[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]
-
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_.
-[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe October 2021
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards December 2021
- * 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: Boston–New York visit
+
+ * worked on "Challenges" and my Charles Murray review from Boston
+
+ * saw an escort, who I found in the "ebony" section of eros.com
+ * who I'll call ... (which wasn't the name she used, and the name she used was surely not her real name)
+ * she finally got back to me just in time for me to go to the bank and get cash, there not being Wells Fargo branches on the east coast (speaking of decisions my father made for me when I was four years old)
+ * she was very late; we went to an Indian restaurant and then to my hotel
+ * an opportunity to talk to someone who I wouldn't ordinarily otherwise (messaging someone like her on match.com would have felt fake, paying for her time felt more "honest")
+ * I explained AGP to her
+ * I didn't let her/have her touch my penis (that seemed "unethical" according to my own sense of ethics, though I'm not super-confident that my "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her); I just wanted to touch
+ * I wasn't coming; she said that for $2K, I definitely deserved to get off
+ * she said I could have her breasts, they were heavy
+ * my comment about how I wished I could have a photograph, but that it would be rude to ask; she said "No", and I wanted to clarify that I didn't ask, I said I wished I _could_ ask—but, you see, her culture didn't support that level of indirection; the claim that I wasn't asking, would seem dishonest
+ * I didn't tell her about the Charles Murray book review I was writing
+
+ * met my NRx Twitter mutual, wore my Quillette shirt
+ * he had been banned from Slate Star Codex "for no reason"
+ * he offered to buy me a drink, I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that being drunk was the ritual for how men establish trust, so I had a glass and a half of wine
+ * it was so refreshing—not being constrained
+ * I explained the AI risk case; he mentioned black people having larger wingspan
+
+ * met Ben and his new girlfriend; Jessica wasn't around; he said the psych disaster was a betrayal, but a finite one; Ben's suggestion that if CfAR were serious, they'd hire me
]
+------
+
+In October 2021, Jessica [published a memoir about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
+
+Scott Alexander posted a comment "add[ing] some context [he thought was] important to this", essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!).
+
+I thought this was unfair, and [said so](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy) (and [offered textual evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=yKo2uuCcwJxbwwyBw) against the claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy).
+
+To me, Scott's behavior looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders move in to discredit her by association.
+
+It was effective, though. After Alexander's comment (and [a comment from Yudkowsky](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8) uncritically accepting Alexander's charge of Vassar "causing psychotic breaks in people"), the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma.
+
+[TODO my conversation with Scott—
+
+> when you had some more minor issues in 2019 I was more in the loop and I ended out emailing the Vassarites (deliberately excluding you from the email, a decision I will defend in private if you ask me) accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
+
+ * Scott interviewed me
+ * I said
+
+]
+
+In December, Jessica published [a followup post explaining the circumstances of her psychotic episode in more detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards).
+
+[TODO: Scott concedes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=RGKkmyvyoeWe2LB7d ]
+
+------
+
[TODO:
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?
+> The Kiritsugu shrugged. "When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+
* 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
]
You can, of course, make up any number of sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationales for this. (For example, a world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to hold Society together.)
-I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from.
+I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to Speech and Information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from. ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to."
Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics):
Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neurology skills that the author Doylistically doesn't know how to write, I am entirely unimpressed by the assertion that this idea is somehow _dangerous_, a secret that only Keepers can bear, rather than something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. We're told that "[i]t's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does"—reflecting an attitude that revealing information is _meddling_, rather than talking being a free action.
-[ TODO—
- * I think there's even a part (find it) where the Keeper says it's nice that they live in a world where not everyone has to be a Keeper just for the world to survive, portraying rationality, knowledge as a burden
-]
-
As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad_.
It did not escape my notice that when "rationalist" authorities _in real life_ considered public knowledge of some paraphilia to be an infohazard (ostensibly for the benefit of people with that paraphilia), I _didn't take it lying down_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff