-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+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
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
-
-> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
-
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
-
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
-
-(Reading _this_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
-
-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
-
-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-
-Indeed—here we are five years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-
-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
-
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
-
-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-
-In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
-
-So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
-
-So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
-
-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. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
-
-> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
-
-> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
-
-> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
-
-> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
-
-> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
-
-> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
-
-> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
-
-> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+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"
[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
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 ...
Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
+_for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
+> This about dath ilani, they are trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything, and so at the end of it all you look at what happened and try to build an explanation around that alone.
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866
+
+
> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-the most recent pronoun update
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
-
-> I would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character.
-[...]
-> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
-
-like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+whom I have variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"
* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
-> 16: I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
-
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
-
> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
https://archive.is/7Wolo
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."
+
+(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-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)
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
Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
-typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
-
https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
> These neurons detect gender^10
> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
-> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
+> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
+
If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, or for words with two letters rather than three.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative#Voiceless_palato-alveolar_fricative
-
-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
-
I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
-[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
-
-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
-
-[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_.
-
-Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
-
[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
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
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.
+----------
+
+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. [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._"
+
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
+
+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.
+
+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—
+
+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 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]
+
+----------
+
+[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
+
+
+-----------
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
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.
+
+• 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 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.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."
+
+Or as Yudkowsky put it—
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
+
+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.
+
+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)
+
+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"),
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
+
+If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts
+
+-----
+
+If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
+
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
+>
+> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
+>
+> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
+
+So, the explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is _really obvious_.
+
+Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
+
+But perhaps it's premature to judge Yudkowsky without appreciating what tight constraints he labors under. The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, exactly, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+
+> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
+
+(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is _very_ interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community, is, effectively, a partisan institution, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
+
+I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
+
+Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf) (The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!)
+
+And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_ (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans or even gender-dysphoric if they lived in a different subculture.
+
+I claim that (a′) and (b′) are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not?
+
+We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
+
+But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
+
+> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
+>
+> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
+
+Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is a contested social construct, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
+
+(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is _much_ better than not-admitting it; so, huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
+
+Again, as discussed in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", a comparison to [the _tú_/_usted_ distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted) is instructive. It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.
+
+It's quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist), while _also_ refusing to entertain or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just psychologically abusive.
+
+If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
+
+---------
+
+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.
+
+_After it's been pointed out_, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
+
+At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
+
+On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+
+Note: being _on peaceful terms_ with the progressive _Zeitgeist_ isn't the same as kowtowing to it entirely. So, for example, Yudkowsky is _also_ on the record claiming that—
+
+> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
+
+> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
+
+There's a sense in which this could be read as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF _was_ the thing I was originally trying to talk about, before the philosophy-of-language derailing, and here Yudkowsky is backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology. So there's an intuition that I should be grateful for and satisfied with this concession—that it would be _greedy_ for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he's throwing me a bone here.
+
+But that intuition is _wrong_. The perception that there are "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an _illusion_ of the human cognitive architecture; it's not something that any sane cognitive process would think in the course of constructing a map that reflects the territory.
+
+As I explained in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), this argument that "gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties" is actually _wrong_. The _reason_ I believe in the two-type taxonomy of MtF is because of [the _empirical_ case that androphilic and non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexualism actually look like different things](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), enough so for the two-type clustering to [pay the rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) [for its complexity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length).
+
+But Yudkowsky can't afford to acknowledge the empirical case for the two-type taxonomy—that really _would_ get him in trouble with progressives. So in order to throw me a bone while maintaining his above-it-all [pretending to be wise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise) centerist pose, he needs to come up with some other excuse that "exhibit[s] generally rationalist principles".
+
+The lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even when the political pressure is coming from _me_.
+
+If you "project" my work into the "subspace" of contemporary political conflicts, it usually _codes as_ favoring "anti-trans" faction more often than not, but [that's really not what I'm trying to do](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). From my perspective, it's just that the "pro-trans" faction happens to be very wrong about a lot of stuff that I care about. But being wrong about a lot of stuff isn't the same thing as being wrong about everything; it's _important_ that I spontaneously invent and publish pieces like ["On the Argumentative Form"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) and ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) that "favor" the "pro-trans" faction. That's how you know (and how I know) that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
+
+In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
+
+Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
+
+It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political-risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that's not what's going on, he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of _something_—but at this point, I have no reason to care. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a _waste of everyone's time_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
+
+Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
+
+I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+
+(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they _have a case_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
+
+What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
+
+Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+
+But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
+
+Why does this matter?
+
+[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+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.
+
+> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
+https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1769064#reply-1769064
+> "Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly. None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."
+It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly
+
+congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
+> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
+
+the "It is sometimes personally prudent to be seen to agree with Stalin" attitude behaves like a conspiracy, even if
+
+I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/
+
+> 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
+
+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.
+
+> 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.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
+
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
+
+contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard, you don't take it lying down
+
+Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
+
+maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
+
+Feb. 2016 happy price schedule https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228
+
+one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
+
+When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
+
+OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
+
+http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
+
+A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
+> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
+[...]
+> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
+> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
+[...]
+> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
+in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
+
+Rubices—
+> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
+gonna mostlky bite the bullet on this one
+
+
+https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
+> You all remember the thing I predicted correctly 12 years ago, therefore you should heed my word on this completely unrelated topic
+
+The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels telling—you could say it's circumstantial nitpicking, but I think it's revealing, like the "reducing negativity"
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz
+
+"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
+
+https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
+> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
+
+> One nice thing about intellectuals is that when they turn, they frequently leave behind a detailed, mostly coherent record of what a person turning into a rhinoceros thinks is going on.
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1477733825702936581
+
+Rationality was supposed to be important!!
+
+Paul says so—
+> My current sense is that cooperation has a better tradeoff than some forms of enhancement (e.g. giving humans bigger brains) and worse than others (e.g. improving the accuracy of people's and institution's beliefs about the world).
+
+Rob says so, too—
+> Help ourselves think more clearly. (I imagine this including a lot of trying-to-become-more-rational, developing and following relatively open/honest communication norms, and trying to build better mental models of crucial parts of the world.)
+
+> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228
+
+dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
+> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140
+
+> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374
+
+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)
+
+The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
+
+jbeshir
+> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
+—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing
+
+
+[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
+[internet pharmacy]
+
+
+> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
+response—
+> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do
+
+In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]
+
+https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma
+
+postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
+
+if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
+
+Gell-Mann amnesia
+
+EY's commenting guidelines
+
+> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
+https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409
+
+flu virus that cures Borderer culture
+https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement
+
+> 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.
+
+------
+
+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
+
+https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/686455476984119296/eliezer-yudkowsky-seems-really-depressed-these
+
+> So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do. In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes. The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy. It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1614129#reply-1614129
+
+I was pleading to him in his capacity as rationality leader, not AGI alignment leader; I know I have no business talking about the latter
+
+(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
+
+[TODO: misrepresentation of the Light: Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.]
+
+"You're allowed to talk to me," he said at the Independence Day party
+
+MIRI made a point of prosecuting Tyler Altman rather than participating (even if it was embarrassing to be embezzled from) because of game theory, but it sees folding to social-justice bullies as inevitable
+
+re Yudkowsky not understanding the "That's So Gender" sense, I suspect this is better modeled as a nearest-unblocked-strategy alignment problem, rather than a capabilities problem ("doesn't comprehend"). Author has a Vision of a Reality; that Reality conflicts with the ideology of the readership, who complain; Author issues a patch that addresses the surface of the complaint without acknowledging the conflict of Visions, because describing the conflict in too much detail would be construed as aggression
+
+------
+
+[TODO:
+Email to Scott at 0330 a.m.
+> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: "The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories." That thing is a fucking Absolute Denial Macro!
+]
+
+------
+
+So, because
+
+[TODO: the rats not getting AGP was excusable, the rats not getting the category boundary thing was extremely disappointing but not a causis belli; Eliezer Yudkowsky not getting the category boundary thing was an emergency]
+
+-----
+
+Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low."
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
+
+------
+
+
+Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
+
+Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
+
+> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
+
+The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
+
+> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
+>
+> Sorry. It can't be done.
+>
+> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
+>
+> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
+
+The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to other candidates, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
+>
+> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
+>
+> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
+
+The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
+
+Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
+
+> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
+>
+> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
+> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
+> * Process the checklist.
+> * Go to the winning candidate.
+> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
+> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
+>
+> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
+
+I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
+
+This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
+
+... which is why it's so _bizarre_ that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your _actual_ bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
+
+"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where presumably, 'getting shot' is a metaphor for a large negative utility, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation! And _any other partisan hack could say exactly the same_, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot.
+
+If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is _so_ terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+
+I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
+
+For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
+
+With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
+
+To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
+
+Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
+
+Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I engage in a bit of what is sometimes called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+
+That is, my bad faith concern-trolling gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
+
+In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
+
+Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
+
+Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
+
+But if it were _actually_ the case that everybody knew (and everybody knew that everybody knew), then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the entire appeal and purpose of censorship is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
+
+For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be _convenient_ if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really _were_ no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.
+
+But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail).
+
+"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? I'm asking because I have a long sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
+
+------
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> 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.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to strategically say positive things about Republican candidates, and make sure to never, ever say negative things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+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://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'"]
+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"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff