16 Apr: I feel sad and gaslighted
16 Apr: Jessica sparks engagement by appealing to anti-lying
Ben— I think a commitment to lying is always wrong just straightforwardly leads to deciding that anything power demands you say is true.
-16 Apr: If it were just a matter of my own pain, I wouldn't bother making a fuss about this. But there's a principle here that's way bigger than any of us: that's why Michael and Ben and Sarah and Zvi and Jessica are here with me.
+16 Apr: If it were just a matter of my own pain, I wouldn't bother making a fuss about this. But there's a principle here that's way bigger than any of us: that's why Michael and Ben and Sarah and [...] and Jessica are here with me.
we're in favor of Jessica's existence
17 Apr: plantiff/pawn/puppydog
17 Apr: Jessica— This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
16 Jan: do you think you could explain this in a way Said would find satisfying?
18 Jan: Yudkowsky on Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-on-mental-illness-a-belated-reply/#comment-237783
21 Jan: still have this "Vassar Group vs. Corrupt Mainstream MIRI/CfAR/LW/EA rationalist civil war" framing in my head that I need to unwind, because it's the wrong frame, and it's ironically the wrong frame by our ("our") own standards. I already made the mistake of expecting a community once, but by now I should know that no Lord hath the champion, and no safe defense. There is no group; there is no community; there are just grown-ups who think for themselves (or ought to) and sometimes coordinate with their friends on those specific plans that actually require coordination.
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+I indicate I might enter the Caplan-Alexander debate (I don't actually)
+25 Jan: Said thinks Jessica's political thinking is vague and under-researched
+27 Jan: Anna has to ("has to") let both me and Ziz down because big-tent coalitions require incoherence (e.g., progressives prefer not to admit out loud that trans people and Muslims have conflicting interests).
+27 Jan: Vassar's trans reversal—lame
+1 Feb: sleep disruption due to M.M.B. situation
+1 Feb: I reply to Scott on "AGP is common", and M.M.B. situation
+4 Feb: you exist in the physical sense. To whatever extent your behavior is controlled by the balance of "not wanting to fight pro-trans people" and "not wanting to fight Zack", then you don't exist decision-theoretically.
+6 Feb: me to Anna on fog of war and MMB
+(the conversation with Somni is relevant)
+12 Feb: "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian"
+23 Feb: connection with Iceman
+23 Feb: discussion on meaning of "zero-sum"
+25 Feb: I'm still talking about finishing writing a memoir
+28 Feb: "belief check" conversation with Jessica on origin of trans ideology
+3 Mar: Scott's new COVID-19 post is great on the "shared maps" issue! https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/ in contrast to how last month he was acting like he didn't understand the problem https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/#comment-847143 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to/comment/mHrHTvzg8MGNH2CwB
+4 Mar: niche skill of being able to translate between high-church Yudkowskyism and Vassarian moonspeak
+9-10 Mar: talk to Mom/Nicole about COVID prep
+22 Mar: ping Jack for social call ("You seem a lot more vicious than the sixteen-or-whatever-year-old I remember meeting at a Less Wrong meetup back in '13-or-whatever, but it looks adaptive")
+31 Mar: I'm skeptical of Eli as a mediator between me and Anna
+"Human Diversity" review published
+I've discovered that you can just stop being scared of things and then nothing bad happens. All swans are white! There are no other swans!
+24 May: Jessica on high-precision claims
+24 May: Anna seems to be regaining power of speech (Facebook post on U.S. decline)
+2 Jun: I send an email to Cade Metz, who DMed me on Twitter
+25 Jul: rubber-duck philosophy for "Unnatural Categories"!!
+4 Sep: misguided by the hideousness of our weapons?! or, theory of universal algorithmic bad faith
+runaround argument about free speech that never gets anywhere, possibly because of a bug on my end
+in principle, "What if telling the truth about X has bad consequences?" is an empirical question that could be asked in good faith and, having been asked in good faith, deserves a good-faith answer
+in principle, I don't believe people are asking it in good faith; I think it's a weapon of psychological warfare
+our most recent Less Wrong exchange. I characterized you as being on "Team Seek Power For The Greater Good". You explained why that's not a fair characterization. I explained why selectively omitting evidence is a problem. You explained that you only advocate omitting things that will make the audience respond irrationally, not omitting everything that would be inconvenient to the case.
+I don't think that thread was a good showing for me: if we apply the principle of charity to my behavior, we would say I was a bit slow on the uptake, forcing a four-comment thread to restate things that had already been covered previously.
+I'm better modeled as trying to humiliate him or waste his time
+... I still don't understand how to engage with it
+"I'm curious what evidence changed your mind" is still a counter-weapon
+13 Sep: out of patience
+13 Sep: me to Anna—focusing on my email to Yudkowsky is more important than entering the Facebook comments
+Anna asks me to be calm, high in denotation
+14 Sep: the end of the Category War
+suspect Ben will be sad that I'm "bought off", but I think not being at war makes it easier for me to do clarity-creation, in the spirit of "Here's what the thing is actually doing" rather than "flames on the side of my face"
+21 Sep: me to Don Fallis—the argument over whether merely withholding information is deception reminds me of arguments over distortion: it's not surprising that the answer takes the form "it depends on the zero point" rather than "Extoriton: Yes or No"
+25 Sep: anticipating that people are going to (not entirely inaccurately?! :'( ) round off everything I say as being backchained from my gender war, which makes the fact that Ziz totally agrees with us (about the Bay eating our culture and our people) very reassuring https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-897
+still this urge to prevent the old beacon from eating people who don't know what it's doing
+maybe my razzing him about the Human Compatible review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/#comment-847143) was causal in his COVID shared maps thing—maybe this entire line of thinking is still poison: thinking about my effects on Scott in particular (as if he were special, which he's not)
+3 Oct: Do the smart-leftists feel contempt for all the retarded children, or do they just not-notice them as being worth paying attention to (the way I seamlessly don't-notice ordinary Trump voters)?
+1 Nov: knowledge boostrapping with EvN
+4 Nov: destructive creature Olympics
+25 Nov: me to Michael—I think your reputation (in the jungle growing around the ruins of what we once called the "rationalist community") has some amount of instrumental value
+25 Nov: "No reputation in the jungle" meaning that people are just going to praise or throw you to the wolves depending on the expediency of the moment's shifting alliances, rather than there being any way to gain or retain standing for being Actually Good?
+25 Nov: notes from conversation with Michael
+in lawful environments, your reputation is by default true
+in lawless environments, bad rep just means you're important enough to have enemies, which is good
+It's easy to move the conversation from what is going on to whose side are you on.
+There's a game of trying to build the largest coalition: previously, it was the European coalition, now the not-European coalition is ascendant. [ZMD's note: this reminds me of both NRx's https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/ and Ben's http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/] We want to carve out a space for reason within the winning coalition.
+Reason is the motte and pragmatism is the bailey
+the officers vs. the enlisted; the enlisted claim to recommend the common people, the officers claim to represent the rich; both sides totally fake ideas
+Ziz is that least plausibly a girl of all trans girls, but by declaring a protected identity and having wealth, can just barely survive.
+my objection: but, but as part of the whole "Truth instead of expedient lies" part of rationality, don't we at least want Ziz to know that?!
+ I can operate for short periods in territory in which I only have the option of being a (closeted) trans woman—as an energy-minimizing play, to inhabit someone else's stereotype—but I can't live there, because that story makes no fucking sense
+Trauma is expecting coordination for evil to win, and causes you to be part of that coordination in a way that's minimally ego-dystonic.
+Surprise minimization means doing what you think that that they think that ... a free-energy constaint. If you're given a lot of "responsibility", you have to behave in a way that fulfills expectations, and eventually the only thing left is being bad in a stereotyped way that everyone knows how to expect—the type of conspiracy you can only get out of physics.
+By defying people's stereotypes, Shawanna imposes enormously large costs on cynical do-gooders, so they equalize the energy differential by imposing pragmatic costs on her.
+surpised that Ziz can't get a lawyer despite having money
+14 Dec: destructive creature Olympic, cont'd: It's great to have common knowledge of the mutual ability to interpret conditional statements literally! (Not something you can always depend on these days.)
+if Kelsey wrote her own 10,600 draft Document [...] that would be really interesting! [...] no one else seemed interested in having a theory, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+I don't think the 19th-century Chinese who bound their daughters' feet, or the 18th-century Italians who castrated little boys to perserve their singing voice were innately less empathetic than us [...] How will history analyze the moral culture of 21st-century Californians?
+17 Dec: But parts of it felt like concern trolling as a cult-recruitment tactic? In caricature: "Your writing and research doesn't matter because there's no living audience out there; you can only talk to us." You can see why Dagny Taggart would perceive that as hostile?
+--- psych care disaster
+21 Dec: me to Anna—you either didn't hide it, or I noticed anyway. But if other people in the care coordination group had seized on that to turn against you and paint you (to me) as dangerous, that would have been bad for me (independently of whether or not it would have been fair to you), because the fact that you were there was vastly more helpful, than the fact that you didn't want to be there was unhelpful
+2 Jan 21: super-weird unsolicited mental/physical health email about blood sugar and sleep
+4 Jan: sleep strategy notes
+7 Jan: I've been distracted by the news (I told Anna that Wednesday was a scary news day—referring, of course, to OpenAI DALL-E
+Feb: New York Times hit piece on Scott
+18 Feb: my "incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving" reaction to Yudkowsky on Scott email leak
+22 Feb: Technically, he started it this time! I totally would have left him alone if he didn't kick the shitpile again!
+dude can't really expect to get away with pulling out the pompous-register "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol" in that context; that's _my_ line
+27 Feb: me to Marcus—Everyone who's read Scott's work deeply is completely unsurprised by the content of the leaked email
+28 Feb: "Are you trying to convince him, yourself or those watching?" Those watching, plus testing my acquired immunity to pompous-register Yudsplaining (which I used to psychologically vulnerable to, because in 2009, it was always right)
+28 Mar: block warning
+9 May 21: trapped priors—at home!
+ I think the effort asymmetry here is kind of hilarious, where it's not that hyperbolic to say I spent three years of my life (early 2018–early 2021) trying undo the cultural brain damage from that one post.
+when I talk to AI researchers like Abram Demski or John Wentworth, they get it instantly ...
+7 Jun: dolphin war
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402067999977132035
+9 Jun: I want to use the phrase "all-out nuclear war with MIRI", but that's just another expression of anger
+23 Jun: I am introduced to Slay the Spire
+28 Jun:
+> I hope you find a way to let go of your war.
+You know, this is awfully condescending! You wouldn't tell a transgender person who was transitioning, "I hope you find a way to let go of this."
+But when I, who no one even seems to doubt has the same underlying psychological condition (long story—I recently finished a 16,000-word essay explaining my thing), put in years of effort to counter what I'm claiming is disinformation about the counterintuitive true nature of underlying psychological condition, I get told to drop it. Why the double standard? If [...] feelings count, why don't mine?
+4 Jul: Independence Day party
+feeling scared about the Singularity
+6 Sep: final Twitter showdown
+2 Nov: It's a black mark, but let's be quantitative: the guy helped me a huge amount in 2017-2019 (long, separate story) for reasons that made sense to him, and he also hurt me a decently large amount in December 2020 for reasons that made sense to him. These things can both be true at the same time!
+13 Jan 22: blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?
> When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
-Eliezer, I've spent my entire adult life in the subculture you created. You created me. Everything I'm doing now, I learned from you. I've put in a lot of effort—along with Ben and Michael and Sarah and Zvi and now Jessica—trying to explain that there's a collective sanity problem that we could really use your help with. (You should see the strategy email threads we've been having behind your back!) I don't understand how repeating that people live in different mental universes is a relevant response to our thousands of words of careful arguments?
+Eliezer, I've spent my entire adult life in the subculture you created. You created me. Everything I'm doing now, I learned from you. I've put in a lot of effort—along with Ben and Michael and Sarah and [...] and now Jessica—trying to explain that there's a collective sanity problem that we could really use your help with. (You should see the strategy email threads we've been having behind your back!) I don't understand how repeating that people live in different mental universes is a relevant response to our thousands of words of careful arguments?
I'm pretty sure everyone here is strongly in favor of Jessica's existence. But maybe, if someone thinks really carefully about it, there could be some way to protect Jessica's interests without destroying the faculty of language?! (Especially given that Jessica herself may have interests in being able to talk.)
Michael—
-> My guess is that at this point Zack and Ben should both sign off actually, and maybe Sarah as well, and that this should become a conversation between Eliezer and Jessica, Zvi, myself, and other people who have or have historically had strong MIRI affiliations and have paid serious attention to logical decision theories. Maybe we should bring in Wei Dai, since along with Eliezer, he created logical decision theory, so in so far as there's a natural heir to the Caliphate other than Eliezer it's him. At this point, I think that if this doesn't resolve with Eliezer backing down I am pretty much obligated to involve everyone who I believe has historically taken seriously Eliezer's claims of strong principles against lying. Among other things, I think that it's clear that without standing on such a moral bedrock, Eliezer is no longer claiming to be the spiritual leader of the Caliphate (intuitively, that title passes to me?), and that the secular leader of the AI Risk Caliphate has been Demis for many years now.
+> My guess is that at this point Zack and Ben should both sign off actually, and maybe Sarah as well, and that this should become a conversation between Eliezer and Jessica, [...] myself, and other people who have or have historically had strong MIRI affiliations and have paid serious attention to logical decision theories. Maybe we should bring in Wei Dai, since along with Eliezer, he created logical decision theory, so in so far as there's a natural heir to the Caliphate other than Eliezer it's him. At this point, I think that if this doesn't resolve with Eliezer backing down I am pretty much obligated to involve everyone who I believe has historically taken seriously Eliezer's claims of strong principles against lying. Among other things, I think that it's clear that without standing on such a moral bedrock, Eliezer is no longer claiming to be the spiritual leader of the Caliphate (intuitively, that title passes to me?), and that the secular leader of the AI Risk Caliphate has been Demis for many years now.
> Sarah, don't worry, this definitely doesn't imply involving shit-heads who want to carpet-bomb us. It might involve explicitly discussing the pros and cons of involving leftist shit-heads as part of motivating Eliezer (and/or Scott) and I think that we should try to become psychologically immune to their carpet-bombing in any event, but there may be good reasons for Sarah to remain economically coupled to their good-will, since of all of us she's the only one who may stand to receive resources from the Corporate Center-Left Coalition or to direct their resources. It does seem to me that technically, in so far as their attacks are harmless to those not seeking privilege, leftist shit-heads are Guided by the Goodness of their Weapons, and working out whether this is in fact true may be related to the logical decision theory that will enable us to integrate political threats with compassionate rational engagement and bring Eliezer and Scott back from the team of deception and privilege.
Michael—
> I don't think that we should be permanently giving up on people, but I do think that we should be regarding them as temporarily without the appeal to rights in relationship to ourselves. Varelse in Orson Scott Card speak.
-> I think that it was extremely worth our time to engage at this level of detail, and at an even greater level of detail in order to achieve common knowledge, as I don't think that we have achieved common knowledge*yet* if Zvi still thinks that we shouldn't confidently act on the assumption that Eliezer is not doing useful things unobserved.
+> I think that it was extremely worth our time to engage at this level of detail, and at an even greater level of detail in order to achieve common knowledge, as I don't think that we have achieved common knowledge*yet* if [...] still thinks that we shouldn't confidently act on the assumption that Eliezer is not doing useful things unobserved.
> I would defend engagement with Eliezer for as long as we did in the past and in several future cases if we had several future relationships that seemed comparably valuable to the one we were hoping for, e.g. with a reformed Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I think that it's important that we be clear in our own minds that as of now there should be no presumptive loyalty to Eliezer over, for instance, Demis who is the Schelling Point for leader for an AI Risk coalition not Guided by the Goodness of it's Weapons.
(zero-sum actors, e.g. neo nazis, are going to be pushing in various ways that make it easier to push along in their direction than it would if it were just you).
-I think this is how the political factions end up being "protect minorities and be incoherent" and "harm minorities and be locally coherent". Different respectability/violence tradeoffs (to get a mix of zero sum and non zero sum energy). And these define the Overton window, whereas many other Overton windows could be drawn instead.
+> I think this is how the political factions end up being "protect minorities and be incoherent" and "harm minorities and be locally coherent". Different respectability/violence tradeoffs (to get a mix of zero sum and non zero sum energy). And these define the Overton window, whereas many other Overton windows could be drawn instead.
+
+In the possible world where the parameters of male sexual psychology are such that autogynephilia doesn't exist "but everything else is the same", then I don't think you get the kind and scope of trans-activism movement that Saotome-Westlake's and Adams-Miller's writing is a reaction to. In this world, you still get Judith Butler (AFAB, Gender Trouble published 1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (AFAB, Sexing the Body published 2000), but I think you don't get pronoun stickers at conferences in 2018 and you don't get a "three-year-old [...] is a girl now; she verbally confirmed it!" social-reality enforcement campaign in 2020.
+
+To your second question, it might actually depend on how you operationalize "influence"! Notably, the campaign to trans MMB (whose parents met on lesswrong.com) is being run predominantly by AFAB people; they're just combatants in the service of an ideology that I don't think would have been so memetically fit if it weren't such a convenient accommodation for AGP. (At least, that's my theory under the doctrine of "algorithmic intent"; the people involved don't think of themselves as combatants in the service of anything.)
+
+
+I think your reputation (in the jungle growing around the ruins of what we once called the "rationalist community") has some amount of instrumental value: most of why you were so useful to me during the Category War when everyone I trusted was fucking with me, is that I was leaning on you for internal social proof ("Michael thinks it makes sense that I'm murderously angry about this, and that makes me feel brave enough to keep harrassing Scott and Eliezer instead of quietly committing mind-suicide"), but that only worked because I had a cached reputation of you as one of the Old-Time Rationalist Elders. It seems unfortunate that you don't have the asset of that reputation anymore among today's jungle-dwellers.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff