16 Jan: Ben to me/Anna on old thread: esotericism is less of a problem if flagged
18 Jan: gender refugees, moral patiency, and BBL
29 Jan: me to Kay Brown: have you noticed LGBTQ/queer culture getting worse?
+7 Feb: Messenger with "Wilhelm" about Rust All-Hands
8 Feb: me to Katie about Rust All-Hands
8 Feb: me to Ben and Michael about social competence
20 Feb: impulsive email to Scott (subject: a howl of despair which is nameless)
3 Mar: more draft, more thanks for social proof
5 Mar: Scott gets back to me
5 Mar: 12 short stories about language (and, expressing regret that I only email Scott when I need something from him)
+6 Mar: to "Wilhelm" about anti-trans complaints against Anna
6 Mar: SJWs without guns doing this than you are about mostly white men with money, gavels and guns doing it? ... SJW agenda is to play by the same rules as the legal system plays by, and they do it with less support from tradition and from ritual, so it's more obvious,
6 Mar: much better draft to EY (defending against alt-right)
10 Mar: send revised draft to EY
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.
\ No newline at end of file
+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.
+
+
+-----
+
+7 Feb conversation with "Wilhelm" about Rust All-Hands
+
+M. showed people this funny Tweet on his phone: https://twitter.com/reduct_rs/status/1093599017303457793 and my uncontrolled facial expression was probably one of annoyance rather than mirth
+ReductRs on Twitter
+
+https://twitter.com/reduct_rs/status/1093599017303457793
+> Man Who Finds ‘They’ Pronouns Confusing Has No Problem Calling His Computer "She"
+
+You sent
+I don't know if he noticed; it's not like he was testing me for facecrime; showing ppl funny Tweets on your phone is just what everyone does. But maybe the little moments add up?
+You sent
+I lamented that the karoke machine didn't have the background lyrics for the part of "Prince Ali" where the women are fawing over Aladdin, and wokebro said that now that he thinks of it, the song is problematic, and I said, jovially, "It was 1992; it was a different time"
+You sent
+Obviously, no one is going to throw a fit over me casually defending the Disney films of my youth; that's not purity test material. But maybe the little moments add up, as people gradually get a read of who's sending what signals
+
+oh, I guess there was also a moment where I told the wife, "You're our only female vocalist; you should make sure to sing the 'Hope he doesn't see right through me' line in 'Be a Man' from Mulan", which I thought was an obviously innocuous/relevant comment (it was in fact the case that no one else had the voice for that part), I could imagine someone having a negative micro-reaction on the grounds that I was being exclusionary by calling attention to her sex, or because of counterfactual transphobia (I wouldn't have said that if there was also a trans woman in the room, which maybe makes it a bad thing to say even if there wasn't??)
+You sent
+that's sheer speculation; I don't know how the 2019 algorithm works; I haven't been downloading patches since 2009
+
+except, oops, I'm unironically guilty of sexism by referring to the woman as one of the dev's wife, when she's a Site Engineer at GitHub in her own right and therefore deserves one-of-us Hacker status even if she hasn't been working with Rust specifically
+You sent
+you, at least, will forgive me
+
+-----
+
+to Wilhelm 6 Mar 2019
+
+so much stupid drama among the "rationalists"
+You sent
+two non-passing MtFs are kicking up a fuss about my friend Anna allegedly discriminating against trans women, and people are taking this seriously
+You sent
+in contrast to my view (speaking only for myself; Anna is totally innocent) that statistically "discriminating" (i.e., using Bayesian reasoning) against trans women when hiring for a rationality org is just straightforwardly CORRECT
+
+
+at least men's and women's bodies will make similar numbers of paperclips
+You sent
+where "similar" means Cohen's d around 0.9
+
+8 Mar:
+
+watching television is different now that I have anti-prog antibodies
+
+on The Good Place (2016—), the neurotic philosophy professor character is black, and the idiot comic relief guy is Asian
+You sent
+I like Superstore (2015—) as a moderately-funny workplace comedy, but sometimes it veers into prog signaling in a way that just—isn't even well-done? (the most egregious one was when the disabled mulatto main-cast character is attracted to a woman at an anti-trans bathrooms protest, and is faced with the dilemma of, "She's hot, but her views are beyond the pale")
+
+Lauren Ash's character on Superstore is written in a behaviorally-masculine way that makes me swoon (in a world with magical body-swapping, AGPs would be this kind of woman), but Lauren Ash probably doesn't actually behave that way in real life
+
+[11 April:] Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992–1999) got preachy ... like, three episodes in a seven year run
+
+
+30 March
+> The cynicism may not be misplaced? The language of allyship is not a credible signal (in the language of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory) of actually being an ally if non-allies can translate their agenda into that language and are incentivized to do so.
+
+he Liked it; as if you can get away with explaining the game theory of Havel's greengrocer as long as you frame it as "some greengrocers are actually enemies of the people"
+You sent
+"even if they have the sign up"
+
+
+13 April
+
+> Another problem with the view that "how to draw category boundaries is based on subjective priorities" perspective is that it is solipsistic. Your priorities re the territory aren't something you can always dictate; sometimes the territory is dictating priorities to you, and you need to figure out the right categories to address this pressure.
+> For instance, if you are a fisherman, you may not care about whether a dolphin is a fish: you can catch both in nets. But if you are a dophin breeder, then dolphins being mammals matters a lot more.
+> In the case of dolphins, most people won't have to breed dolphins or house them, so they lack skin-in-the-game to care about the exact categorization of dolphins
+
+one possible failure mode of this marketing campaign is that people who saw the object-level culture war version "... To Make Predictions" will have an Absolute Denial Macro reaction, but people who see the meta-level version about dolphins will just be like "This is obvious; everyone already knows this, not worth upvoting or discussion"
+
+there's no way to win
+
+> Perhaps because they don't think they have skin-in-the-game
+
+EVERYONE has skin in the game of Bayesian epistemology!!!
+
+------
+
+Discord conversation 23 Jan 2019
+
+but I need the phrase "actual women" in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call "trans women" would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology
+
+Kelsey—
+what's wrong with 'cis women'?
+
+me—
+it's _pointlessly obfuscatory_
+in this particular context
+
+Kelsey—
+also, cis women get boob jobs all the time
+the people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want
+are mostly cis women
+cis women get labia reconstruction sometimes
+cis women get tummy tucks
+I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints
+
+Elena—
+"the original thing that already exists without having to try" sounds fake to me
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff