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.[^murray-alignment]
+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 Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence.[^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).
+[^murray-alignment]: 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 which 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.
Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our object-level beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much most of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit it's an empirical question, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).[^logical-induction]
+I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a positive [technical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) [discipline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gk8Dvynrr9FWBztD4/what-s-a-market) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).[^logical-induction]
[^logical-induction]: I wonder how hard it would have been to come up with MIRI's [logical induction result](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543) (which describes an asymptotic algorithm for estimating the probabilities of mathematical truths in terms of a betting market composed of increasingly complex traders) in the Soviet Union.
So the _New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]
-[^deny-everything]: In January 2023, when Nick Bostrom [preemptively apologized for a 26-year-old email to the Extropians mailing list](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) that referenced the IQ gap and mentioned a slur, he had [some](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi) [detractors](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old) and a [few](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi?commentId=h9gdA4snagQf7bPDv) [defenders](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NniTsDNQQo58hnxkr/my-thoughts-on-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old-email), but I don't recall seeing anyone defending the 1997 email itself.
+[^deny-everything]: In January 2023, when Nick Bostrom [preemptively apologized for a 26-year-old email to the Extropians mailing list](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) that referenced the IQ gap and mentioned a slur, he had [some](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi) [detractors](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old) and a [few](https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi/comment/h9gdA4snagQf7bPDv) [defenders](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NniTsDNQQo58hnxkr/my-thoughts-on-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old-email), but I don't recall seeing anyone defending the 1996 email itself.
But if you're [familiar with the literature](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad) and understand the [use–mention distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction), the literal claims in [the original email](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) are entirely reasonable. (There are additional things one could say about [what pro-social functions are being served by](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts) the taboos against what the younger Bostrom called "the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity", which would make for fine mailing-list replies, but the original email can't be abhorrent simply for failing to anticipate all possible counterarguments.)
[^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 those! In [the same blog post in which Scott Alexander characterized rationalism as the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), he also named "don’t misgender trans people" as one of the group's distinguishing norms. Two years later, he joked 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).
+But _trans!_ We have plenty of those! In [the same blog post in which Scott Alexander characterized rationalism as the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), he also named "don't misgender trans people" as one of the group's distinguishing norms. Two years later, he joked 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).
-Having plenty of trans people means having plenty of high-ranking [progressive stack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack) members to trot out as a shield to prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys. 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" should have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
+The benefit having plenty of trans people is that high-ranking members of the [progressive stack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack) can be trotted out as a shield to prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys. 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" should have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
Even the haters grudgingly give Alexander credit for ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong"](https://archive.is/SlJo1), wrote one.
On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/), on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
-I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. In the email, he said that biologically-mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's collective epistemology is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. (In contrast, [RationalWiki](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) didn't generate garbage, but by hewing so closely to the mainstream, it also didn't say much that Alexander didn't already know.) The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't already blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing _vis á vis_ the neoreactionaries and his own popularity—but again, none of it is really surprising if you know Scott from his writing.
+I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. In the email, he said that biologically-mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's intelligentsia is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. (In contrast, [RationalWiki](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) didn't generate garbage, but by hewing so closely to the mainstream, it also didn't say much that Alexander didn't already know.) The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't already blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing _vis á vis_ the neoreactionaries and his own popularity—but again, none of it is surprising if you know Scott from his writing.
I think the main reason someone _would_ consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read _Slate Star Codex_ that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was, "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse that he [wrote up an explanation of what _reactionaries_ (of all people) believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)—and then, of course, [turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're totally wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/)." As a first approximation, it's not a terrible picture. But what it misses—what _Scott_ knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent, before concluding (of course) that they were wrong and you were right all along in every detail. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting _right_.
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 in the position of 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).
-In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological of sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size."
+In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological of sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size", on the grounds that "logically rude to demand that other people use only your language system and interpretation convention in order to communicate, in advance of them having agreed with you about the clustering thing."
-But I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We only infer whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing [a variety of correlated characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic). Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to, one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.
+But I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We only infer whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing [a variety of correlated characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic). Thus, the complaint that sex-based pronoun conventions rudely demand that people "agree[ ] [...] about the clustering thing" is hypocritical, because Yudkowsky's proposal also expects people to agree about the clustering thing. Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to (without having explicitly asked for pronouns), one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex?
-Thus, Yudkowsky's "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flailing attempt to gesture at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex, without having to admit that that's what's going on.
+Thus, Yudkowsky's "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" proposal can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flailing attempt to gesture at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex, without having to admit that that's what's going on.
One could argue that this is hostile nitpicking on my part: that the use of "gamete size" as a metonym for sex here is either an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition (because if you said _sex_, _female_, or _male_, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision that can be usefully critiqued.
This also isn't a particularly advanced rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
-Back in 2009, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I hadn't yet grown out of [my teenage ideological fever dream of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was a poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
+Back in 2009, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I hadn't yet grown out of [my teenage ideological fever dream of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was a poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):
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 "really 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 of a writer for me to excuse his words as an artifact of accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about at the risk of offending someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous.
+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 of a writer for me to excuse his words as an artifact of accidentally unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about at the risk of offending someone's "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", I think it's deliberately ambiguous.
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 of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
[^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 dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors in both political camps. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make 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 dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors in both political camps. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make proportionately more errors on the "pro-Stalin" side.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", [judging by local demographics](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/), 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):
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)](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton).
-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).
+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 concept of binary sex 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 alright. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
+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/).[^hexaco] 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 alright. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
+
+[^hexaco]: The authors of the [HEXACO personality model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure) may have gotten something importantly right in [grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality).
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).
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 good teacher.)
+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)). 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.
+["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.
[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
> 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 (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_.
+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 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 craven duplicity. **If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.**
+
+A few clarifications are in order here. First, as with "bad faith", 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 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.
+
+[TODO: explain how he could come clean without making it sound like a negotiation, and why it shouldn't be a negotiation—if he had the courage to be loud and clear that people who are unhappy about what color their hair is _as a fact_, even if it hurts their feelings]
+
+He probably won't. (We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit about people like me respecting his intellectual integrity, and it's not clear why me telling this Whole Dumb Story would change his mind about that.)
+
+Third, given that "fraud" is a literal description and not just an evaluative boo light, [TODO: bridge]
+
+If being a fraud were instrumentally useful for saving the world, maybe being a fraud would be the right thing to do? More on this in the next post. (To be continued.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff