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.
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-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.
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.
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-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.
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-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."
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-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 ...
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-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,
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> 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!
I still feel sad and upset and gaslighted and I haven't done any dayjob work so far this week even though it's Tuesday afternoon. So, I feel motivated to send this email to communicate that I feel sad, even though this message is of questionable value to the recipients.
-"We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. Didn't we? And, and ... [_you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndYouWereThere), and _you_ were there ... It—really happened, right? I didn't just imagine it? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ..."
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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?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff