[^egan-paraphrasing]: The original quote says "one hundred thousand straights" ... "gay community" ... "gay and lesbian" ... "franchise rights on homosexuality" ... "unauthorized queer."
-[TODO: recap previous 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 told you about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky which incidentally pointed out how absurdly impossible my obsessive fantasy was—
-Given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing, and the operators of the marketing machine for the old thing.
+—none of which gooey private psychological minutiæ would be at all in the public interest to blog about _except that_, as I explained in a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", in 2016, everyone in the community that formed around the Sequences suddenly decided for political reasons that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and the cognitive dissonance of having to rebut all this nonsense coming from everyone I used to trust, drove me temporarily insane from stress and sleep deprivation—
+
+—which would have been the end of the story, _except that_, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning", in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for the same political reasons, and my unsuccessful attempts to get him to clarify led me and allies to conclude that Yudkowsky and his "rationalists" were corrupt.
+
+Anyway, given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing, and the operators of the marketing machine for the old thing.
_I_ had been hyperfocused on prosecuting my Category War, but the reason Michael and Ben and Jessica were willing to help me out on that, was not because they particularly cared about the gender and categories example, but because it seemed like a manifestation of a _more general_ problem of epistemic rot in "the community".
On 31 May 2019, a [draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for) included a link to "... Not Man for the Categories" as one of Scott Alexander's best essays. I argued that it would be better to cite _almost literally_ any other _Slate Star Codex_ post (most of which, I agreed, were exemplary). I claimed that the following disjunction was true: _either_ Alexander's claim that "There's no rule of rationality saying that [one] shouldn't" "accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life" was a blatant lie, _or_ one had no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way. The mod [was persuaded on reflection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for?commentId=oBDjhXgY5XtugvtLT), and "... Not Man for the Categories" was not included in the final FAQ. Another "victory."
-But winning "victories" wasn't particularly comforting when I resented this becoming a political slapfight at all.
-
-[TODO:
-a lot of the objections in the Vanessa thread were utterly insane
-I wrote to Anna and Steven Kaas (who I was trying to "recruit" onto our side of the civil war)]
-
-In "What You Can't Say", Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what _is_ one's real work. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except for this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve our collective ability to reason, should probably be doing _more_ fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improving our collective ability to reason", in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."
+But winning "victories" wasn't particularly comforting when I resented this becoming a political slapfight at all. I thought a lot of the objections I faced in the derailed "Possibility of No" thread were insane.
-[TODO: I don't know if you caught the shitshow on Less Wrong, but isn't it terrifying that the person who objected was a goddamned _MIRI research associate_ ... not to demonize Vanessa because I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008 (/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#hair-trigger-antisexism), but in 2008 we had a culture that could _beat it out of me_]
+I wrote to Anna and Steven Kaas (who I was trying to "recruit" onto our side of the civil war). In ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html), Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what _is_ one's real work. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except for this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve our collective ability to reason, should probably be doing _more_ fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improving our collective ability to reason", in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."
-[TODO: Steven's objection:
-> the Earth's gravitational field directly hurts NASA's mission and doesn't hurt Paul Graham's mission, but NASA shouldn't spend any more effort on reducing the Earth's gravitational field than Paul Graham.
+I said, I didn't know if either of them had caught the recent trainwreck on _Less Wrong_, but wasn't it _terrifying_ that the person who objected was a goddamned _MIRI research associate_? Not to demonize Kosoy, because [I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#hair-trigger-antisexism). The difference was that in 2008, we had a culture that could _beat it out of me_.
-I agreed that tractability needs to be addressed, but ...
-]
+Steven objected that tractibility and side effects matter, not just effect on the mission considered in isolation. For example, the Earth's graviational field directly impedes NASA's mession, and doesn't hurt Paul Graham, but both NASA and Paul Graham should spend the same amount of effort (_viz._, zero) trying to reduce the Earth's gravity.
-I felt like—we were in a coal-mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I was freaking out about this, and represenatives of the Caliphate (Yudkowsky, Alexander, Anna, Steven) were like, Sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; you'll get over it; it's not really that important to the coal-mining mission.
+I agreed that tractability needs to be addressed, but I felt like—we were in a coal mine, and my favorite one of our canaries just died, and I was freaking out about this, and represenatives of the Caliphate (Yudkowsky, Alexander, Anna, Steven) were like, Sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; you'll get over it; it's not really that important to the coal-mining mission.
-And I was like, I agree that I was unreasonably emotionally attached to that particular bird, which is the direct cause of why I-in-particular am freaking out, but that's not why I expect _you_ to care. The problem is not the dead bird; the problem is what the bird is _evidence_ of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claim to have spotted their own dead canaries. I feel like the old-timer Rationality Elders should be able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
+And I was like, I agree that I was unreasonably emotionally attached to that particular bird, which was the direct cause of why I-in-particular was freaking out, but that's not why I expected _them_ to care. The problem was not the dead bird; the problem was what the bird was _evidence_ of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claim to have spotted their own dead canaries. I felt like the old-timer Rationality Elders should be able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was [a fragment of group theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/), and [some probability/information theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that [actually turned out to super-relevant to understanding sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point). So much for taking a break.
* secret posse member: level of social-justice talk makes me not want to interact with this post in any way
]
-[TODO: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/]
+On 4 July, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by Ben's request back in March that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
[TODO: "AI Timelines Scam"
* I still sympathize with the "mainstream" pushback against the scam/fraud/&c. language being used to include Elephant-in-the-Brain-like distortions
[TODO: State of Steven]
-I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constraint; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
+I still wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained; I was still bound by internal silencing-chains. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!
In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
-In September 2019's "Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists" [TODO: ... I was surprised by how well this did (high karma, later included in the best-of-2019 collection); Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering]
+In September 2019's ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting), I presented a toy mathematical model of how censorship distorts group beliefs. I was surprised by how well-received it was (high karma, Curated within a few days, later included in the Best-of-2019 collection), especially given that it was explicitly about politics (albeit at a meta level, of course). Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering when I sent them a draft.
+
+In October 2019's ["Algorithms of Deception!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception), I exhibited some toy Python code modeling different kinds of deception. A function that faithfully passes observations it sees as input to another function, lets the second function constructing a well-calibrated probability distribution. But if the first function outright fabricates evidence, or selectively omits some evidence, or gerrymanders the categories by which it interprets its observations as evidence, the second function comes up with a worse (less accurate) probability distribution.
-In October 2019's "Algorithms of Deception!", I explained [TODO: ...]
+Also in October 2019, in ["Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist), I replied to Scott Alexander's ["Against Lie Inflation"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/), which was itself a generalized rebuke of Jessica's "The AI Timelines Scam". Scott thought Jessica was wrong to use language like "lie", "scam", _&c._ to describe someone thing (purportedly) motivatedly wrong, but not necessarily _consciously_ lying.
-Also in October 2019, in "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" [TODO: ... I was _furious_ at "Against Lie Inflation"—oh, so _now_ you agree that making language less useful is a problem?! But then I realized Scott actually was being consistent in his own frame: he's counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost; but, if everyone _is_ lying, maybe they should be angry!]
+I was _furious_ when "Against Lie Inflation" came out. (Furious at what I perceived as hypocrisy, not because I particularly cared about defending Jessica's usage.) Oh, so _now_ Scott agreed that making language less useful is a problem?! But on further consideration, I real I realized Alexander actually was being consistent in admitting appeals-to-consequences as legitimate. In objecting to the expanded definition of "lying", Alexander was counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost. Whereas on my philosophy, that wasn't a legitimate cost. (If everyone _is_ lying, maybe people _should_ be angry!)
------
(This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our coordination group, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if that word _ever_ meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important way in which things were messed up, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's reply that the Vassarite usage of "fraud" was motte-and-baileying between vastly different senses of _fraud_; I wanted to do _more work_ to formulate a _more precise theory_ of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things are messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.)
-[TODO: Ziz's protest; Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
+[TODO: Ziz's protest;
+
+[TODO: Somni? ("peek behind the fog of war" 6 Feb)]
[TODO: rude maps]
[TODO: complicity and friendship]
-[TODO: affordance widths]
-
[TODO: I had a productive winter blogging vacation in December 2019
pull the trigger on "On the Argumentative Form"; I was worried about leaking info from private conversations, but I'm in the clear "That's your hobbyhorse" is an observation anyone could make from content alone]
[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
+-----
+
On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
-He never got back to me.
+He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing _Slate Star Codex_ posts were taken down.
-[TODO: three weeks later, Slate Star Codex went down
- my slate_starchive.py script
-]
+A [lone post on the main page](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) explained that the _New York Times_ piece was going to reveal Alexander's real last name, and that he was taking his posts down as a defensive measure. (No blog, no story?) I [wrote a script](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191) (`slate_starchive.py`) to replace the _Slate Star Codex_ links on this blog with links to the most recent Internet Archive copy.
------
_ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule, only 1 year and 8 months after asking for it
]
+And really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. At the trifling cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that. I was satsified. I still published "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" in January 2021, but if I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
+
+[TODO: psychiatric disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me]
+
[TODO: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"
Abram was right
somehow accuracy seems more fundamental than power or resources ... could that be formalized?
]
-
-And really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. At the trifling cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that. I was satsified. I still published "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" in January 2021, but if I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
-
-[TODO: psychiatric disaster, breakup with Vassar group, this was really bad for me]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff