I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
-> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/
https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
-"Index of Yvain's excellent articles"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles
Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
-The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves, and that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
+The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves—and that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
-And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own—
+And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
----------
-In part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Mencius Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
-
-Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners:
-
-
-
-
-It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, but I clearly didn't have license to _talk_ about any reasons to be skeptical ...
-
-—until, suddenly, in 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
-
-----------
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[TODO: David Xu's postrat]
And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps
> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
-> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
\ No newline at end of file
+> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
+
+Standard excuses—
+"i just don't think that gender is less of a politeness mind-control regime when it doesn't allow people to switch categories"
+biosex actually exists
+also no one cares about that fact of the matter, unless they want to have sex with someone or are doing a weird ideological thing
+I think you're the ones doing a weird ideological thing
+
+brain: wow, eiko has a deep understanding of straight men for a lesbian! she must be so empathetic
+me: ...
+
+... why validated and not offended??
+Eiko — Today at 8:37 PM
+?_?
+what... would i be... offended by...
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 8:38 PM
+The "brain: / me:" thing seems like it should be offensive for the same reason that the phrase-I-said-I-wasn't-going-to-say is offensive
+the language is subtler, but it's gesturing at the same thing
+
+(explanation: I read this as ozy saying they parsed Eiko as a girl so much that they didn't remember she used to be a straight guy)
+
+... I, just, really have trouble emphasizing with this culture where people are allowed to make jokes about the similarities between trans lesbians and straight guys, and as long as you talk in terms of "I thought I was a straight guy", it's all cool, but as soon as someone bites the bullet and says, "Yes, because trans lesbians are straight males, etiologically; you thought correctly", then they're ... marking themselves as not part of the coalition? From my perspective, it just looks like your culture is pro-lying
+
+like if i look at a person and my brain's intuitive instinctive bucketing function goes "girl" and they tell me "i'm a boy actually" does whether that's mind control depend on what genitals the person has??
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 10:02 PM
+Yes?
+Omega ω — Today at 10:02 PM
+?????
+
+... people just don't see the ideological bubble they live in! People tell me, "frankly you seem to be deeply unhappy about [being gendered male]", because they're relying on their prior of what trans women need. And having been born in 1987, I just don't share that prior! If you actually listen to the thing I'm been yelling for the last six years, I'm much more unhappy about the culture of mind-control than I am about being male, but people put more weight on their prior than my verbal self-report! I guess I can't blame them on the meta level (I also put more weight on priors that people's self-reports a lot of the time), but it's just—so shocking, that people don't see the thing
+
+I don't actually want to return to the past permanently; I want to first rewind to 2007 or so, and then re-do the trans rights thing but with less 🐛 lying this time, "lying" being my heat-of-the-moment angry word for the thing where the born-in-the-wrong-body story that gets sold to the public is very different from the picture you get when you read what people write about their feelings when the general public isn't looking, and people know it's different, and they go on talking in terms of the standard story anyway, and when you challenge them on none of this stuff being true, they say, "Oh, well, those are just lies to cis people; that doesn't count" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/) as if lies to cis people weren't still lies
+
+And, just—I think if an alien or an AI or really any normal person outside of this very specific Berkeley 2016– ideological subculture were to try to objectively describe what's actually happening there in the real physical universe, I don't think they would want to talk about a woman born in the wrong body, coping with her tragic dysphoria; I think the alien or AI would talk about a male primate with some kind of brain malfunction in its sexual targeting system causing it to get confused about a self-other distinction, and I think the normal person would talk about a man with a gross, weird fetish who they don't want sharing a locker room with their daughter.
+
+And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the right ontology here? The Berkeley 2016– denizen can come up with a lot of replies ("But cis women also enjoy being women", "But I don't care about someone's private thoughts; I only care about whether they'll come vintage dress shopping with me"), but they all just seem fundamentally unserious to me?
+
+----
+
+Habryka's PalmCone memo mentions there being people whose top priority is to influence you—that's totally what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
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