Elena—
"the original thing that already exists without having to try" sounds fake to me
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+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_?
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+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WA95Anng7UZZEjqYv2aWC4LxZJU7KPvcRnxkTdmNJpH4PoQQgEFtqszPbCiCnqfil?comment_id=10159410429909228
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+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?)
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+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.)
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+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.)
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+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!
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+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!!
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+> 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.
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+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.)
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+> 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.
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+> 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.)
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+> 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.
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+> 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.
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+> 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).
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