-editing tier—
-_ Robert Stadler analogy
-_ better explanation of posse formation
-_ Emperor Norton ordered Hayes executed
+with internet available—
+_ Discord logs before Austin retreat
+_ screenshot Rob's Facebook comment which I link
+_ 13th century word meanings
+_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
+
+
+far editing tier—
+_ clarify why Michael thought Scott was "gaslighting" me, include "beeseech bowels of Christ"
+_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
-_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
+_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
+_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
_ the right way to explain how I'm respecting Yudkowsky's privacy
+_ 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
+_ better explanation of posse formation
+_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
_ 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 "rationalist"
_ 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
-_ chat with "Wilhelm" during March 2019 minor psych episode
-_ 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)
_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
+_ when to use first _vs. last names
+_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
+_ January 2019 meeting with Ziz and Gwen
+_ better summary of Littman
+
+
+
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
_ Iceman
_ Scott
_ Anna
_ secret posse member
+_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader (Swimmer?)
-_ Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)
+_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
+_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)?
(probably don't bother with Michael?)
things to bring up in consultation emails—
It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
-> _Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
->
-> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
-https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
https://www.readthesequences.com/
> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-> "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me" I wish I had never written about LDT and just told people to vote for reasons they understand when they're older [TODO full direct quote]
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929
+
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
+>
+> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I calim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
-To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once [TODO: linky] wrote to Judea Pearl to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
+To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, [the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once wrote to Judea Pearl](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKa9Lebyebf6a7P2o/the-rhythm-of-disagreement) to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq ]
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq
+
+> The condescension is _important information_ to help a reader figure out what is producing the outputs, and hiding it would make the task of 'extract the key insights' harder.
+
+]
------
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizing
+
+This should be common sense, though
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3szWd8HwWccJb9z5L/the-ea-community-might-be-neglecting-the-value-of
+
+she thought "I'm trans" was an explanation, but then found a better theory that explains the same data—that's what "rationalism" should be—including "That wasn't entirely true!!!!"
+https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole
+
+sorrow at putting on a bad performance with respect to the discourse norms of the people I'm trying to rescue/convert; I think my hostile shorthand (saying that censorship costs nothing implies some combination "speech isn't useful" and "other people aren't real" is pointing at real patterns, but people who aren't already on my side are not going to be sympathetic)
+
+
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
+> You could argue that a wise policy is that we should all be called by terms and pronouns we don't like, now and then, and that to do otherwise is coddling. You could argue that Twitter shouldn't try to enforce courtesy. You could accuse, that's not what Twitter is really doing.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880
+> But Twitter is at least not *ontologically confused* if they say that using preferred pronouns is courtesy, and claim that they're enforcing a courtesy standard. Replying "That's a lie! I will never lie!" is confused. It'd be sad if the #IDW died on that hill of all hills.
+
+> Acts aren't sentences, pronouns aren't lies, bathrooms aren't fundamental physical constants, and if you know what a motte-and-bailey is you're supposed to know that.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067287459589906432
+
+> I don't care whose point it is on this planet, the point I'm making would stand in any galaxy: You are not standing in noble defense of Truth when you ask who gets to use which bathroom. This is true across all possible worlds, including those with no sociologists in them.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067187363544059905
+
+------
+
+https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896
+
+
+
+David Xu writes (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [he] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
+
+> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is the proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
+>
+> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
+
+On the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a _conflict_ between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided if possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
+
+On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to _prevent people from noticing facts about reality_, then preventing them from using words that refer those facts seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
+
+On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is true (for humans). We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it (even when alone) using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
+
+Xu continues:
+
+> I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
+>
+> My sense is that you have (thus far, in the parts of the public discussion I've had the opportunity to witness) been behaving as though the _one and only crux in play_—that is, the True Source of Disagreement—has been the fifth crux, the thing I refused to include with the others of its kind. Your accusations against the caliphate _only make sense_ if you believe the dividing line between your behavior and theirs is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it"; as opposed to, say, what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, and which (if any) of those prescriptions are violated by using a notion of gender (in public, where you do not know in advance who will receive your communications) that does not cause massive psychological damage to some subset of people.
+>
+> Perhaps it is your argument that all four of the initial cruxes I listed are false; but even if you believe that, it should be within your set of ponderable hypotheses that people might disagree with you about that, and that they might perceive the disagreement to be _about_ that, rather than (say) about whether subscribing to the Blue Tribe view of gender makes them a Bad Rationalist, but That's Okay because it's Politically Convenient.
+>
+> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
+
+I reply: I'd like to [taboo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words) the word "rational"; I think I can do a much better job of explaining what's going on without appealing to what is or is not "rational." (As it is written of a virtue which is nameless, if you speak overmuch of the Way, you will not attain it.)
+
+Thus, bearing in mind that we don't all need to count harms and benefits the same way, and that it is futile to contest what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, on the question of whether the dividing line between my behavior and the Caliphate's is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it", I'm inclined to say—
+
+It's not a "disagreement" at all. It's a _conflict_.
+
+
+Telling the truth _isn't_ rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+
+
+I have a _seflish_ interest in people making and sharing accurate probabilistic inferences about how sex and gender and transgenderedness work in reality, for many reasons, but in part because _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+[TODO:
+"massive psychological damage to some subset of people",
+that's _not my problem_. I _don't give a shit_.
+
+Berkeley people may say that I'm doubling-down on failing to Other-model, but I don't think so; it's more honest to notice the conflict and analyze the conflict, than to pretend that we all want the same thing; I can empathize with "playing on a different chessboard", and I would be more inclined to cooperate with it if it weren't accompanied by sneering about how he and his flunkies are the only sane and good people in the world]
+
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Crux: "If you say that Stalin is a dictator, you'll be shot, therefore Stalin is not a dictator" has the same structure as "If you say that trans women are male, they'll take massive psych damage, therefore trans women are not male"; both arguments should get the same response.
+Zack M. Davis
+@zackmdavis
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Thoughts on your proposed cruxes: 1 (harmful inferences) is an unworkable AI design: you need correct beliefs first, in order to correctly tell which beliefs are harmful. 4 (non-public concepts) is unworkable for humans: how do you think about things you're not allowed words for?
+
+
+[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
+I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
+
+"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
+
+I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
+]
+
+> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
+
+> a gradual shift away from STEM nerd norms to fandom geek norms [...] the pathological insistence that you're not allowed to notice bad faith
+https://extropian.net/notice/A7rwtky5x3vPAedXZw
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+"When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+
+https://glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=83
+> A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.
+
+further post timeline—
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
+"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
+"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+"Darkest Timeline" June 2020
+"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" Aug 2020
+"Unnatural Categories" Jan 2021
+"Differential Signal Costs" Mar 2021
+
+
+"Public Heretic" on "Where to Draw the Boundary?"—
+> But reality, in its full buzzing and blooming confusion, contains an infinite numbers of 'joints' along which it could be carved. It is not at all clear how we could say that focusing one some of those joints is "true" while focusing on other joints is "false," since all such choices are based on similarly arbitrary conventions.
+
+> Now, it is certainly true that certain modes of categorization (i.e. the selection of certain joints) have allowed us to make empirical generalizations that would not otherwise have been possible, whereas other modes of categorization have not yielded any substantial predictive power. But why does that mean that one categorization is "wrong" or "untrue"? Better would seem to be to say that the categorization is "unproductive" in a particular empirical domain.
+
+> Let me make my claim more clear (and thus probably easier to attack): categories do not have truth values. They can be neither true nor false. I would challenge Eliezer to give an example of a categorization which is false in and of itself (rather than simply a categorization which someone then used improperly to make a silly empirical inference).
+
+Yudkowsky's reply—
+> PH, my reply is contained in Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2
+> I would have been surprised if she was. Joscelin Verreuil also strikes me as being a projection of some facets of a man that a woman most notices, and not a man as we exist from the inside.
+>
+> I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
+> Could you please [taboo](Could you please taboo these?) these?
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> Okay. I’ve never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime’s work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other’s deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we’re talking about here.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b
+> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is not necessarily something to integrate.
+
+> Duly appreciated.
+
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY#comments 110 karma
+support from Oli—
+> I think there is a question of whether current LessWrong is the right place for this discussion (there are topics that will attract unwanted attention, and when faced with substantial adversarial forces, I think it is OK for LessWrong to decide to avoid those topics as long as they don't seem of crucial importance for the future of humanity, or have those discussions in more obscure ways, or to limit visibility to just some subset of logged-in users, etc). But leaving that discussion aside, basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=cPunK8nFKuQRorcNG#comments
+iceman—
+> I kinda disagree that this is a mere issue of Straussian reading: I suspect that in this (and other cases), you are seeing the raw output of Elizer's rationalizations and not some sort of instrumental coalition politics dark arts. If I was going for some sort of Straussian play, I wouldn't bring it up unprompted or make long public declarations like this.
+>
+> Zack is hypersensitive to this one issue because it interacts with his Something to Protect. But what I wonder about is where else Eliezer is trying to get away with things like this.
+
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1853001#reply-1853001
+> Another reason people go to Hell? Malediction! An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too! Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit! At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted. A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her _really giving a shit_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff