But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what large tech companies are doing as they build transformative AI, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have _time_ to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_. If the progressive machine marks you as a transphobic bigot, the machine's functionaries at OpenAI or Meta AI Research are less likely to listen to you when you explain why [their safety plan](https://openai.com/blog/our-approach-to-alignment-research/) won't work, or why they should have a safety plan at all.
-(I remarked to "Wilhelm" in June 2022 that DeepMind [changing its Twitter avatar to a rainbow variant of their logo for Pride month](https://web.archive.org/web/20220607123748/https://twitter.com/DeepMind) was a bad sign.)
+(I remarked to "Wilhelm" in mid-2022 that DeepMind [changing its Twitter avatar to a rainbow variant of their logo for Pride month](https://web.archive.org/web/20220607123748/https://twitter.com/DeepMind) was a bad sign.)
So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain, willfully damaging humanity's chances of survival by picking unimportant culture-war fights in the xrisk-reduction social sphere, when _I know_ that the sphere needs to keep its nose clean in the eyes of the progressive egregore? _That's_ why Yudkowsky said the arguably-technically-misleading things he said about my Something to Protect: he _had_ to, to keep our collective nose clean. The people paying attention to contemporary politics don't know what I know, and can't usefully be told. Isn't it better for humanity if my meager talents are allocated to making AI go well? Don't I have a responsibility to fall in line and take one for the team—if the world is at stake?
That is, there's _no story_ under which misleading people about trans issues is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. _I'd_ prefer him to have free speech, but if _he_ thinks he can't afford to be honest about things he [_already_ got right in 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), he could just—not issue pronouncements on topics where he intends to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds!_
-In [a Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
+In [a March 2021 Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
> Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at _all_ the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a _lot_ of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
In particular, if you're the kind of agent that gives in to extortion—if you respond to threats of the form "Do what I want, or I'll hurt you" by doing what the threatener wants—that gives other agents an incentive to spend resources trying to extort you. On the other hand, if any would-be extortionist knows you'll never give in, they have no reason to bother trying. This is where the standard ["Don't negotiate with terrorists"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) advice comes from.
-So, naïvely, doesn't Yudkowsky's "personally prudent to post your agreement with Stalin"[^gambit] gambit constitute giving in to an extortion threat of the form, "Support the progressive position, or we'll hurt you", which Yudkowsky's own decision theory says not to do?
+So, naïvely, doesn't Yudkowsky's "personally prudent to post your agreement with Stalin"[^gambit] gambit constitute giving in to an extortion threat of the form, "support the progressive position, or we'll hurt you", which Yudkowsky's own decision theory says not to do?
[^gambit]: In _ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles_, natch.
I can think of two reasons why the naïve objection might fail. (And who can say but that a neutral expert witness on decision theory wouldn't think of more?)
-First, the true decision theory is subtler than "defy anything that you can commonsensically pattern-match as looking like 'extortion'"; the case for resisting extortion specifically rests on there existing a subjunctive dependence between your decision and the extortionist's decision (they threaten _because_ you'll give in, or won't bother _because_ you won't), and the relevant subjunctive dependence doesn't obviously pertain in the real-life science intellectual _vs._ social justice mob match-up. If the mob has been trained from past experience to predict that their targets will give in, should you defy them now in order to somehow make your current situation "less real"? Depending on the correct theory of logical counterfactuals, the right stance might be ["We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears"](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) (because the bear's response isn't calculated based on our response), and the forces of political orthodoxy might be relevantly bear-like.
+First, the true decision theory is subtler than "defy anything that you can commonsensically pattern-match as looking like 'extortion'"; the case for resisting extortion specifically rests on there existing a subjunctive dependence between your decision and the extortionist's decision: they threaten _because_ you'll give in, or don't bother _because_ you won't.
-On the other hand, the relevant subjunctive dependence doesn't obviously _not_ pertain, either! Parsing social justice as an agentic "threat" rather than a non-agentic obstacle like an avalanche, does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics, who dissent from an ideological group, more than infidels, who were never part of the group to begin with—_because_ heretics are more extortable—more vulnerable to social punishment from the original group.
+Okay, but then how do I compute this "subjunctive dependence" thing? Presumably it has something to do with the extortionist's decisionmaking process incuding a model of the target. How good does that model have to be for it to "count"?
-Which brings me to the second reason the naïve anti-extortion argument might fail: what counts as "extortion" depends on the relevant "property rights", what the "default" action is. If having free speech is the default, being excluded from the coalition for defying the orthodoxy could be construed as extortion. But if _being excluded from the coalition_ is the default, maybe toeing the line of orthodoxy is the price you need to pay in order to be included.
+I don't know—and if I don't know, I can't say that the relevant subjunctive dependence obviously pertains in the real-life science intellectual _vs._ social justice mob match-up. If the mob has been trained from past experience to predict that their targets will give in, should you defy them now in order to somehow make your current predicament "less real"? Depending on the correct theory of logical counterfactuals, the correct stance might be "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but [we do appease bears](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) and avoid avalanches" (because neither the bear's nor the avalanche's behavior is calculated based on our response), and the forces of political orthodoxy might be relevantly bear- or avalanche-like.
-[TODO: defying threats, cont'd—
+On the other hand, the relevant subjunctive dependence doesn't obviously _not_ pertain, either! Yudkowsky does seem to endorse commonsense pattern-matching to "extortion" in contexts [like nuclear diplomacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256). Or I remember back in 'aught-nine, Tyler Emerson was caught embezzling funds from the Singularity Institute, and SingInst made it a point of pride to prosecute on decision-theoretic grounds, when a lot of other nonprofits would have quietly and causal-decision-theoretically covered it up to spare themselves the embarrassment. Parsing social justice as an agentic "threat" rather than a non-agentic obstacle like an avalanche, does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics (who dissent from an ideological group) more than infidels (who were never part of the group to begin with), _because_ heretics are more extortable—more vulnerable to social punishment from the original group.
- * Yudkowsky does seemingly back commonsensical interpretations, re voting, or how, back in 'aught-nine, SingInst had made a point of prosecuting Tyler Emerson, citing decision theory
+Which brings me to the second reason the naïve anti-extortion argument might fail: [what counts as "extortion" depends on the relevant "property rights", what the "default" action is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qjaaux3XnLBwomuNK/countess-and-baron-attempt-to-define-blackmail-fail). If having free speech is the default, being excluded from the dominant coalition for defying the orthodoxy could be construed as extortion. But if _being excluded from the coalition_ is the default, maybe toeing the line of orthodoxy is the price you need to pay in order to be included.
- * Curtis Yarvin has compared Yudkowsky to Sabbatai Zevi (/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/), and I've got to say the comparison is dead-on. Sabbatai Zevi was facing much harsher coercion: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+Yudkowsky has [a proposal for how bargaining should work between agents with different notions of "fairness"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2YwmzuT7nWx62Kfh/cooperating-with-agents-with-different-ideas-of-fairness).
-]
+Suppose Edgar and Fiona are splitting a pie, and if they can't initially agree on how to split it, they have to fight over it until they do, destroying some of the pie in the process. Edgar thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Fiona claims that she contributed more ingredients to the baking process and that it's therefore fair that she gets 75% of the pie, pledging to fight if offered anything less.
+
+If Edgar were a causal decision theorist, he might agree to the 75/25 split, reasoning that 25% of the pie is better than fighting until the pie is destroyed. Yudkowsky argues that this is irrational: if Edgar is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Fiona has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Fiona's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
+
+Instead, Yudkowsky argues, Edgar should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Fiona _also_ does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split (after 100−(32+48) = 20% of the pie has been destroyed by the costs of fighting) or an 42/18 split (where 40% of the pie has been destroyed). This isn't Pareto-optimal (it would be possible for both Edgar and Fiona to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Edgar to burn some of Fiona's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by her, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
+
+It seemed to me that in the contest over the pie of Society's shared map, the rationalist Caliphate was letting itself get exploited by the progressive Egregore, doing worse than the fair outcome without dealing any damage to the egregore in return. Why?
+
+The logic of "dump stats", presumably. Bargaining to get AI risk on the shared map—not even to get it taken seriously as we would count "taking it seriously", but just acknowledged at all—was hard enough. Trying to challenge the Egregore about an item that it actually cared about would trigger more fighting than we could afford.
+
+I told the illustration about splitting a pie as a symmetrical story: if Edgar and Fiona destroy the pie fighting, than neither of them get any pie. But in more complicated scenarios (including the real world), there was no guarantee that non-Pareto Nash equilibria were equally bad for everyone.
+
+I'd had a Twitter exchange with Yudkowsky in January 2020 that revealed some of his current-year thinking about Nash equilibria. I [had Tweeted](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1206718983115698176):
+
+> 1940s war criminal defense: "I was only following orders!"
+> 2020s war criminal defense: "I was only participating in a bad Nash equilibrium that no single actor can defy unilaterally!"
+
+(The language of the latter being [a reference to Yudkowsky's _Inadequate Equilibria_](https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/).)
+
+Yudkowsky [quote-Tweet dunked on me](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392):
+
+> Well, YES. Paying taxes to the organization that runs ICE, or voting for whichever politician runs against Trump, or trading with a doctor benefiting from an occupational licensing regime; these acts would all be great evils if you weren't trapped.
+
+I pointed out the voting case as one where he seemed to be disagreeing with his past self, linking to 2008's ["Stop Voting for Nincompoops"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k5qPoHFgjyxtvYsm7/stop-voting-for-nincompoops). What changed his mind?
+
+"Improved model of the social climate where revolutions are much less startable or controllable by good actors," he said. "Having spent more time chewing on Nash equilibria, and realizing that the trap is _real_ and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant."
+
+In response to Sarah Constantin mentioning that there was no personal cost to voting third-party, Yudkowsky [pointed out that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216809977144168448) the problem was the [third-party spoiler effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting), not personal cost: "People who refused to vote for Hillary didn't pay the price, kids in cages did, but that still makes the action nonbest."
+
+(The "cages" in question—technically, chain-link fence enclosures—were [actually](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/08/26/fact-check-obama-administration-built-migrant-cages-meme-true/3413683001/) [built](https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-democratic-national-convention-ap-fact-check-immigration-politics-2663c84832a13cdd7a8233becfc7a5f3) during the Obama administration, but that doesn't seem important.)
+
+I asked what was wrong with the disjunction from "Stop Voting for Nincompoops", where the earlier Yudkowsky had written that it's hard to see who should accept the argument to vote for the lesser of two evils, but refuse to accept the argument against voting because it won't make a difference. Unilaterally voting for Clinton doesn't save the kids!
+
+"Vote when you're part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things, or when you're worried about your reputation and want to be honest about whether you voted," Yudkowsky replied.
+
+"How do I compute whether I'm in a large enough decision-theoretic cohort?" I asked. Did we know that, or was that still on the open problems list?
+
+Yudkowsky said that he [traded his vote for a Clinton swing state vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_pairing_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election), partially hoping that that would scale, "but maybe to a larger degree because [he] anticipated being asked in the future if [he'd] acted against Trump".
+
+The reputational argument seems in line with Yudkowsky's [pathological obsession with not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). People asking if you acted against Trump are looking for a signal of coalitional loyalty. By telling them he traded his vote, Yudkowsky can pass their test without lying.
+
+I guess that explains everything. He doesn't think he's part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things. He's not anticipating being asked in the future if he's acted against gender ideology. He's not worried about his reputation with people like me.
+
+Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to [Sabbatai Zevi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam), the 17th-century Jewish religious leader who purported to be the Messiah, who later converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans. "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
+
+I don't think this is as much of a burn as Yarvin does. Zevi was facing some very harsh coercion: a choice to convert to Islam, "prove" his divinity via deadly trial by ordeal, or just be impaled outright. Extortion-resistant decision theories aside, it's hard not to be sympathetic to someone facing this trilemma who chose to convert.
+
+So to me, the more damning question is this—
+
+If in the same position as Yudkowsky, would Sabbatai Zevi declare that 30% of the ones with penises are actually women?
+
+-----
I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
* But he does, in fact, seem to actively encourage this conflation (contrast to how the Sequences had a [Litany Against Gurus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) these days, with the way he sneers as Earthlings and post-rats)
- * "I may as well do it on Earth"
-
* a specific example that made me very angry in September 2021—
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
In September 2021, I took a trip to the east coast to see my sister and new baby niece in Cambridge and some friends in New York, and otherwise to work on blog posts from my hotel room. (You've seen one American city, you've seen them all, I reasoned, _modulo_ a different ratio of Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks.)
-The thought occured to me that while I was on vacation anyway, it might be nice to see an escort (which I had only done once before, in March 2016). I browsed around the "Boston" section on _eros.com_. Under the "ebony" subsection[^ebony], I found a profile that I liked on the basis of photographs and a professional-seeming website. I'll call her "Crystal" (which was not the name she used, and the name she used was also surely not her real name). The "consideration" page on her website listed three hours at $1500, and four hours for $2000. I filled out the booking form requesting a three-hour engagement.
+The thought occured to me that while I was on vacation anyway, it might be nice to see an escort (which I had only done once before, in March 2016). I browsed around the "Boston" section on _eros.com_. Under the "ebony" subsection[^ebony], I found a profile that I liked on the basis of photographs and a professional-seeming website. I'll call her "Crystal" (which was not the name she used, and the name she used was also surely not her real name). The "consideration" page on the website listed three hours at $1500, and four hours for $2000. ("All rates are for my time and companionship only.") I filled out the booking form requesting a three-hour engagement.
[^ebony]: I don't know why they say "ebony" instead of "black". Porn sites do this, too. Seems problematic to have an ethnic term that only gets used in sexualized contexts?
[^upsold]: But I had mentioned the $2000 bank withdrawal in my email, so it made sense that that figure was more salient to her than the fact that my form submission from weeks earlier had said three hours.
-[TODO paid date cont'd—
+I didn't get any writing done the day of our date, although I had at least [gotten in a couple hundred words the previous day](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=470bbc84ba) on my draft review of Charles Murray's _Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America_. I texted my sister and my mother (who was also in town to see my sister) that I had other plans that night, requested housekeeping service for my hotel room (which had been suspended by default due to COVID), and mostly just walked around Cambridge for the late morning and afternoon. I bought a shirt with a collar at Target.
-All rates are for my time and companionship only.
+My mother called to inquire more about my plans, which I preferred to be at least somewhat vague about. I said that the safety concerns about meeting someone from the internet were mostly for women. She asked that I at least tell my sister where I was going, to which I agreed. I texted my sister: "Mom thinks there's a safety rationale for telling someone my plans, which I think is retarded, but specifically, it's a casual dinner date at"—I gave the name and address of the restaurant—"with a woman I met online (no reply expected; there's nothing useful for you to do with this information and this message is just to appease Mom)".
-I didn't get any writing done the day of our date.
+"Crystal" was late (date was originally scheduled for 4 _p.m._, then she texted in the early afternoon to move it to 4:30, then finally texted "I'm here"/"Just valeting my car" at 5:04), and then it turned out that she was expecting to meet me at the hotel while I was waiting at the restaurant, but we met in the middle and walked back to the restaurant.
-my review of Charles Murray's _Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America_
+It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt "fake"; it felt more honest to just pay for her time.
-I requested housekeeping service for my hotel room (which had been suspended by default)
+What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
-texted mom and sis that I had other plans
+What I don't know how to do without the moral indulgence of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
-mom later insisted that I tell sister about my plans; I said that the safety concern was only for women
+[^romantic-poem]: Though the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre, I'm very proud of [the poem I wrote in 2016 depicting a woman I was interested in eradicating malaria by wiping out all the mosquitos using CRISPR gene drive](/ancillary/megan-and-the-anopheles-gambiae/), although our one date didn't amount to anything. She later married Scott Alexander.
-"Mom thinks there's a safety rationale for telling someone my plans, which I think is retarded, but specifically, it's a casual dinner date at [restaurant name] ([address]) with a woman I met online (no reply expected; there's nothing useful for you to do with this information and this message is just to appease Mom)"
+Dinner was nice. We talked. She had a dayjob in real estate. There were some conversational topics I wanted to steer away from until after dinner. When we got to my hotel room, I felt freer to speak. I explained autogynephilia to her, and (briefly) the Category War with my robot cult.
-She was very late (scheduled for 4; then moved to 4:30; then "I'm here / Just valeting my car" at 5:04)
+I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
-we went to an Indian restaurant and then to my hotel
+We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have breasts like that (my gynecomastia from that HRT experiment four years before simply didn't compare), and a waist-to-hip ratio like that. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
-It was nice.
+I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
- * 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 think it would have been _more_ creepy, if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense
- * 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
+(At any rate, I think it would have been _more_ creepy if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense.)
-> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
+I wasn't coming. She said that for $2000, I definitely deserved to get off. That didn't matter to me. I ended up finishing that after she left.
- * I didn't tell her about the Charles Murray book review I was writing
-]
+Before she left, as she was using the bathroom and washing up, I tried to say something about how I wished I could have a photo to remember her by, but I knew that it would be impolite to ask. (I had done my reading. "Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.") No photos, she said.
+
+I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my rationalist friends would have understood what I meant. Considering how Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games relied on a similar abuse of indirection, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
+
+-----
[ TODO— New York
+ * I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
* 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
Scott Alexander posted a comment claiming to add important context, essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!). Alexander accused Vassar of trying "jailbreak" people from normal social reality, which "involve[d] making them paranoid about MIRI/CFAR and convincing them to take lots of drugs". Yudkowsky posted [a comment that uncritically validated Scott's reliability as a narrator](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=x5ajGhggHky9Moyr8).
-To me, this looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders moved in to discredit her by association. Quite effectively, as it turned out: the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma. (The fact that Scott said "it's fair for the community to try to defend itself" in ensuing back-and-forth suggests that he also saw the conversation as an adversarial one, even if he thought Jessica shot first.)
+To me, this looked like raw factional conflict: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about the Caliphate, so Caliphate leaders moved in to discredit her by association. Quite effectively, as it turned out: the karma score on Jessica's post dropped by more than half, while Alexander's comment got voted up to more than 380 karma. (The fact that Scott said ["it's fair for the community to try to defend itself"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=qsEMmdo6DKscvBvDr) in ensuing back-and-forth suggests that he also saw the conversation as an adversarial one, even if he thought Jessica shot first.)
I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](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 silly claim that Michael was _trying_ to drive Jessica crazy).
After a month of dawdling, I eventually decided to pull the trigger on publishing "Challenges", without the extended political coda.[^coda] The post was a little bit mean to Yudkowsky, but not so mean that I was scared of the social consequences of pulling the trigger. (Yudkowsky had been mean to Christiano and Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah in [the recent MIRI dialogues](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oDueqtq); I didn't think this was worse than that.)
-[^coda]: The text from the draft coda would later be incorporated into the present post.
+[^coda]: The text from the draft coda would later be incorporated into the present memoir.
I cut the words "in this domain" from the go-for-the-throat concluding sentence that I had been worried about. "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth," full stop.
/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
]
-Meanwhile, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth in which the ideas Yudkowsky presented to this world as his own, were commonplace.
+Meanwhile, Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_). Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from a smarter, saner alternate version of Earth where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge.
The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, which inspired a new worldbuilding trope, the [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.[^medianworlds]
Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neuroscience 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_. "It's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does," we're told.
-In the same story, an agent from Exception Handling [tells Merrin that the bureau's Fake Conspiracy section is running an operation to plant evidence that Sparashki (the fictional alien Merrin happens to be dressed up as) are real](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952), and asks Merrin not to contradict this, and Merrin just ... goes along with it. (Elsewhere in the text, we're told that claiming to be a Sparashki isn't "lying", because no one would _expect_ someone to tell the truth in that situation.) It's in-character for Merrin to go along with it, because she's a pushover. My question is, why is it okay that Exception Handling has a Fake Conspiracies section, any more than it would have been if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department? (Because dath ilan are the designated good guys? Well, so was FTX.)
+In the same story, an agent from Exception Handling [tells Merrin that the bureau's Fake Conspiracy section is running an operation to plant evidence that Sparashki (the fictional alien Merrin happens to be dressed up as) are real](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952), and asks Merrin not to contradict this, and Merrin just ... goes along with it. It's in-character for Merrin to go along with it, because she's a pushover. My question is, why is it okay that Exception Handling has a Fake Conspiracies section, any more than it would have been if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department? (Because dath ilan are the designated good guys? Well, so was FTX.)
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 in dath ilan. 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, because it would make them sad_ (!!).
I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be OK on Earth were somehow OK on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Or if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad on dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
-And just—back in the 'aughts, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
+And just—back in the 'aughts, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it, I said.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from being destroyed by the truth as a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff