on deck—
-- § about privacy norms, and my secret research project (research report on gout)
-_ finish and polish § on reaching out a fourth time
-_ talk about the 2019 Christmas party
_ Let's recap
_ If he's reading this ...
_ Perhaps if the world were at stake
+_ ¶ about social justice and defying threats
_ ¶ about body odors
_ regrets and wasted time
+_ talk about the 2019 Christmas party
_ excerpt 2nd "out of patience" email
with internet available—
+_ Sarah Barellies cover links
+_ "watchful waiting"
+_ Atlantic article on "My Son Wears Dresses" https://archive.is/FJNII
_ in "especially galling" §: from "Changing Emotions"—"somehow it's always about sex when men are involved"—he even correctly pinpointing AGP in ordinary men (as was obvious back then), just without the part that AGP _is_ "trans"
_ "look at what ended up happening"—look up whether that exact quote from from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47 or https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
+_ Discord history with Scott (leading up to 2019 Christmas party, and deferring to Tailcalled on SSC survey question wording)
_ Gallileo "And yet it moves"
_ Discord logs before Austin retreat
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ "The Correct Contrarian Cluster" and race/IQ
_ taqiyya
_ refusing to give a probability (When Not to Use Probabilities? Shut Up and Do the Impossible?)
+_ retrieve comment on pseudo-lies post in which he says its OK for me to comment even though
far editing tier—
+_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
_ context of his claim to not be taking a stand
_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
_ explain "court ruling" earlier
_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ first appearance of "Caliphate"
_ explain the adversarial pressure on privacy norms
_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ explain first use of "rationalist"
-_ explain first use of Center for Applied Rationality
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
_ when to use first _vs. last names
_ January 2019 meeting with Ziz and Gwen
_ better summary of Littman
_ explain Rob
-_ explain or omit first mention of "egregore"
+_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
+
+
+terms to explain on first mention—
+_ "Caliphate"
+_ "rationalist"
+_ Center for Applied Rationality
+_ MIRI
+_ "egregore"
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
+Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
+
+
+(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):
+
+
Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
-... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal. But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that
+
+
+Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal.
+
+
+But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's
]
-Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance, really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance,
+
+really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
-Because of my hero worship, "he's being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives" wasn't in my hypothesis space; I _had_ to assume the thread was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, rather than (what it actually was, what it _obviously_ actually was) hostile political action.
+Because of my hero worship,
> People probably change their mind more often than they explicitly concede arguments, which is fine because intellectual progress is more important than people who were wrong performing submission.
I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democrat—not just about the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole _thing_ of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was sympathetic.
-[TODO: paraphrase remaining interaction with Scott, or not worth the space?
-
-> I don't have a simple, mistake-theoretic characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I can do is try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of conflicts over possible conventions.
-
helping Norton live in the real world
Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus."; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious
Michael on EA suppressing credible criticism https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1559534045914177538
-"epistemic hero"
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-
zinger from 93—
> who present "this empirical claim is inconsistent with the basic tenets of my philosophy" as an argument against the _claim_
> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
]
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
I'm totally still doing this
> it's that it's hard to get that innocence back, once you even start thinking about whether you're _independent_ of someone
-
If Scott's willing to link to A. Marinos, maybe he'd link to my memoir, too? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242
My reaction to Marinos is probably similar to a lot of people's reaction to me: geez, putting in so much effort to correct Scott's mistake is lame, what a loser, who cares
+This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
+> journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
--------
----
-comment on pseudo-lies post in which he says its OK for me to comment even though
+
bitter comments about rationalists—
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
+"epistemic hero"
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
+
+ [TODO: asking Anna to weigh in] (I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my recent habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
+
+https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
+> changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money
+
+when I talked to the Kaiser psychiatrist in January 2021, he said that the drugs that they gave me in 2017 were Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg, which actually seems a lot more reasonable in retrospect (Trazadone is on Scott's insomnia list), but it was a lot scarier in the context of not trusting the authorities
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff