensen's ["How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F) as an epigraph.)
-
-[TODO: dolphin war con'td
-
- * Nate conceded all of my points (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433), said the thread was in jest ("shitposting"), and said he was open to arguments that he was making a mistake (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402889976438611968), but still seemed to think his shitposting was based
-
- * I got frustrated and lashed out; "open to arguments that he was making a mistake" felt fake to me; rats are good at paying lip service to humility, but I'd lost faith in getting them to change their behavior, like not sending PageRank to "... Not Man for the Categories"
-
- * Nate wrote a longer reply on Less Wrong the next morning
-
- * I pointed out that his followup thread lamented that people hadn't read "A Human's Guide to Words", but that Sequence _specifically_ used the example of dolphins. What changed?!?
-
- * [Summarize Nate's account of his story], phylogeny not having the courage of its convictions
-
- * Twitter exchange where he said he wasn't sure I would count his self-report as evidnece, I said it totally counts
-
- * I overheated. This was an objectively dumb play. (If I had cooled down and just written up my reply, I might have gotten real engagement and a resolution, but I blew it.) I apologized a few days later.
-
- * Nate's reaction to me blowing up said it looked like I was expecting deference. I deny this; I wouldn't expect people to defer to me—what I did expect was a fair hearing, and at this point, I had lost faith that I would get one. (Could you blame me, when Yudkowsky says a fair hearing is less important than agreeing with Stalin?)
-
- * My theory of what's going on: I totally believe Nate's self report that he wasn't thinking about gender. (As Nate pointed out, you could give the thread an anti-trans interpretation, too.) Nevertheless, it remains the case that Nate's thinking is causally downstream of Scott's arguments in "... Not Man for the Categories." Where did Scott get it from? I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient.
-
- * This is like radiocontrast dye for dark side epistemology: we can see Scott sneezing his bad epistemology onto everyone else because he's such a popular writer. No one can think fast enough to think their own thoughts, but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes.
-
- * I look up the relevant phylogenetics definitions, and write "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
-
-]
-
-
-[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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) these days, with the way he sneers as Earthlings and post-rats
-
- * "I may as well do it on Earth"
-
- * a specific example that made me very angry in 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.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-
-Or [as Yudkowsky put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228)—
-
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor _only makes sense in the first place_ in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
-
- * 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. (The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. Motte: someone who's critical of central rationalists; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason.)
-
-sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
-
-> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
-
-https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
-]
-
-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
-
-
-
-[David Xu writes](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
-
-> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is [to] proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
->
-> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
-
-I reply: on the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
-
-On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
-
-On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is mostly true for humans. We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
-
-Xu continues:
-
-> I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
->
-> My sense is that you have (thus far, in the parts of the public discussion I've had the opportunity to witness) been behaving as though the _one and only crux in play_—that is, the True Source of Disagreement—has been the fifth crux, the thing I refused to include with the others of its kind. Your accusations against the caliphate _only make sense_ if you believe the dividing line between your behavior and theirs is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it"; as opposed to, say, what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, and which (if any) of those prescriptions are violated by using a notion of gender (in public, where you do not know in advance who will receive your communications) that does not cause massive psychological damage to some subset of people.
->
-> Perhaps it is your argument that all four of the initial cruxes I listed are false; but even if you believe that, it should be within your set of ponderable hypotheses that people might disagree with you about that, and that they might perceive the disagreement to be _about_ that, rather than (say) about whether subscribing to the Blue Tribe view of gender makes them a Bad Rationalist, but That's Okay because it's Politically Convenient.
->
-> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
-
-After everything I've been through over the past six years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
-
-It's a _conflict_. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want people to tell the truth, and the Caliphate wants people to not tell the truth. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
-
-At this point, I imagine defenders of the Caliphate are shaking their heads in disappointment at how I'm doubling down on refusing to Other-model. But—_am_ I? Isn't this just a re-statement of Xu's first proposed crux, except reframed as a "values difference" rather than a "disagreement"?
-
-Is the problem that my use of the phrase "tell the truth" (which has positive valence in our culture) functions to sneak in normative connotations favoring "my side"?
-
-Fine. Objection sustained. I'm happy to use to Xu's language: I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop), and the Caliphate wants to _not_ facilitate people making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because facilitating inferences _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to make inferences_ (for example, because they cause more harm than benefit).
-
-Better? Perhaps, to some 2022-era rats and EAs, this formulation makes my position look obviously in the wrong: I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_ (!). Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
-
-One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased).
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 starts by quoting a passage from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record). Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 continues—it's again worth quoting at length—
-
-> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
->
-> Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
->
-> [...]
->
-> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
->
-> You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
->
-> The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
->
-> [...]
->
-> One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know _what_ you don't know, you don't know how _much_ you don't know, and you don't know how much you _needed_ to know.
->
-> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
-
-Looking back on this from 2022, the only criticism I have is that Yudkowsky was too optimistic to "doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen." In some ways, people's actual behavior is _worse_ than what Orwell depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph _before_ denying memory of it, because it would be _too_ absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
-
-In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year _doesn't even bother covering its tracks_. Turns out, it doesn't need to! People just don't remember things!
-
-The [flexibility of natural language is a _huge_ help here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). If the caliph were to _directly_ contradict himself in simple, unambiguous language—to go from "Oceania is not at war with Eastasia" to "Oceania is at war with Eastasia" without any acknowledgement that anything had changed—_then_ too many people might notice that those two sentences are the same except that one has the word _not_ in it. What's a caliph to do, if he wants to declare war on Eastasia without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the decision to do so?
-
-The solution is simple: just—use more words! Then if someone tries to argue that you've _effectively_ contradicted yourself, accuse them of being uncharitable and failing to model the Other. You can't lose! Anything can be consistent with anything if you apply a sufficiently charitable reading; whether Oceania is at war with Eastasia depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of "at war."
-
-Thus, O'Brien should envy Yudkowsky: burning the photograph turns out to be unnecessary! ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say. I claim that these posts _effectively_ contradict each other. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are _not only_ out of luck given forseeable technology, but _also_ that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, _already_ be women in some unspecified psychological sense.
-
-_Technically_, these don't _strictly_ contradict each other: I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one includes the word _not_. (And even if there were such sentences, I wouldn't be able to prove that the other words were being used in the same sense in both sentences.) One _could_ try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing.
-
-_Realistically_ ... no. These two posts _can't_ both be right. In itself, this isn't a problem: people change their minds sometimes, which is great! But when people _actually_ change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even _acknowledge the change_, that's pretty Orwellian, like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
-
-And if a little bit of Orwellianism on specific, narrow, highly-charged topics might be forgiven—because everyone else in your Society is doing it, and you would be punished for not playing along, an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) that no one actor has the power to defy—might we not expect the father of the "rationalists" to stand his ground on the core theses of his ideology, like whether telling the truth is good?
-
-I guess not! ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
-
-I don't doubt Yudkowsky could come up with some clever casuistry why, _technically_, the text he wrote in 2007 and the text he endorsed in 2021 don't contradict each other. But _realistically_ ... again, no.
-
-[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 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.")
-
-What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_. That's _not_ "no commment"! Having _already_ chosen to comment, he can't reasonably expect any self-respecting rationalist to take his "epistemic hero" bluster seriously if he's not going to reply to the obvious objections to have been made with standing and warrant. To wit—
-
- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
-
- * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
-
- * In a comment on his February 2021 Facebook post on pronoun reform, Yudkowsky [claims that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228) "in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where [...] you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, 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". Some interesting potential counterevidence to this "not community-harmful" claim comes in the form of [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror of my rebuttal. Habryka writes:
-
-> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
->
-> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
->
-> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
-
-Again, that's the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!). Is that ... _not_ a form of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
-
-... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker" is what I _would_ say, if I hadn't given up.
-
-[TODO: finish that thought ...]
-
-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: 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
-
- * 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; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier; Asimov wrote about robots and psychohistory, but he still portrayed a future galaxy populated by humans, which seems so silly now
-
-/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
- * 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?
-]
+I notice that this advice leaves out a possibility: that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show (judged to be personally prudent and not community-harmful), rather than a misperception on your part. I am left in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) shaking my head sadly about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and shaking my head in disgust at his craven duplicity. If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff