> 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).
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Ben—
> A description of the nitpicking as hostile and anti-epistemic can be correct and important even if mentioning that description is not the correct response for you.
-Among social-justice folks, "Trans women are women" gets you upvotes and "'Trans women' are men" gets you ostracized. Among so-called 'rationalists', "Trans women can be defined as women with no negative consequences" gets you upvotes, and "Look, I'm not going to misgender anyone to their face, but trans women are biologically male in the sense that many observations about them are better modeled as being drawn from the male distribution rather than the female distribution" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—bullshit nitpicking. (What about complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? &c. ad infinitum.)
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-With enough time, I think the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (The ones that can't are presumably fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks!) But while I'm in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hope you can see why I feel somewhat gaslighted and geniunely emotionally distressed—to the point of being hospitalized last year, you'll recall.
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-(I've been told that I'm not using the word "gaslighting" correctly. Somehow no one seems to think I have the right to define that category boundary however I want.)
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?"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff