https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089
Robert Stadler
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14
+> Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
+
+Really, it's impressive how far we got in establishing a cult of Bayesians in a world where "discimination" is a transgression against the dominant ideology! I can't be the only one who got the joke
+
+https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
+
+prevaricate
+
+back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as if you had to be of a particular generation to understand the ideas—that could apply in both directions (the next generation's culture does not look promising to me; midwits say that elders have always said that, but maybe the elders were always right, by the standard preference-stability argument)
+
+> [Anna] seemed to disapprove of our putting pressure on Scott, because the fact that Scott has done a lot of great work is exactly what made him a target for our pressure.
+
+> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused
+
+> I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and Mean—I don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."
+
+> He says he likes "monastic rationalism vs. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben is proposing.
+
+> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.
+
+Dawkins and Dennett have joined the intellectual gender-ID skeptics; shame that Yudkowsky can't reach that level
+
+• at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+
+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
+
+> 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
+
+But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
+
+Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
+
+[
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans) - I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+
+Tweet said "I've never persuaded anyone to go trans" in light of his track record; is like thinking it's personally prudent and not community-harmful to bash Democrats and praise Republicans. If any possible good thing about Democrats is something you mention that "the other side" would say. Even if you can truthfully say "I've never _told_ anyone to _vote_ Republican", you shouldn't be surprised if people regard you as a Republican shill ; the "30% of the ones with penises" proclamation sort of was encouraging it, really!
+
+
+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.
+
+I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
+
+> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
+
+> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
+
+> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.
+
+]
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
+
+If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
+Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped
+
+example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
+https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
+> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
+
+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.
+
+Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+
+It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
+
+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.
+
+
+
+Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.
+
+I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
+
+And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+
+https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
+
+> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+
+"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
+
+3 January 2020 text from Michael to me:
+> because I want to make it very clear to you, and to encourage you to make it very clear to others [...] that you are experiencing extremely articulate and extremely by the book trauma, caused in a very canonical manner by institutional betrayal and causing silencing of a sort very similar to that which causes investigation of sex crimes to be problematic (as in the high quality current Netflix show "Unbelievable", which you all might benefit from watching)
+
+Forget it, Jake—it's the rationalist community
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
+> 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)
+
+[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
+
+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
+]
+
+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.)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff