... except, I would be remiss to condemn Yudkowsky without discussing—potentially mitigating factors. (I don't want to say that whether someone is a fraud should depend on whether there are mitigating factors—rather, I should discuss potential reasons why being a fraud might be the least-bad choice, when faced with a sufficiently desperate situation.)
-So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to _make sense_, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, and not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
+So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to make sense, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
-That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science blogging was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (an informal internship in 'aught-nine, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
+That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science blogging was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (a "we don't pay you, but you can sleep in the garage" internship in 2009, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna Salamon, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
-Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
+Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was not my problem, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael Vassar, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore". When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
-At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl\[ing\] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to \[his\] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for Friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl\[ing\] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to \[his\] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
-But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
+But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have time for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about timelines. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the second half of the 21st century.
-Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution.[^second-half] Yudkowsky seemed particularly [spooked by AlphaGo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=gQzA8a989ZyGvhWv2) [and AlphaZero](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/20/alphago/) in 2016–2017, not because superhuman board game players were dangerous, but because of what it implied about the universe of algorithms.
+Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution.[^second-half] Yudkowsky seemed particularly [spooked by AlphaGo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=gQzA8a989ZyGvhWv2) [and AlphaZero](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/20/alphago/) in 2016–2017, not because superhuman board game players were themselves dangerous, but because of what it implied about the universe of algorithms.
-In part of the Sequences, Yudkowsky had been [dismissive of people who aspired to build AI without understanding how intelligence works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence)—for example, by being overly impressed by the [surface analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ByPxcGDhmx74gPSm/surface-analogies-and-deep-causes) between artificial neural networks and the brain. He conceded the possibility of brute-forcing AI (if natural selection had eventually gotten there with no deeper insight, so could we) but didn't consider it a default and especially not a desirable path. (["If you don't know how your AI works, that is not good. It is bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence))
+In the Sequences, Yudkowsky had been [dismissive of people who aspired to build AI without understanding how intelligence works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence)—for example, by being overly impressed by the [surface analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ByPxcGDhmx74gPSm/surface-analogies-and-deep-causes) between artificial neural networks and the brain. He conceded the possibility of brute-forcing AI (if natural selection had eventually gotten there with no deeper insight, so could we) but didn't consider it a default and especially not a desirable path. (["If you don't know how your AI works, that is not good. It is bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence))
These days, it's increasingly looking like making really large neural nets ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
[^second-half]: In an unfinished slice-of-life short story I started writing _circa_ 2010, my protagonist (a supermarket employee resenting his job while thinking high-minded thoughts about rationality and the universe) speculates about "a threshold of economic efficiency beyond which nothing human could survive" being a tighter bound on future history than physical limits (like the heat death of the universe), and comments that "it imposes a sense of urgency to suddenly be faced with the fabric of your existence coming apart in ninety years rather than 10<sup>90</sup>."
- But if ninety years is urgent, what about ... nine? Looking at what deep learning can do in 2023, the idea of Singularity 2032 doesn't seem self-evidently _absurd_ in the way that Singularity 2019 seemed absurd in 2010 (correctly, as it turned out).
+ But if ninety years is urgent, what about ... nine? Looking at what deep learning can do in 2023, the idea of Singularity 2032 doesn't seem self-evidently absurd in the way that Singularity 2019 seemed absurd in 2010 (correctly, as it turned out).
-My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of [that week in January 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack)). Previous AI milestones, like GANs for a _fixed_ image class, were easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the _details_, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to _combine_ concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of examples of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.[^qualitatively-new]
+My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of [that week in January 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack)). Previous AI milestones, like [GANs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network) for a fixed image class, felt easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to combine concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of examples of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.[^qualitatively-new]
[^qualitatively-new]: By mid-2022, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were generating much better pictures, but that wasn't surprising. Seeing AI being able to do a thing at all is the model update; AI being able to do the thing much better 18 months later feels "priced in."
-[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the great common task. Existing companies working on embryo selection [boringly](https://archive.is/tXNbU) [market](https://archive.is/HwokV) their services as being about promoting health, but [polygenic scores should work as well for maximizing IQ as they do for minimizing cancer risk](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection).[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
+[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the Great Common Task. Existing companies working on embryo selection [boringly](https://archive.is/tXNbU) [market](https://archive.is/HwokV) their services as being about promoting health, but [polygenic scores should work as well for maximizing IQ as they do for minimizing cancer risk](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection).[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
[^eugenics-altruism]: If it seems odd to frame _eugenics_ as "altruistic", translate it as a term of art referring to the component of my actions dedicating to optimizing the world at large, as contrasted to "selfishly" optimizing my own experiences.
[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos; the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
-But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's starting to look unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is [on track to end the world in twenty years](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
+But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's looking unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is [on track to end the world in twenty years](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
-[It's ironic that "longtermism" got traction as the word for the cause area of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future, end up working out to extreme _short_-termism. Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a recognizable world of humans in 2123—_would_ care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone _better_ if Galileo had declined to publish for pre-emptive fear of the Inquisition.
+[It's ironic that "longtermism" got traction as the word for the cause area of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future, end up working out to extreme short-termism. Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a recognizable world of humans in 2123—would care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone better if Galileo had declined to publish for pre-emptive fear of the Inquisition.
-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.
+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/introducing-superalignment) won't work, or why they should have a safety plan at all.
(I remarked to "Thomas" 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?
+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 existential-risk-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?
As usual, the Yudkowsky of 2009 has me covered. In his short story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), our protagonist Hirou wonders why the powerful wizard Dolf lets other party members risk themselves fighting, when Dolf could have protected them:
>
> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-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!_
+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 March 2021 Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
But I don't think it's the mere addition of the arguments to the discourse that I'm objecting to. (If some garden-variety trans ally had made the same dumb arguments, I would make the same counterarguments, but I wouldn't feel betrayed.)
-It's the _false advertising_—the pretense that Yudkowsky is still the unchallengable world master of rationality, if he's going to behave like a garden-variety trans ally and reserve the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (!!) when his incentives point that way.
+It's the false advertising—the pretense that Yudkowsky is still the unchallengable world master of rationality, if he's going to behave like a garden-variety trans ally and reserve the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (!!) when his incentives point that way.
In _Planecrash_, when Keltham decides he needs to destroy Golarion's universe on negative-leaning utilitarian grounds, he takes care to only deal with Evil people from then on, and not form close ties with the Lawful Neutral nation of Osirion, in order to not betray anyone who would have had thereby a reasonable expectation that their friend wouldn't try to destroy their universe: ["the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1882395#reply-1882395).
Similarly, I think Yudkowsky should stop pretending to be our rationality teacher after he stopped being our rationality teacher and decided to be a politician instead.
-I think it's significant that you don't see me picking fights with—say, Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't repeatedly take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano _isn't trying to be a religious leader_ (in this world where religious entrepreneurs can't afford to contradict the state religion). If Paul Christiano has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them. If we knew about them and they were correct, I would upvote them, and if we knew about them and they were incorrect, I would criticize them, but in either case, Christiano would not try to cultivate the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is insane. That's not his bag.
+I think it's significant that you don't see me picking fights with—say, Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't repeatedly take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano isn't trying to be a religious leader. If Paul Christiano has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them. If we knew about them and they were correct, I would upvote them, and if we knew about them and they were incorrect, I would criticize them, but in either case, Christiano would not try to cultivate the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is insane. That's not his bag.
------
Yudkowsky's political cowardice is arguably puzzling in light of his timeless decision theory's recommendations against giving in to extortion.
-The "arguably" is important, because randos on the internet are notoriously bad at drawing out the consequences of the theory, to the extent that Yudkowsky has said that he wishes he hadn't published—and though I think I'm smarter than the average rando, I don't expect anyone to _take my word for it_. So let me disclaim that this is _my_ explanation of how Yudkowsky's decision theory _could be interpreted_ to recommend that he behave the way I want him to, without any pretense that I'm any sort of neutral expert witness on decision theory.
+The "arguably" is important, because randos on the internet are notoriously bad at drawing out the consequences of the theory, to the extent that Yudkowsky has said that he ["wish[es] that [he'd] never spoken on the topic"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929)—and though I think I'm smarter than the average rando, I don't expect anyone to take my word for it. So let me disclaim that this is _my_ explanation of how Yudkowsky's decision theory _could be interpreted_ to recommend that he behave the way I want him to, without any pretense that I'm any sort of neutral expert witness on decision theory.
-The idea of timeless decision theory is that you should choose the action that has the best consequences _given_ that your decision is mirrored at all the places your decision algorithm is embedded in the universe.
+The idea of timeless decision theory is that you should choose the action that has the best consequences given that your decision is mirrored at all the places your decision algorithm is embedded in the universe.
-The reason this is any different from the "causal decision theory" of just choosing the action with the best consequences (locally, without any regard to this "multiple embeddings in the universe" nonsense) is because it's possible for other parts of the universe to depend on your choices. For example, in the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" scenario, someone might give you a ride out of the desert if they _predict_ you'll pay them back later. After you've already received the ride, you might think that you can get away with stiffing them—but if they'd predicted you would do that, they wouldn't have given you the ride in the first place. Your decision is mirrored _inside the world-model every other agent with a sufficiently good knowledge of you_.
+The reason this is any different from the "causal decision theory" of just choosing the action with the best consequences (locally, without any regard to this "multiple embeddings in the universe" nonsense) is because it's possible for other parts of the universe to depend on your choices. For example, in the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" scenario, someone might give you a ride out of the desert if they predict you'll pay them back later. After you've already received the ride, you might think that you can get away with stiffing them—but if they'd predicted you would do that, they wouldn't have given you the ride in the first place. Your decision is mirrored inside the world-model every other agent with a sufficiently good knowledge of you.
-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.
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_terrorists) ["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?
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.
-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.
+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 2009, 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.
-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.
+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.
-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).
+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 Greg and Heather 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 agree, destroying some of the pie in the process. Greg thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Heather 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.
-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 Greg 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 Greg is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Heather has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Heather's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
-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, Greg should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Heather also does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split in Heather's favor (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 Greg and Heather to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Greg to burn some of Heather's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by her, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the entire pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
-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?
-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](/2023/Dec/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#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.
-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.
+In my illustrative story, if Greg and Heather destroy the pie fighting, then 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 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):
+I 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!"
"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!
+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 wouldn't stop Trump.
-"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.
+"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," he 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?
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.
+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 doesn't doesn't care about trashing his reputation with me, because I don't matter.
Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century Jewish religious leader purported to be the Messiah, who later [converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam). "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
-----
-I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
-
-I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)).
-
-I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
-
-But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
-
------
-
-I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit "Arcadia" again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
-
-I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
-
-The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to "Arcadia". There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the "Arcadia" edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
-
-The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
-
-At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
-
-It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the purview of my double-dog promise.
-
-There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
-
------
-
In June 2021, MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares [wrote a Twitter thread aruging that](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) "[t]he definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering", which [Yudkowsky retweeted](https://archive.is/Ecsca).[^not-endorsements]
[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
-Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), which post I had just dedicated _more than three years of my life_ to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), _specifically using dolphins as my central example_—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky (who retweeted Soares) definitely did. (Soares's [specific reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander.) [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
+Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). Soares's [reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander. [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
-The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't _immediately_ see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which was _hostile to my interests_. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed _implausible_ that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
+The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't immediately see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which post I had just dedicated more than three years of my life to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), specifically using dolphins as my central example—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky definitely did. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed implausible that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
-After a little more thought, I decided the thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"!), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar _in general_. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
+After a little more thought, I decided that Soares's thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar in general. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
(Somehow, it felt appropriate to use a quote from Arthur Jensen's ["How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F) as an epigraph.)
-[TODO: dolphin war con'td
+On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433) Soares conceded my main points, but said that the tone, and the [epistemic-status followup thread](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761124429701121), were intended to indicate that the original thread was "largely in jest"—"shitposting"—but that he was "open to arguments that [he was] making a mistake here."
- * Nate conceded all of my points (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433), said the thread was in jest ("shitposting"), and said he was open to arguments that he was making a mistake (https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402889976438611968), but still seemed to think his shitposting was based
+I didn't take that too well, and threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum. Soares wrote a longer comment on _Less Wrong_ the next morning, and I [pointed out that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/BBtSuWcdaFyvgddE4) Soares's followup thread had lamented ["the fact that nobody's read A Human's Guide to Words or w/e"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761130041659395), but—with respect—he wasn't behaving like _he_ had read it. Specifically, [#30](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on the list of ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) had characterized the position that dolphins are fish as "playing nitwit games". This didn't seem controversial in 2008.
- * I got frustrated and lashed out; "open to arguments that he was making a mistake" felt fake to me; rats are good at paying lip service to humility, but I'd lost faith in getting them to change their behavior, like not sending PageRank to "... Not Man for the Categories"
+And yet it would seem that sometime between 2008 and the current year, the "rationalist" party line (as observed in the public statements of SingInst/MIRI leadership) on whether dolphins are fish shifted from (my paraphrases) "No; _despite_ the surface similarities, that categorization doesn't carve reality at the joints; stop playing nitwit games" to "Yes, _because_ of the surface similarities; those who contend otherwise are the ones playing nitwit games." A complete 180° reversal, on this specific example! Why? What changed?
- * Nate wrote a longer reply on Less Wrong the next morning
+It would make sense if people's opinions changed due to new arguments. (Indeed, Yudkowsky's original "stop playing nitwit games" dismissal had been sloppy, and I had had occasion in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the specific senses in which dolphins both do and do not cluster with fish.)
- * I pointed out that his followup thread lamented that people hadn't read "A Human's Guide to Words", but that Sequence _specifically_ used the example of dolphins. What changed?!?
+But when people change their mind due to new arguments, you'd expect them to acknowledge the change, and explain how the new arguments show that why they thought before was actually wrong. Soares hadn't even acknowledged the change!
- * [Summarize Nate's account of his story], phylogeny not having the courage of its convictions
+Soares wrote [a comment explaining](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) why he didn't think it was such a large reversal. I [started drafting a counterreply](/ancillary/dolphin-war/), but decided that it would need to become a full post on the timescale of days or weeks, partially because I needed to think through how to reply to Soares about paraphyletic groups, and partially because the way the associated Twitter discussion had gone (including some tussling with Yudkowsky) made me want to modulate my tone. (I noted that I had probably lost some in-group credibility in the Twitter fight, but the information gained seemed more valuable. Losing in-group credibility didn't hurt so much when I didn't respect the group anymore.)
- * Twitter exchange where he said he wasn't sure I would count his self-report as evidnece, I said it totally counts
+Subjectively, I was feeling time pressure on my reply, and in the meantime, I ended up adding [a huffy comment](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/rMHcWfqkH89LWt4y9) to the _Less Wrong_ thread taking issue with Soares's still-flippant tone. That was a terrible performance on my part. It got downvoted to oblivion, and I deserved it.
- * I overheated. This was an objectively dumb play. (If I had cooled down and just written up my reply, I might have gotten real engagement and a resolution, but I blew it.) I apologized a few days later.
+In general, my social behavior during this entire episode was histrionic, and I probably could have gotten an equal-or-better outcome if I had kept my cool. The reason I didn't feel like keeping my cool was because after years of fighting this Category War, MIRI doubling down on "dolphins are fish" felt like a gratuitous insult. I was used to "rationalists" ever-so-humbly claiming to be open to arguments that they were making a mistake, but I couldn't take such assurances seriously if they were going to keep sending PageRank-like credibility to "... Not Man for the Categories".
- * Nate's reaction to me blowing up said it looked like I was expecting deference. I deny this; I wouldn't expect people to defer to me—what I did expect was a fair hearing, and at this point, I had lost faith that I would get one. (Could you blame me, when Yudkowsky says a fair hearing is less important than agreeing with Stalin?)
+Soares [wrote that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/8nmjnrm4cwgCCyYrG) I was persistently mis-modeling his intentions, that I seemed to be making a plea for deference that he rejected.
- * My theory of what's going on: I totally believe Nate's self report that he wasn't thinking about gender. (As Nate pointed out, you could give the thread an anti-trans interpretation, too.) Nevertheless, it remains the case that Nate's thinking is causally downstream of Scott's arguments in "... Not Man for the Categories." Where did Scott get it from? I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient.
+I don't think I wanted deference, though. I write these thousands of words in the hopes that people will read my arguments and think it through for themselves; I would never expect anyone to take my word for the conclusion. What I was hoping for was a fair hearing, and by that point, I had lost hope of getting one.
- * This is like radiocontrast dye for dark side epistemology: we can see Scott sneezing his bad epistemology onto everyone else because he's such a popular writer. No one can think fast enough to think their own thoughts, but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, rather than copying smart people's views including mistakes.
+As for my skill at modeling intent, I think it's less relevant than Soares seemed to think. I believe his self-report that he wasn't trying to make a coded statement about gender; my initial impression otherwise _was_ miscalibrated. (As he pointed out, his "dolphins are fish" position could be given an "anti-trans" interpretation, too, in the form of "you intellectuals get your hands off my intuitive concepts". The association between "dolphins are fish" and "trans women are women" ran through their conjunction in Alexander's "... Not Man for the Categories", rather than being intrinsic to the beliefs themselves.)
- * I look up the relevant phylogenetics definitions, and write "Blood Is Thicker Than Water"
+The thing is, I was _right_ to notice the similarity between Soares's argument and "... Not Man for the Categories." Soares's [own account](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) agreed that there was a causal influence. Okay, so _Nate_ wasn't trying to play gender politics; Scott just alerted him to the idea that people didn't used to be interested in drawing their categories around phylogenetics, and Nate ran with that thought.
-]
+So where did _Scott_ get it from?
+I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient. I think if you asked Scott Alexander whether dolphins are fish in 2012, he would have said, "No, they're mammals," like any other educated adult.
-[TODO:
+In a world where the clock of "political time" had run a little bit slower, such that the fight for gay marriage had taken longer [such that the progressive _zeitgeist_ hadn't pivoted to trans as the new cause _du jour_](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/), I don't think Alexander would have had the occasion to write "... Not Man for the Categories." And in that world, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or "Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary" would have become memes in our subculture.
- * depressed after talking to him at Independence Day party 2021 (I can mention that, because it was outdoors and probably lots of other people saw us, even if I can't talk about content)
+This case is like [radiocontrast dye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocontrast_agent) for [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Because Scott Alexander won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes_ onto everyone who trusts Scott to have done his homework, even when he obviously hasn't.
- * It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't trying to sell himself as a religious leader, and profiting from the conflation of rationalist-someone-who-cares-about-reasoning, and rationalist-member-of-robot-cult
+[No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-thoughts), but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, such that collective belief trends toward truth as [the signal of good arguments rises above the noise](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/), rather than being copied from celebrity leaders (including the mistakes).
- * 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)
+It's true that there's a cluster of similarities induced by adaptations to the acquatic environment. It's reasonable to want to talk about that subspace. But it doesn't follow that phylogenetics is irrelevant. Genetics being at the root of the causal graph induces the kind of conditional independence relationships that make "categories" a useful AI trick.
- * a specific example that made me very angry in September 2021—
+But in a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who have read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their conversations with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that completely forgot the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill. People only remember the subset of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the conditional independence structure in the environment.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+After I cooled down, I did eventually write up the explanation for why paraphyletic categories are fine, in ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). But I'm not sure that anyone cared.
-Or [as Yudkowsky put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228)—
+--------
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+I got a chance to talk to Yudkowsky in person at the 2021 Event Horizon[^event-horizon] Fourth of July party. In accordance with the privacy norms I'm adhering to while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I don't think I should elaborate on what was said. (It felt like a private conversation, even if most of it was outdoors at a party. No one joined in, and if anyone was listening, I didn't notice them.)
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
+[^event-horizon]: Event Horizon was the name of a group house in Berkeley.
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor _only makes sense in the first place_ in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
+I will say that it finalized my sense that the vision of rationalism he had preached in the Sequences was dead as a cultural force. I was somewhat depressed for months afterwards.
- * the fact that David Xu interpreted criticism of the robot cult as me going "full post-rat" suggests that Yudkowsky's framing had spilled onto others. (The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. Motte: someone who's critical of central rationalists; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason.)
+It wouldn't be so bad if Yudkowsky weren't trying to sell himself as a _de facto_ religious leader,[^religious-leader] profiting from the conflation of _rationalist_ in the sense of "one who aspires to systematically correct reasoning" and _rationalist_ as member of his fan-club/personality-cult.
-sneering at post-rats; David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! 6 September 2021
+[^religious-leader]: "Religious leader" continues to seem like an apt sociological description, even if [no supernatural claims are being made](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural).
-> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
+But he does seem to actively encourage this conflation. Contrast the ["Litany Against Gurus"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) from the Sequences, to the way he sneers at "post-rationalists"—or even "Earthlings" in general (in contrast to his fictional world of dath ilan). The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. [Motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/): someone who's critical of central "rationalists" like Yudkowsky or Alexander; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason itself.
-https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+One example that made me furious came in September 2021. Yudkowsky, replying to Scott Alexander on Twitter, [wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419):
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
-> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
-
-I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
-
-But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be _completely_ mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a suspect idea; I think _something of value has been lost_ when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
-
-At "Arcadia"'s 2022 [Smallpox Eradication Day](https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1391248651167494146) party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
+I understand, of course, that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Yudkowsky or Alexander because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I had just spent more than three and a half years of my life[^years-of-my-life] [explaining in](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), with math, how Alexander was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Yudkowsky was still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seemed egregiously unfair, in a way that wasn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+[^years-of-my-life]: I started outlining ["The Categories Where Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) in January 2018. I would finally finish ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), following up on the "dolphins are fish" claim later that month of September 2021.
-My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+Or [as Yudkowsky had once put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228):
-If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-(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).)
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Irene says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Jonas says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Irene says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Irene is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Irene was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]
-I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]: I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
-From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I _know some things_ about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in _a world that makes sense_.
+ But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be completely mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a crazy idea; I think something of value has been lost when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
-]
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior, in a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior.
+I don't think the motte-and-bailey concern is hypothetical. When I [indignantly protested](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435059595228053505) the "we're both always right" remark, one David Xu [commented](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482): "speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat"—as if my criticism of Yudkowsky's self-serving bluster itself marked me as siding with the "post-rats"!
-[David Xu writes](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
+Concerning my philosophy of language grievance, [Xu wrote](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is [to] proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
>
> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
-I reply: on the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
+I reply: on the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a conflict between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided when possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
-On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
+On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to prevent people from making inferences, then preventing them from corresponding language seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is mostly true for humans. We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
>
> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
-After everything I've been through over the past six years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
-
-It's a _conflict_. I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want people to tell the truth, and the Caliphate wants people to not tell the truth. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
-
-At this point, I imagine defenders of the Caliphate are shaking their heads in disappointment at how I'm doubling down on refusing to Other-model. But—_am_ I? Isn't this just a re-statement of Xu's first proposed crux, except reframed as a "values difference" rather than a "disagreement"?
+After everything I've been through over the past seven years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
-Is the problem that my use of the phrase "tell the truth" (which has positive valence in our culture) functions to sneak in normative connotations favoring "my side"?
+It's a conflict. I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop). The Caliphate doesn't want to facilitate people publicly making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit—for example, by putatively causing massive psychological damage to some subset of people. This isn't a disagreement about rationality. Telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
-Fine. Objection sustained. I'm happy to use to Xu's language: I think what's actually at issue is that, at least in this domain, I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop), and the Caliphate wants to _not_ facilitate people making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because facilitating inferences _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to make inferences_ (for example, because they cause more harm than benefit).
+I anticipate this being construed as me doubling down on failing to properly Other-model, because I'm associating my side of the conflict with "telling the truth", which is a positive-valence description. But what am I getting wrong substantively, as a matter of fact rather than mere tone? It seems to me that declining to "facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit" (Xu's words, verbatim) is a form of not wanting people to know things.
-Better? Perhaps, to some 2022-era rats and EAs, this formulation makes my position look obviously in the wrong: I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_ (!). Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
+It's not like my side of the conflict isn't biting any bullets, either. I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_. Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
-One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased).
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 starts by quoting a passage from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record). Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
-
-The Yudkowsky of 2007 continues—it's again worth quoting at length—
+One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased). It's again worth quoting at length—
> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
>
-> Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.
->
> [...]
>
> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
>
> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
-Looking back on this from 2022, the only criticism I have is that Yudkowsky was too optimistic to "doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen." In some ways, people's actual behavior is _worse_ than what Orwell depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph _before_ denying memory of it, because it would be _too_ absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
-
-In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year _doesn't even bother covering its tracks_. Turns out, it doesn't need to! People just don't remember things!
+The post opens with an epigraph from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record. Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
-The [flexibility of natural language is a _huge_ help here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). If the caliph were to _directly_ contradict himself in simple, unambiguous language—to go from "Oceania is not at war with Eastasia" to "Oceania is at war with Eastasia" without any acknowledgement that anything had changed—_then_ too many people might notice that those two sentences are the same except that one has the word _not_ in it. What's a caliph to do, if he wants to declare war on Eastasia without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the decision to do so?
+Orwell was too optimistic. In some ways, people's actual behavior is worse than what he depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph before denying memory of it, because it would be too absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
-The solution is simple: just—use more words! Then if someone tries to argue that you've _effectively_ contradicted yourself, accuse them of being uncharitable and failing to model the Other. You can't lose! Anything can be consistent with anything if you apply a sufficiently charitable reading; whether Oceania is at war with Eastasia depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of "at war."
-
-Thus, O'Brien should envy Yudkowsky: burning the photograph turns out to be unnecessary! ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say. I claim that these posts _effectively_ contradict each other. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are _not only_ out of luck given forseeable technology, but _also_ that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, _already_ be women in some unspecified psychological sense.
-
-_Technically_, these don't _strictly_ contradict each other: I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one includes the word _not_. (And even if there were such sentences, I wouldn't be able to prove that the other words were being used in the same sense in both sentences.) One _could_ try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing.
-
-_Realistically_ ... no. These two posts _can't_ both be right. In itself, this isn't a problem: people change their minds sometimes, which is great! But when people _actually_ change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even _acknowledge the change_, that's pretty Orwellian, like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
-
-And if a little bit of Orwellianism on specific, narrow, highly-charged topics might be forgiven—because everyone else in your Society is doing it, and you would be punished for not playing along, an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) that no one actor has the power to defy—might we not expect the father of the "rationalists" to stand his ground on the core theses of his ideology, like whether telling the truth is good?
-
-I guess not! ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is _still up_ and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
-
-I don't doubt Yudkowsky could come up with some clever casuistry why, _technically_, the text he wrote in 2007 and the text he endorsed in 2021 don't contradict each other. But _realistically_ ... again, no.
-
-[TODO: elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers]
-
-I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's _clearly labeled as such_ would be fine. (There's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself.")
-
-What's _not_ fine is selective argumentation while claiming "confidence in [your] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [yourself] before speaking" when you _very obviously have done no such thing_.
-
-------
-
-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 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?
-
-"Crystal" didn't get back to me within several days, and I resigned myself to the implied rejection. (I already felt morally ambiguous about filling out the form; I certainly wasn't about to _shop around_.) But then on 4:37 _p.m._ on the day before my flight left, she got back to me asking if I was still interested in connecting, explaining that there had been a problem with her spam filter (Subject: "Hello! My apologies For The Late Reply"). I rushed to the bank just before it closed to withdraw $2000 cash that would have been harder to get at on my trip, between ATM withdrawal limits and the lack of Wells Fargo branches in Massachusetts.
-
-She suggested switching to texts to get around the spam issue, and I texted her a photo of my ID and a link to my LinkedIn profile to confirm my identity (or gentlemanliness). She asked, "Would you like to go on a dinner date, four hours, 2,000."[^no-dollar-sign] (Already feeling morally ambiguous, I certainly wasn't going to complain about getting _upsold_.)[^upsold] I eagerly agreed, and suggested an Indian restaurant a half-mile walk from my hotel.
-
-[^no-dollar-sign]: I appreciated the absence of a dollar sign in front of the figure. Feels less crass.
-
-[^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.
-
-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.
-
-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)".
-
-"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.
-
-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, and cold-approaching someone like her in public was unthinkable. It felt more honest to just pay for her time.
-
-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_.)
-
-What I don't know how to do without the moral [indulgence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.)
-
-[^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.
-
-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.
-
-I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
-
-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 that face and that voice and those breasts (my gynecomastia from [that HRT experiment four years before](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) simply didn't compare) and that—waist-to-hip ratio. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
-
-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 satisfying the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
-
-(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.)
-
-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.
-
-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 my frustration at Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
-
-------
+In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year doesn't even bother covering its tracks. It doesn't need to: people just don't remember things. ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is still up and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say.
-The New York leg of my trip went fine. I visited Sarah. I met another _Less Wrong_-er whose comments I had liked. I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
+I claim that "Changing Emotions" and the 2016 Facebook post effectively contradict each other, even if I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one that includes the word _not_. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are not only out of luck given forseeable technology, but also that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, already be women in some unspecified psychological sense. One could try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing—or simply that Yudkowsky changed his mind.
-I visited Ben and met his new girlfiend. Jessica wasn't around. We hadn't talked much since the "Lenore" disaster nine months before. He said that my behavior then _had_ been a betrayal, but a finite one. It happens. (Not "it happens" meaning that it's _okay_, but that it _happens_; moral agents keep accounts; [you forgive, but don't forget](/2020/Dec/liability/).)
+But when people change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to _acknowledge_ the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even acknowledge the change, that feels like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
-I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
+Likewise, ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is still up and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
-So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back [_coverture_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture) on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
+[TODO: clincher sentence? Explain why "Doublethink" being directed at oneself doesn't really solve the problem]
------
An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an August 2021 EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism [...] as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seem[ed] to be the main alternative."
-I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does _not_ make sense to be reassured that _Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it_. That's just being a personality-cultist.
+I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does not make sense to be reassured that Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it. That's just being a personality-cultist.
In January 2022, in an attempt to deal with my personality-cultist writing block, I sent him one last email asking if he particularly _cared_ if I published a couple blog posts that said some negative things about him. If he actually _cared_ about potential reputational damage to him from my writing things that I thought I had a legitimate interest in writing about, I would be _willing_ to let him pre-read the drafts before publishing and give him the chance to object to anything he thought was unfair ... but I'd rather agree that that wasn't necessary. I explained the privacy norms that I intended to follow—that I could explain _my_ actions, but had to Glomarize about the content of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred.
In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror, or save it for the memoir. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
-I asked "Trent" for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
+I asked "Riley" for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
-"Trent" said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) He said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
+"Riley" said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) They said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
-"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded "Trent". "I don't know what you're afraid of."
+"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded "Riley". "I don't know what you're afraid of."
I was afraid of taking irrevocable war actions against the person who taught me everything I know. (And his apparent conviction that the world was ending _soon_, made it worse. Wouldn't it feel petty, if the last thing you ever said to your grandfather was calling him a liar in front of the whole family, even if he had in fact lied?)
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