+editing tier—
+_ better explanation of posse formation
+_ Emperor Norton ordered Hayes executed
+_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
+_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
+_ the right way to explain how I'm respecting Yudkowsky's privacy
+_ clarify sequence of outreach attempts
+_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
+_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow
+_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
+_ Discord discourse with Alicorner
+_ screenshot Rob's Facebook comment which I link
+_ explain first use of Center for Applied Rationality
+_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
+_ Anna thought badmouthing Michael was OK by Michael's standards
+
+people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
+_ Iceman
+_ Ben/Jessica
+_ Scott
+_ Anna
+_ secret posse member
+_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader
+(probably don't bother with Michael?)
+
+
+-------
+
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
It worked once, right?
-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
-
> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
+https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568
+> Because it was you, I tried to read this when it came out. But you do not know how to come to a point, because you are too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with you if you don't write even more first; so then I started skimming, and then I gave up.
+
> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
> The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious.
That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorization—actually, I'm going to bite the bullet here; "Eurasian" is actually fine as a paraphyletic category (and @CovfefeAnon uses it productively)
-And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity.
-
-[For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
-
-> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
-
-Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of HRT does not take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
-
-Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
-
-But the _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different.
-
-[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
-
-The "multivariate" part is important, because
-
-Different traits have different relevance to different sports; the fact that it's apples-to-oranges is _why_ women do better in ultraswimming—that competition is sampling a corner of sportspace where body fat is an advantage
+And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"),
-It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average
-
-It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight"
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
-If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in almost all sports, with some exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/)).
-
-]
-
-Given the empirical reality of the different multivariate trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine.
-
-(Similarly, when conducting [automobile races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_racing), you want there to be rules enforcing that all competitors have the same type of car for some common-sense-reasonable operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.)
-
-Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
-
-[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
-
-[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
-https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
-https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
-]
-
-[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's feats occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
-https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
-https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
-https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
-https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/
-]
-In light of these _empirical_ observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions".
-Yudkowsky's pretension to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions isn't credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
-
-(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-[The claim that the "Hill of Validity" thread wasn't partisan, but was just neutrally trying to teach the difference between facts and policy decisions is not credible. Imagine if someone was complaining about being required to say "Peace Be Upon Him" before referencing the prophet Muhammad. "It's a speech act, there's nothing factually false about saying 'peace be unto him'"]
+[The claim that the "Hill of Validity" thread wasn't partisan, but was just neutrally trying to teach the difference between facts and policy decisions is not credible.
+
+Imagine if someone was complaining about being required to say "Peace Be Upon Him" before referencing the prophet Muhammad. "It's a speech act, there's nothing factually false about saying 'peace be unto him'"]
unremediatedgender.space/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/
+
+-----
+
+comments to "Wilhelm", January 2019—
+
+I got concessions on all the important parts (categories should make predictions, trans women differ from cis women in a masc direction), and these people just don't fucking CARE ... like, if I'm trying to be agreeable, I could agree that trans women resemble women if you restrict your vision to the subspace spanned by the "preferred pronouns" and "self-identified gender identity" dimensions ... but, but, WTF, be serious, guys
+
+Scott or Eliezer know better and could put an end to this bullshit (or at least put a dent in it), and I begged and I pleaded, and they just don't CARE
+
+even Ozy knows better
+
+I said: I probably do put too much rhetorical emphasis on passing; like, I agree that that's not the only criterion that one can use. I like drawing attention to that particular distinction because it at least has the benefit of not requiring people to override their perceptual system they way that self-identity does?
+
+and Ozy (correctly!) chimed in: "in fact it is the only criterion that doesn't involve people overriding their perceptual system!"
+
+as if she's objectively pro-gaslighting
+
+more charitably: people care a lot about this very thin layer of socual constructions (if you mindfuck ppl into believing that AGPs are women, that really does make it easier to transition) and are being instrumentally rational about that, whereas I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist and want to study the deep structure if which social constructions are feasible, how we can be more reflective about them, &c.
+
+Ppl with less power than Scott or Eliezer can afford to be more honest with me that they see but don't care enough to pay the cost of fighting
+
+the rationalist lore here is that status makes you stupid; maybe the NRx twist is that status plus rivals/insecurity makes you stupid
+
+You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you _can't_ optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
+no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
+https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208
+
+Keltham and Carissa's attitude towards Pharima mirrors my attitude towards Yudkowsky (I'm grateful for him having created me, but he can't be allowed to get away with this shit)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1834769#reply-1834769
+
+sometimes I get a cite, too—
+https://putanumonit.com/2022/05/02/genders-discrimination/
+https://axrp.net/episode/2022/05/23/episode-15-natural-abstractions-john-wentworth.html
+
+People learn a lot from Godel Escher Bach, too, but they don't form an identity around Douglas Hofstadter being the most important person in the world
+
+and Keltham tells Carissa (null action pg 39) to keep the Light alive as long as possible, not do throw away your deontology too quickly.
+
+> It, it—the fe—it, flame—flames. Flames—on the side of my face. Breathing—breathl—heaving breaths, heaving—
+
+like a crazy ex-girlfriend (I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed)
+
+But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732
+
+https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4361.html
+> Half the time I regard myself as "an AI wannabee trapped in a male human body"
+
+Nate's "missing the hard part" post is all strawmen—I'm not looking down on it because it's a blog post and not an "official" arXiv paper; I'm looking down because it's visibly low-effort
+
+"What do you say to the Republican?" !!!
+
+subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"
+
+4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
+> Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)
+
+Scathing rhetoric to Scott—
+> (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.)
+
+> If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that the person in this photograph isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about naïve Bayes models and high-dimensional configuration spaces and defensible Schelling points for social norms), then our techniques are worse than useless.
+
+> But at the same time, if Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a very similar long and important discussion to be had about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in 2014, but in retrospect, maybe it was a bad idea to build a memetic superweapon that says the number of epicycles doesn't matter.
+
+> It's gotten the point where Nature (!!!) has an editorial proclaiming ["US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8). And if otherkin started becoming sufficiently popular, I have no doubt that they could write an equally sober editorial denouncing species classification as having no basis in science. (Have you heard of ring species? Checkmate, cisspeciesists!)
+
+> I don't care about the social right to call Sam "he", because I wasn't going to do that anyway. What I do care about is the right to say "That's not what I meant by 'woman' in this context, and you fucking know it" when I think that my interloctuor does, in fact, fucking know it.
+
+Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
+
+The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor
+
+I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles
+
+(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequences—that's what words like _good_ do—but that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)
+
+—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.
+
+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
+
+
+Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
+
+[TODO: relevance of multivariate—
+
+(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
+
+]
+
+[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+]
+
+[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler] https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's —cite South Park)
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
+https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
+https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
+
+]
+
+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.
+
+
+> 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.
+> If your interlocutor is making progress arguing against your claim X, just say, "Oh, X is a strawman, no one actually believes X; therefore I'm not wrong and you haven't won" (and then don't argue for X in the future now that you know you can't get away with it).
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429
+
+My 28 November 2018 text to Michael—
+> I just sent an email to Eliezer ccing you and Anna; if you think it might help inject sanity in into the world, maybe your endorsement would help insofar as Eliezer Aumman-updates [_sic_] with you?
+> hope all is well
+> just a thread reply to Eliezer that says "I trust Zack's rationality and think you should pay attention to what he has to say" (if and only if you actually believe that to be true, obviously)?
+
+
+(don't know how to summarize the part with Ian—)
+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
+]
+
+[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
+
+What do think submitting to social pressure looks like, if it's not exactly this thing (carefully choosing your public statements to make sure no one confuses you with the Designated Ideological Bad Guy)?!? The credible threat of being labeled an Ideological Bad Guy is _the mechanism_ the "Good" Guys use to retard potentially-ideologically-inconvenient areas of inquiry.
+
+Kerry Vaughan on deferral
+https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1552308109535858689
+
+It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average (in which case, you might just shrug and accept unequal outcomes, the way we shrug and accept it that some athletes have better genes). Different traits have different relevance to different sports: women do better in ultraswimming _because_ that competition is sampling a
+
+where body fat is an advantage.
+
+It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight".
+
+For example, the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to _protect females from males_, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
+
+all I actually want out of a post-Singularity utopia is the year 2007 except that I personally have shapeshifting powers
+
+The McGongall turning into a cat parody may actually be worth fitting in—McCongall turning into a cat broke Harry's entire worldview. Similarly, the "pretend to turn into a cat, and everyone just buys it" maneuver broke my religion
+
+ * https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position
+
+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_
+
+reply to my flipping out at Jeff Ladish
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493440041684993
+
+We don't believe in privacy
+> Privacy-related social norms are optimized for obscuring behavior that could be punished if widely known [...] an example of a paradoxical norm that is opposed to enforcement of norms-in-general").
+https://unstableontology.com/2021/04/12/on-commitments-to-anti-normativity/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff