### Yudkowsky Doubles Down (February 2021)
-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.
+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]. Briefly: given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's not going to be a "right answer", but we can at least be objective in describing what the conflict is about, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that. Given that we can't coordinate a switch to universal singular _they_, the pronouns _she_ and _he_ continue to have different meanings in the minds of native English speakers, in the sense that your mind forms different probabilistic expectations of someone taking feminine or masculine pronouns. That's _why_ trans people want to be referred to by the pronoun corresponding to their chosen gender; if there were literally no difference in meaning, there would be no reason to care. Thus, making the distinction on the basis of gender identity rather than sex [has consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences); by proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best, Yudkowsky was [falsely portraying the policy debate as one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided).
[^challenges-title]: 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 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.
+
Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.
But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was because the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).
At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post also explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?
-I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) Yudkowsky is just too talented a writer for it to be a coincidence that his rational analysis of pronoun conventions just happens to affirm trans activist sensibilities and to avoid mentioning any specific unfavorable truth-bearing propositions about these issues that could possibly exist. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about despite someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's ambiguous for a reason.
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) If Yudkowsky just wanted to post about how gendered pronouns are unnecessary and bad as an apolitical matter of language design, he could have written a post just making that narrow point. What ended up happening is that he wrote a post featuring sanctimonious flag-waving about the precious feelings of people "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", and concluding with a policy proposal that gives the trans activist coalition everything they want, proclaiming this "the simplest and best protocol" without so much as acknowledging the real arguments on [the other side of the policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided). I don't think it's crazy for me to assume this was the intended result, and to ask who benefitted.
-When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
+When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky does not obviously disagree with this interpretation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png):
Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to take actions _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... speech? I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character_.
-### This Isn't About Subjective Intent
+### Criticism of Public Statements Is About the Public Statements, Not Subjective Intent
This is the part where Yudkowsky or his flunkies accuse me of being uncharitable, of [failing at perspective-taking](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435617576495714304) and [embracing conspiracy theories](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242). Obviously, Yudkowsky doesn't _think of himself_ as trying to transform his faithful students into Jane Austen characters. Perhaps, then, I have failed to understand his position? [As Yudkowsky put it](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
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 (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 designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on 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.[^gould-analogy] His marketing bluster was designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.[^gullible]
+
+[^gould-analogy]: Yudkowsky [once wrote of Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould) that "[c]onsistently self-serving scientific 'error', in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud." I think the same standard applies here.
+
+[^gullible]: Perhaps some readers will consider this post to be more revealing about my character rather than Yudkowsky's: that [everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) his bluster wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, so I have no more right to complain about "false advertising" than purchasers of a ["World's Best"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) ice-cream who are horrified (or pretending to be) that it may not objectively be the best in the world.
+
+ Such readers may have a point. If _you_ [already knew](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info) that Yudkowsky's pose of epistemic superiority was phony (because everyone knows), then you are wiser than I was. But I think there are a lot of people in the "rationalist" subculture who didn't know (because we weren't anyone). This post is for their benefit.
Because, I did, actually, trust him. Back in 2009 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)). ["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts/comment/Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
[^bo-heroism]: A lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in [noticing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.
- What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to publicly proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
+ What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people who do not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket, which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing.
I got offended. I felt like a devout Catholic watching the Pope say, "Jesus sucks; I hate God; I never should have told people about God."
-Later, I felt the need to write another message clarifying exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. People being annoyed at the condescension was fine. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
+Later, I felt the need to write another message clarifying exactly what I found offensive. The problem wasn't the condescension of the suggestion that other people couldn't reason. The problem was that "just learn[ing] to persuade people of things instead" was giving up on the principle that the arguments you use to convince others should be the same as the ones you used to decide which conclusion to argue for. Giving up on that amounted to giving up on the _concept_ of intellectual honesty, choosing instead to become a propaganda AI that calculates what signals to output in order to manipulate an agentless world.
[He put a check-mark emoji reaction on it](/images/davis-amounts-to-giving-up-on-the-concept-of-intellectual-honesty.png), indicating agreement or approval.
-If the caliph has lost his [belief in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1) the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better results than propaganda.
+If the caliph has lost his [belief in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1) the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better consequences than propaganda.
-But since I haven't relinquished my belief in honesty, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
+But since I haven't lost my belief in honesty, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
The modern Yudkowsky [writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
I notice that this advice fails to highlight the 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 shaking my head in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) sadness about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and disgust at his duplicity. **If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambiguously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.**
-A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless [boo light](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights). I specifically and literally mean it in [_Merriam-Webster_'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud)—and I think I've made my case. Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, [rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism).
+A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless [boo light](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights). I specifically and literally mean it in [_Merriam-Webster_'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud)—and I think I've made my case. (The "epistemic hero" posturing isn't compatible with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" prevarication; he needs to choose one or the other.) Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, [rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism).
-Second, it's a conditional: _if_ Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, _then_ he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean—if he decided after all that he wanted it to be common knowledge in his Caliphate that gender-dysphoric people can stand what is true, because we are already enduring it—he could do so at any time.
+Second, it's a conditional: _if_ Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, _then_ he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean, he could do so at any time.
He probably won't. We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?
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