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
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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff