25 Feb: first draft of defending against "alt-right" categorization
27 Feb: more support from the gang
27-28 Feb: on private universes
+1 Mar: intra-group disagreement re "ambient epistemic violence"
+2 Mar: Michael—independence of perspectives vs. failure to present an united front
+2 Mar: I saw the new Rebel Wilson movie last night, went to Simon's birthday (I remember seeing Scott there), then met Anna
+2 Mar: Anna's comment about Michael
+3 Mar: "Apologies are always intrinsically worthless, but that fact that we are able to legitimately demand an apology means that we can legitimately demand that he look at something."
+3 Mar: I heard Anna say my desire for good arugments to win was "selfish"; what she actually said was "self-centered", "it seems less important than what happens on topics that we don't all know there isn't free speech about."
+3 Mar: "told them that the thing that would most help AI risk from them anyhow was for them to continue on their present career," is that if I try to only focus on "important" things, I'll probably just come up with something fake
+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: 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
+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")—
+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've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
-> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture."
-
-> So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
-
-> I want to emphasize this, because I don't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
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-> My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
-
> I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute
> Imagine your friends got a new front porch installed on your house, and you noticed that the boards were smoother and shinier than you expected. A question you might then ask your friend is, "Oh, is this real wood, or one of those wood-plastic composites?"
> I think that if Zack is having difficulties it would be ideal if we could move this ahead without him. Needless to say, he doesn't need to feel any responsibility and has done all that could be asked of him and more to cause this project to survive unanticipated difficulties. Right now, I don't think there's much help he can offer except for periodic pushes, like the current one, for the rest of us to keep at it.
+
+> On my model, it's good to send this because there are two possibilities
+> 1) that this demonstrates the independence of our perspectives, which causes them to count as additional evidence for a proposition, and that means that this makes us more convincing
+> 2) that this shows a lack of unity, a failure to present a United Front, which is bad, because Arguments are Soldiers, and thus we are making ourselves less convincing.
+> In the latter case, Eliezer is dead to us and it would probably help if we were to bury something in a funeral. In the former case, our friends are still in there, and the way to reach them isn't by balancing the social forces arrayed against them.
+
+I'm pretty sure I can directly link to Ozy and Kelsey speaking favorably of literal self-identity, not gating on hormones or social passability. And just ... I keep rereading this stuff trying to check that I'm not misreading, because I can't take it seriously. They're just fucking with me, right???? I don't harbor ill will against any individual people, but I just can't share a rationalist community with this level of mindfuckery.
+
+I mean, okay, if that's what you want to do. (If the outcome of these hopefully-not-too-annoying emails is that Eliezer Yudkowsky feels more social/political constraints on what he can say rather than less, then this horribly backfired and you should forget we said anything.)
+
+"How would you feel if someone else tried to get away with the 'hill of meaning in defense of validity' appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter against you when you were trying to use language to reason about something you actually cared about (like defending Scott, who is great)? If it would be logically rude in that context, maybe it was also logically rude the first time?"
+
+Michael
+> We have all been essentially trained to believe that we are not entitled to voice our complaints. When someone backs off, we are prone to loosing confidence and to think that maybe we shouldn't be talking with them, yet function institutions have existed in the past, and if people aren't adhering to the normal of functional institutions, we have to not allow that to cause us to stop adhering to those norms. Therefore, we should keep doubling down with reminders regarding the rules for discussion. If he decides to not play, we should establish that to ourselves with no plausible deniability and move on.
+
+
+ "An alternative categorization system is not an error", like all appeals-to-arbitrariness, is necessarily what you called a symmetric weapon: the same form of argument works just as well for being mean to our friends as it does for being nice to our friends. The best the good guys can hope for is to win by coincidence. (Assuming there's any way to distinguish who the "good guys" are, if alternative systems that draw the "good guys" category boundary differently aren't in error, assuming there's any way to distinguish what "winning" is, if alternative systems that draw the "winning" category boundary differently aren't in error, &c.)
+
+If someone showed up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that they had an invisible dragon, I would expect ordinary meetup attendees to exert social pushback against the dragon-claimant: "Dude, that doesn't make sense. Beliefs need to be falsifiable! You should read the Sequences!" I would even expect the social pushback to be strong enough such that the claimant would eventually either internalize the "Beliefs need to be falsifiable" idea or get the fuck out of my rationalist community.
+
+If I show up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that people don't have invisible genders, and I get social pushback ... then I'm not really sure what my options are other than writing off the entire community.
+
+
+
+I'm not extremely troubled by my minor disagreements with you. All the actually-smart high-status old-timers I've talked to (you, Eliezer, Anna, Michael Vassar, Sarah Constantin, Ben Hoffman, Steve Rayhawk, &c.) clearly see the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing I'm trying to point at. Even if you say it's mere awkwardness and not a serious epistemology problem, at least you acknowledge the awkwardness, which is more than I've gotten out of Kelsey.
+
+The thing I find extremely troubling is that none of the old-timers who clearly understand the thing are willing to say so loudly and in public where other people can learn from it, with the exceptions of Ben and Vassar—and Vassar's in-community status is getting debased. (Sarah drafted a post supporting me on the categories thing, but decided not to publish it.)
+
+You wrote about the "inevitable" forces pointing towards a future guided by the beauty of our weapons, where good arguments eventually win out over bad arguments. What if you were too optimistic? What if good arguments don't win—not even in the so-called "rationalist" community?
+
+I think "Categories should carve reality at the joints to help us make efficient probabilistic predictions" is a better argument than "Categories capture tradeoffs you care about; they don't have to carve reality at the joints if that makes people sad." Right now, the better argument is losing. Unless something changes, the better argument will continue to lose. In other words, we live in a world where reason doesn't work. If we live in a world where reason doesn't work, then we're dead. If we can't get consensus on easy problems (Q: Can men become women by means of saying so? A: No. Why would you think that?), then how are we supposed to solve AI alignment?
+
+
+
+> I don't know if you read the glowfic that Alicorn and Kelsey write. There was a scene in one of their LoTR things where some elves capture some orcs. They learn that the orcs are nice people deep down, evil god Melkor has forced the orcs to swear an oath to serve him and do evil all the time and kill people. And for complicated magic reasons, orcs cannot break oaths, or else they are tormented by unbearable pain. So even though the orcs are nice, they are compelled to serve Melkor, who usually wants them to kill people and stuff.
+
+> After a while, our hero comes up with a solution. She founds a religion on the spot devoted to a Deist-style omnipotent observer God, who just so happens to also be named Melkor. Deist-Melkor just wants people to live their lives and be happy and help others. She claims that the orcs did swear an oath to follow Melkor, but they didn't specify *which* Melkor, and since her Melkor is omnipotent he takes preference over evil-Melkor. The orcs (who are all kind of dumb, and also incentivized toward highly motivated reasoning) agree this makes sense, this seems to satisfy whatever magic enforces their oath, and so they go off and live their lives and be happy and help others.
+
+> Part of this story is that occasionally some people will approach the orcs and be like "This is kind of dumb, right, on some level you know you're supposed to be following evil Melkor", and this information is infohazardous to orcs and can put them in unbearable pain (or compel them to kill people and stuff) until they're able to talk themselves out of it.
+
+> I asked Alicorn whether this was an intentional metaphor for this discussion, since I know you've been talking to her about it. She says no. But it captures a lot of how I think about this. Are the *real rationalists!!!* the ones who go to the orcs and tell them that they obviously meant to serve evil Melkor and so should be in constant pain all the time? Are those the people who are """winning"""? Or would saying that just be pointlessly harming them for no reason?
+
+> 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