But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win.
-
-
[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
]
-So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
+I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
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://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i
+(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
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
----------
-In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan) [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
-> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. 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.
+> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. 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. [TODO: continue the quote to the part about Verrez self-awareness]
When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
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.
-
-[...]
+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?"
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. [TODO: echo the Verrez self-awareness phrasing]
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
+And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
-On the contrary, I _like_ being autogynephilic. But I also like having the basic self-awareness to _notice_ that being an autogynephilic male is _not the same thing_ as being female. I don't need people to lie to me about that.
+And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
-I would have hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky would be _in favor_ of his faithful students having these very basic reflective capabilities.
+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_?
-I would have hoped that he would care enough
+[in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
-in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022, "Biological sex actually exists; "
+----------
-He can't do it.
+[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
-But his revealed preference seems to be that not getting in trouble with progressives is more important than teaching this skill.
-----------
> 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
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?
I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)].
+You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)]
+.
In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that "changing sex" is vastly easier said than done—
+
+
[[[ TODO summarize the Whole Dumb Story (does there need to be a separate post? I'm still not sure)
[TODO: But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
playing on a different chessboard—I would be fine with it if he didn't shit on my chessboard. But my shitting on his chessboard
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard ("at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard ([TODO linky-quotey not standing in defense of truth]) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards ([TODO linky-quotey clarification]), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4. But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ([TODO linkey-quotey normative meaning of 'he']) ... at _that_ point, it's hard for me to consider him as neutrally playing on a different chessboard, rather than actively trying to shit on mine; the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio in favor of the latter hypothesis.
+
+
Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
-> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is - aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences - committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
+> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is—aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences—committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
> The people who aren't doing that mostly aren't participating in the LessWrong identity, but while factions like that are hostile to the confused people who behave as though they're part of a community trying to become less wrong, such factions are also parasitic on such people, claiming credit for their intellectual contributions. When such participation is fully extinguished, the group begins to decay, having nothing distinctive to offer, unless it has become too big to fail, in which case it's just another component of one political faction or another.
I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)
-Tweet about "unvirtuous to just believe me"—well, YES
-
The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
jbeshir
flu virus that cures Borderer culture
https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
-Zvi 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
Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
-/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
-
]
You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
+winning Hamilton tickets at $2200
+
meeting Katie—
Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
-Holy shit, this is *exactly* what happened with me
-Katie's comment on https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/
Tue Feb 14 2017 11:26:20 (this conversation was actually during the tantrum)—
> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
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
+
+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
+
+https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
+https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/
+
+The LW community is a bubble/machine that made me who I am (it doesn't infringe on my independence more than school, but it's still shaping force in the way that going to University or Google shapes people)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
+> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving them—well, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?
+
+the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
+> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
+
+------
+
+Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.
+
+
+In dath ilan they talk about the Light—the policy vector that everyone can agree on
+
+
+------
+
+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
+
+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.
+
+[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."]
+
+If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he should remember the only reason he has _any_ people who defer to him _at all_ is _because_ he used to be such a good explainer who actually argued for things.
+
+[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 ]
+
+------
+
+Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff