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
15 Apr: me—concern about bad faith nitpicking, Jessica says I'm not
15 Apr: Jessica's comment, the lesson of Funk-tunul
15 Apr: trying to recruit Steven Kaas
+15 Apr: Signal conversation with Ben—
+I'm having some ideas on how I could write my post about disillusionment with the rationalists well still not being too hostile and not leaking info from private conversations
+
+> Yeah, I think the right target to keep in mind is people like you a few years ago who haven't yet had the experiences you've had
+> So they don't actually have to freak out to the point of being imprisoned and then demand help from community leaders and not get it, they can just learn from you
+> Like, the actual sympathetic-but-naive people
+> Not the people fucking with you
+
+[...]
+
+people also deserve credit for the help they did give me (care resources from Alicorn et al.) even if I don't think there intellectual performance was good enough to deserve the Mandate of Heaven implied by the "rationalist" brand name
+
+> Yes, but we need to keep separate accounts for _personal_ gratitude, and institutional fraud
+> Like, I think that if somehow Alicorn gets hurt by the Rationalists dissolving, and we're in a position to help her, we should try to help in any way that _doesn't_ work via continuing to validate the collective narcissistic fantasy that the Rationalists are a thing
+> Insofar as that makes things hard, we have to think of it as a hostage situations
+> But, it's not obvious that this imposes undue costs on the individuals that have helped you a lot, except maybe Anna
+[...]
+> And, _not_ doing this is imposing costs on people like Michael (and all of humanity) instead, which is a lot less fair than harming Anna's interests incidentally by breaking up a scam she's drawing power from
+
+[...]
+should I just reread you posts about EA, or is there more?
+
+> People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done.
+[...]
+
+> These both seem like evidence that CFAR and MIRI see themselves as building an army, not a truth-seeking intellectual community.
+[...]
+
+> This isn't about direct benefit vs harm
+> This is about what, substantively, they're doing
+> And they claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community while in fact building an army of loyalists
+
+[...]
+
+last night I was up until 2 a.m. and wrote Anna two paper postscards asking for her to engage with my "... Boundaries?" post when she ahs time and to give me an estimate of when she might have time [...] I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards is more polite (and funnier) than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails
+
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.
15 Sep: Yudkowsky will say, "Whoops, I said the wrong thing" re his interaction with Glen Weyl, which seems more proportional to Weyl's power rather than the magnitude of the offense https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164275185622507520
16 Sep: SK: "I think there's a gradient where sanity is mostly flowing from core people outward toward non-core people."
me—That's what I would have thought, too! I consider this falsified [...] twenty-thousand-word, five-month extraordinary effort [...] The gradient is running in the other direction!
+
+19/20 Sep: Signal conversation with Ben—
+> Van Nostrand mentioned that Merlin has asked you why you're a boy, an dwe're curious what you're answer was now
+... I stonewalled him because of my political incentives :'( (semi-consciously mishead the question as "Are you ab boy?" and said "Yes" after a long pause)
+I would have preferred a straightforward honest answer like, "Because I have a penis, like you", but that answer felt inappropriately "political", speech I want to avoid in that house (which is an insane situation to be in, but)
+
21 Sep: Being widely taken seriously is important if the plan is to lobby Congress to pass Safe AI regulation. Being able to add 6 + 7 is important if the plan is to make unprecedented scientific breakthroughs. Remind me what the plan is?
22 Sep: There are also forces pulling in the direction of not selling out your principles for power and popularity, if there exist valuable people who care about principles. [..] If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
24 Sep: "Heads I Win" was really successful; reasons why you might think this is good besides measuring idea quality democratically
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?
-
+---END
> 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.
But have you fucking tried trying to talk about biological sex with Berkeley psuedo-rationalists? They won't fucking acknowledge it.
-I said, "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."
+I said,
+
-Kelsey said, "[T]he people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
Elena said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" ... and gets 4 "+1" emoji.
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
+
+
+I agree that the "SneerClub et al. hates us because they're evil bullies" hypothesis has a grain of truth to it, but stopping the analysis there seems ... _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_?
+
+
+------
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WA95Anng7UZZEjqYv2aWC4LxZJU7KPvcRnxkTdmNJpH4PoQQgEFtqszPbCiCnqfil?comment_id=10159410429909228
+
+If you listen to why _they_ say they hate us, it's because we're racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seems to trend towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the LW/SSC serveys, &c.); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds." (Fair paraphrase?)
+
+But ... the smears have a grain of truth to them, right? If "sexism" means "it's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world", the "SSC et al. are crypto-sexists" charge is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/.../contra-grant-on.../). (Crypto-racist, crypto-fascist, &c. are left as an exercise to the reader.)
+
+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism", but that's only convincing if you've _already_ been trained in the "use empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes" tradition; the people with a California-public-school-social-studies-plus-Tumblr education don't already _know_ that. (Source: I didn't know this at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't have Tumblr then.)
+
+In that light ... can you see why someone might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests"? The "debate ideas, not people" thing is a specific meta-ideological innovation, not baseline human morality!
+
+If our _actual_ problem is "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time (https://www.lesswrong.com/.../heads-i-win-tails-never...)", but we _think_ our problem is "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we're in trouble!!
+
+
+> We also have an inevitable Kolmogorov Option issue but that should not be confused with the inevitable Evil Bullies issue, even if bullies attack through Kolmogorov Option issues.
+
+Being transparent about the game theory I see: intuitively, it seems like I have a selfish incentive to "support" the bullies (by publicly pointing out that they have a point, as above) insofar as I'm directly personally harmed by my social network following a Kolmogorov Option strategy rather than an open-dissidence Free Speech for Shared Maps strategy, and more bullying might cause the network to switch strategies on "may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" grounds? Maybe I should explain this so people have a chance to talk me out of it?
+... hm, acutally, when I try to formalize this with the simplest possible toy model, it doesn't work (the "may as well be hung ..." effect doesn't happen given the modeling assumptions I just made up). I was going to say: our team chooses a self-censorship parameter c from 0 to 10, and faces a bullying level b from 0 to 10. b is actually b(c, p), a function of self-censorship and publicity p (also from 0 to 10). The team leaders' utility function is U(c, b) := -(c + b) (bullying and self-censorship are both bad). Suppose the bullying level is b := 10 - c + p (self-censorship decreases bullying, and publicity increases it).
+My thought was: a disgruntled team-member might want to increase p in order to induce the leaders to choose a smaller value of c. But when I do the algebra, -(c + b) = -(c + (10 - c + p)) = -c - 10 + c - p = -10 - p. (Which doesn't depend on c, seemingly implying that more publicity is just bad for the leaders without changing their choice of c? But I should really be doing my dayjob now instead of figuring out if I made a mistake in this Facebook comment.)
+
+
+
+
+> Eliezer is not a private person - he's a public figure. He set in motion a machine that continues to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on moral authority claims centered around his ability to be almost uniquely sane and therefore benevolent. (In some cases indirectly through his ability to cause others to be the same.) "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically.
+
+> If this is TRUE (and also not a threat to destroy the world), then it's important to say, and to actually extract that work. But if not, then it's abuse! (Even if we want to be cautious about using emotionally loaded terms like that in public.)
+
+> We've falsified to our satisfaction the hypothesis that Eliezer is currently sane in the relevant way (which is an extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Eliezer in the current environment). This should also falsify the hypothesis that the sanity-maintenance mechanisms Eliezer set up work as advertised.
+
+> The machine he built to extract money, attention, and labor is still working, though, and claiming to be sane in part based on his prior advertisements, which it continues to promote. If Eliezer can't be bothered to withdraw his validation, then we get to talk about what we think is going on, clearly, in ways that aren't considerate of his feelings. He doesn't get to draw a boundary that prevents us from telling other people things about MIRI and him that we rationally and sincerely believe to be true.
+
+> The fact that we magnanimously offered to settle this via private discussions with Eliezer doesn't give him an extra right to draw boundaries afterwards. We didn't agree to that. Attempting to settle doesn't forfeit the right to sue. Attempting to work out your differences with someone 1:1 doesn't forfeit your right to complain later if you were unable to arrive at a satisfactory deal (so long as you didn't pretend to do so).
\ No newline at end of file
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff