Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, _e.g._, racial IQ differences?
-I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
+<a id="tragedy-of-recursive-silencing"></a>I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, you either become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor, and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves being pushed to the "Say Nothing" attractor.
It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:[^linkrot]
-[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but Yudkowsky's comment was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d)
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but Yudkowsky's comment was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d).
> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
>
So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because ... it wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was "the nuclear option" in a way that I couldn't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers. If you're slowly-but-surely gaining territory in a conventional war, suddenly escalating to nukes seems pointlessly destructive. This metaphor was horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html); carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
-A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts that didn't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about without making it personal (even if, secretly, it was personal).
+A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts that didn't make it personal. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff I was worried about without making it personal, even if, secretly ("secretly"), it was personal.
Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abuser. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would reduce the perceived complexity of the problem.
>
> The problem with "it's a policy debate about how to use language" is that it completely elides the issue that some ways of using language _perform better_ at communicating information, such that **attempts to define new words or new senses of _existing_ words should come with a justification for why the new sense is _useful for conveying information_, and that _is_ a matter of Truth.** Without such a justification, it's hard to see why you would _want_ to redefine a word _except_ to mislead people with strategic equivocation.
>
-> It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
+> <a id="literally-a-white-supremacist"></a>It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
>
> It is _literally true_ that 2 + 2 = 6 (if I'm allowed to define '2' as •••-many).
>
My poor performance during this incident [weighs on my conscience](/2020/Dec/liability/) particularly because I had previously been in the position of being crazy and benefitting from the help of my friends (including many of the same people involved in this incident) rather than getting sent back to psychiatric prison ("hospital", they call it a "hospital"). Of all people, I had a special debt to "pay it forward", and one might have hoped that I would also have special skills, that remembering being on the receiving end of a psychiatric tripsitting operation would help me know what to do on the giving end. Neither of those panned out.
-Some might appeal to the proverb, "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up being okay, and that, while the stress contributed to me having a relapse of some of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up being okay, too. I am instead inclined to dwell on [another proverb](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
+Some might appeal to the proverb, "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up recovering, and that, while the stress contributed to me having a somewhat serious relapse of some of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up recovering, too. I am instead inclined to dwell on [another proverb](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff