14 Mar: meeting with Ben/Sarah/Marie/Jessica; Ben assist on "Blegg Mode"
17 Mar: me to Scott, bringing up idea that in-person ideas were better
17 Mar: Michael characterizing EY as choosing to be a cult leader
-18 Mar: starting to overheat (subject: "strategy huddle II")
+18 Mar: starting to overheat (subject: "strategy huddle II")—
+I referred to Sarah and Ben at Sunday conversation saying in-person meetings were better
+Scott says "I try to avoid in-person meetings in general, and this is probably in my bottom 1% of things that I would enjoy talking about in person"
+I write to my team wondering if I should propose a $4000 happy price
+then I say, maybe don't reply before Friday
+6 p.m.: really angry at Scott for not understanding the difference between cluster in a value-dependent subspace (as with the dagim/fish example), and value-dependent to not make my friends sad. But my boss was expecting code by noon tomorrow
+7 p.m.: let go of the anger somehow and just do my job this week and then write up the mathy version
+8:44 p.m.: fantasizing about recruiting Buck or Duncan to our coalition; never sure how to interpret my self-reports; even when crying, shaking, randomly yelling, &c. I think I'm still noticeably incentivizable: I think that if someone were to present a credible threat (e.g., slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be tolerated
+10:27 p.m.: I tweeted a Sequences quote that summarizes how I'm feeling (mention is to attribute credit; Eliezer has so many followers that he probably won't even see the mention notification), except it's not quite appropriate, because the quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I was taught are great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just can't cope with everyone else having forgotten!
+11:01 p.m.: OK, the dayjob situation is really bad right now (it's almost 2300), so let's try one of those commitment-contract things. I hereby pledge not to check my personal email, Facebook, or Twitter until 1700 Pacific Daylight time on Friday the twenty-second of March. (I have an /etc/hosts manipulation script and I can turn off my home computer to help.) If I fail in this pledge, then ... um, I'm having trouble thinking of a good incentive here. (Traditionally you use money, but unfortunately, I'm only 78% Ashkenazi and my brain doesn't believe money is real.) So, um, "or else"!
+2:47-3:55 a.m.: some replies from Michael
+4:01 a.m.: I got the unit test passing; why do I keeping lying about email hiatus?
+4:15 a.m.: "predictably bad ideas" email to Anna/Michael/Ben/Sarah/Zvi/Scott/Alicorn/Mike
-
-> A deluge of nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat, or at least a marginalization threat. The game is that the nitpicks force you to choose between infinite interpretive labor, and "never answered these construed-as-reasonable objections" (in which case you lose standing to make the claim, and if people call you on that, they get to start talking about you as a bad rationalist, likely think of you as unreasonable, stop inviting you to things, etc.).
-> It's a bit less direct than how "this is crazy talk" can be an implied imprisonment threat, but it's still strong (distributed) social aggression.
-
-
-> if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen
-(I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
-
-> Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
-
-to Sarah—
-> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
-
> 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.
> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
> I couldn't care less about transgender.
+Michael—
> I agree that he isn't, but it seems Important to me that if we think he isn't interested we actually establish common knowledge that we consider him at this point to be choosing to try to be a cult leader.
+
+
+I was kind of considering replying, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day."
+
+But, maybe I shouldn't do this because the "Volunteer to throw four-figure amounts of money at people in order to get them to hear me out" move is simultaneously personally degrading, psychologically coercive, extremely socially weird, and bad for my economic self-interest.
+
+https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/
+
+commit a5316c23ac837c004922e2d192c2bea914a21ebc
+Author: Zack M. Davis <zack@thecoalition.com>
+Date: Tue Mar 19 00:27:53 2019 -0700
+
+ DIS-327: broker-facing duplicate-quote route
+
+ It's sharing code with the internal resïssue-quote endpoint, because
+ that's convenient.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff