20 Feb: impulsive email to Scott (subject: a howl of despair which is nameless)
20 Feb: cold outreach to Ben Landau-Taylor
21 Feb: telling Marcus, I'm out of cards: we created a monster
+22 Feb: "RIP Culture War" thread
+22 Feb: Michael offers advice; I forward with Scott; Michael calls it a destructive move
+25 Feb: first draft of defending against "alt-right" categorization
+27 Feb: more support from the gang
+27-28 Feb: on private universes
-> if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen - at least it's much higher probability than trying more of the same.
-(I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
-> Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
-Ben—
-> A description of the nitpicking as hostile and anti-epistemic can be correct and important even if mentioning that description is not the correct response for you.
-to Sarah—
-> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
+> A deluge of nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat, or at least a marginalization threat. The game is that the nitpicks force you to choose between infinite interpretive labor, and "never answered these construed-as-reasonable objections" (in which case you lose standing to make the claim, and if people call you on that, they get to start talking about you as a bad rationalist, likely think of you as unreasonable, stop inviting you to things, etc.).
+> It's a bit less direct than how "this is crazy talk" can be an implied imprisonment threat, but it's still strong (distributed) social aggression.
+
-Ben's reply—
-> Your special interest is not just a coincidence here.
+> if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen
+(I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
-I don't think it's a coincidence, either, but I'd like to get more of a sense of how large the posited "If you once [gerrymander a category boundary], the[n parsimony] is ever after your enemy" effect is.
-
+> Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
-Sarah shying away, my rallying cry—
+to Sarah—
+> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
> There have been times during the last few weeks where it's felt like my mind has shut down with the only thought, "What the hell am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? I don't want to be one of the Bad Guys. Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
-> But "whatever" is _not a counterargument!_
-
> But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_—where a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
> But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
> I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
-> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture."
+
+> So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
> I want to emphasize this, because I don't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
> In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
-
-I deeply appreciate your effort here Zack. I think that the link-filled argument structure you have presented here is sufficiently compelling that for someone who is moved to action by arguments, who believes in the original mission of the rationalist community either narrowly or broadly defined, and who doesn't believe that The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://www.google.es/amp/s/srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/) there is little room for productive rebuttal. However, much to my regret, I don't discover in myself an expectation of the sort of action you are hoping for which is very different from your 20% estimate, but I do discover a much lower confidence in that action's success than is suggested by the "you alone can kill it" invocation. It could be true. Conditional on the right set of qualifications it probably is true, but that set of qualifications includes some assumptions about how much effort would be invested and about how other people would respond which I see as much less likely than not.
+The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/)
+Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening.
-> I think that this is a pretty overwhelming argument from an analytic perspective. I'm not expecting that such a perspective will move Eliezer's actions right now, but I badly want to help him to get back to being the sort of person who would be moved by such an argument. I suspect that if something like this can enjoy sent out at a time several weeks away, it will contribute more to Eliezer once again being the sort of person who is influenced by this sort of argument. Can you wait a bit? Is it possiblefot is and some friends to steer the state of the discussion further in the direction you are hoping for before sharing this letter with him?
-
-Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening. Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
+Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
When I told Michael about this, he said that I was ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer mattered more for my claims than the equivalent of a scientist, and that Ben Hoffman (who I had already shared the thread with Scott with) would be helpful in solidifying my claims to IP defense. I said that I didn't _feel_ like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
(I _want_ to confidently predict that everything I've just said is completely obvious to you, because I learned it all specifically from you! A 130 IQ _nobody_ like me shouldn't have to say _any_ of this to the _author_ of "A Human's Guide to Words"! But then I don't know how to reconcile that with your recent public statement about [not seeing "how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). Hence this desperate and [_confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) email plea.)
-And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
+And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the
+
+
+
+Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
In a functioning rationalist community, there should never be any occasion in which "appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal authority" seems like a good strategy: the way this is supposed to work is that I should just make my arguments with the understanding that good arguments will be accepted and bad arguments will be rejected. But I've been trying that, and it's mostly not working. On any other topic, I probably would have just given up and accepted the social consensus by now: "Sure, OK, whatever, trans women are women by definition; who am I to think I've seen into the Bayes-structure?" I still think this from time to time, and feel really guilty about arguing for the Bad Guys (because in my native Blue Tribe culture, only Bad people want to talk about sexual dimorphism). But then I can't stop seeing the Bayes-structure that says that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept even when it's ideologically unfashionable—and I've got Something to Protect. What am I supposed to do?
f you want people to use your preferred categories, you're going to need to convince them with some sort of argument that those categories are predictively useful. I don't see the point of saying "There's no epistemic issue here, although maybe there's a policy debate about how to use language; end-of-discussion" if it's not to justify the mind games? Why can't we get a clear ex cathedra statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule that categories are nonarbitrary? Isn't it true, and important, and something that people who ought to know better are getting wrong? Surely there's some way for "not alt-right" signaling to be purchased separately?
+
+
+
[TODO: Ben—
> I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
I'm still pretty horrified that the sticking point in discussions seems to have been not the AGP etiology itself (which is what I was focusing on in 2016/2017), but the category-boundaries-are-arbitrary "insight." So it's not just that we failed to break the irrationalist trans ideology: we actually invented something arguably worse! (Ordinary trans activists at least try to make (confused) truth claims; we invented a fully general counteragument against truth claims that's all the more dangerous thanks to the virtue of a very narrow kind of technical correctness.)
+> point out to him your sympathies regarding his mental breakdown under soft political persecution and silencing, make it clear that you are not requesting that he now or at any time in the future do anything in public regarding gender issues, and ask him to remember that you have recently been mentally incarcerated more than under similar political pressure (applied in the name of the mental health needs of non-specific people many of whom are in the same natural category as yourself) that he is totally forgiven for participating in it, but that you would like to discuss the shared aspect of your circumstances face to face, and maybe both consider not posting anything online for a couple weeks.
+
+> That was a fairly destructive move to pull without consulting me, but OK, you played it and I will run with it.
+
+(Notwithstanding how it's bad that I've been leaning on you for social proof way too much, I've been writing with the assumption that the author of the Sequences still cares about the common interest of many causes. I can see the "MIRI exists, that was all the raising-the-sanity-waterline project turned out to be good for; I don't have any teaching duties besides my not-explicitly-lying Wizard's Oath" CDT logic, but ... ugh, really? I can't be the one to suggest it.)
+
+
+
+You write:
+
+ Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
+
+Suppose the one were to reply: "Using language in a way you dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (Scott Alexander's explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
+
+How would you begin to respond to this? That's not a rhetorical question: I'm actually curious.
+
+My model of Sequences-era 2009!Eliezer says, "This is an attempt to sneak in connotations by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter. Go read 'A Human's Guide to Words,' and if you've already read it, then you're being incredibly intellectually dishonest and not worth my time to interact with."
+
+But I have no idea what 2019!Eliezer says.
+
+You wrote to me on 28 November:
+
+ The notion of a lie is as sancrosanct as the notion of a truth, and you do not get to say 'lie' when somebody is doing something that you think might tempt somebody to add on a lie as an additional act. [...] 'Lying' is for per se direct falsehoods.
+
+What direct falsehood is being asserted by Scott's detractors? I don't think anyone is claiming that, say, Scott identifies as alt-right (not even privately), any more than anyone is claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Sneer Club has been pretty explicit in their criticism (examples: 1 2) that the Culture War thread harbors racists (&c.) and possibly that Scott himself is a secret racist, with respect to a definition of racism that includes the belief that there are genetically-mediated population differences in the distribution of socially-relevant traits and that this probably has decision-relevant consequences should be discussable somewhere.
+
+And this is just correct: e.g., "The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project" favorably cites Cochran et al.'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott is almost certainly "guilty" of the category-membership that the speech against him is meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. The correct response to the existence of a machine-learning classifer that returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?), but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
+
+Of course, Scott is great and we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it's plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that is to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims, much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might dishonestly plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for jury nullification.
+
+But political convenience comes at a dire cost to our common interest! There's a proverb you once failed to Google, which runs something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+
+Similarly, once someone is known to vary the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience (even if their private, unshared thoughts continue to be consistently wise)—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility of categorizations being lies when that happens to make them look good ...
+
+Well, you're still somewhat better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas clever arguers who don't tell explicit lies are very constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a blue check and 20K followers. I remain,
+
+> >
+>
+> If the statement "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as "Scott Alexander is a racist" or "Slate Star Codex is an alt-right blog" then
+
+Wait! That's not the analogy I'm trying to make!
+
+What I'm trying to say is, whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense as a response to "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y.
+
+Your behavior the other month made it look like you think that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." is a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman."
+
+I'm saying that whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of local validity, apply the same standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist."
+
+The preceding three paragraphs are glossing over some details, and I totally understand if you want to disagree with the exact way I've formulated them! (Like, maybe you think it's inappropriate that I'm focusing on category-membership even though your explicit statement was about pronouns. It's important to notice that! We may be living in different mental universes with respect to how Gricean implicature works!)
+
+But ... I'm not claiming that Eliezer's statement that "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as Sneer Club's statement that "Scott Alexander is a racist." That's just not what the analogy was trying to do!
+
+
+But like, does anyone understand what the fuck could possibly be going on in Eliezer's head? I've spent thousands of words with lots of direct links and quotes to his own writings from ten years ago trying to explain that there's a problem where people who call themselves "rationalists" are somehow very intent on playing clever definition-hacking mind games to make it artificially expensive to express the idea that humans cannot change sex (given current technology), and that I think he could fix the problem because people might listen to him when they don't listen to me. I agree that trans issues aren't important, but I also think that if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should get the right answer even when the issue isn't important.
+
+I think I've been pretty explicit! And today Eliezer is chastising me and Ben for not having enough empathy to realize that people live in different mental universes. And like—I agree that people live in different mental universes! But—that seems bizarrely nonresponsive to the thousands of words I wrote explaining the problem! You see it, right?! What is there left for me to say?
+
+Michael—
+> I think that if Zack is having difficulties it would be ideal if we could move this ahead without him. Needless to say, he doesn't need to feel any responsibility and has done all that could be asked of him and more to cause this project to survive unanticipated difficulties. Right now, I don't think there's much help he can offer except for periodic pushes, like the current one, for the rest of us to keep at it.
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff