on deck—
-_ excerpt "out of patience" email <span style="color: #E00000;">
+_ the egregore doesn't care about the past
+_ § about privacy norms, and my secret research project (research report on gout)
_ finish and polish § on reaching out a fourth time
-_ § about privacy norms, and my secret research project
_ talk about the 2019 Christmas party
_ Let's recap
_ If he's reading this ...
_ Perhaps if the world were at stake
+_ ¶ about body odors
+_ regrets and wasted time
+_ excerpt 2nd "out of patience" email
with internet available—
+_ "look at what ended up happening"—look up whether that exact quote from from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47 or https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
_ Gallileo "And yet it moves"
_ Discord logs before Austin retreat
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
+_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance
+_ "The Correct Contrarian Cluster" and race/IQ
+_ taqiyya
+_ refusing to give a probability (When Not to Use Probabilities? Shut Up and Do the Impossible?)
far editing tier—
I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
+
+----
+
Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
It worked once, right?
+-----
+
> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
(!!)
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
-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"
> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-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
-
> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
-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://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.
> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
Namespace's point about the two EYs
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"— link to the correct contrarian cluster
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
-
-Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
-
But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
-what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
+
> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
> 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/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
-the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
+
that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("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"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
-It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
-
If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?
When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."
People change their opinion with the party line—similarly with Scott and Yud
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12550?campaign=woletoc
-"No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand."
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089
-
-Robert Stadler
-
-----------
-
-
-
-
------------
-
-Really, it's impressive how far we got in establishing a cult of Bayesians in a world where "discimination" is a transgression against the dominant ideology! I can't be the only one who got the joke
-
https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
prevaricate
> [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.
-
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
-> Because it was you, I tried to read this when it came out. But
-
-
Yudkowsky complains—not entirely without justification—that I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)
But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.
-You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words (which could have been three): "Men aren't women tho."
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words: "Men aren't women tho."
> 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.
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
+> 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...
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.
congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
-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/
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 (supposedly for the benefit of people with your sexuality), you don't take it lying down
Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!
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
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
+gonna mostly bite the bullet on this one
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
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.
-
-
-
-
[TODO:
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
If Scott's willing to link to A. Marinos, maybe he'd link to my memoir, too? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242
My reaction to Marinos is probably similar to a lot of people's reaction to me: geez, putting in so much effort to correct Scott's mistake is lame, what a loser, who cares
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1164332124712738821
-> I unfortunately have had a policy for over a decade of not putting numbers on a few things, one of which is AGI timelines and one of which is *non-relative* doom probabilities. Among the reasons is that my estimates of those have been extremely unstable.
-
-
--------
Still citing it (19 Sep 22): https://twitter.com/ingalala/status/1568391691064729603
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
+It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+
------
If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.
bitter comments about rationalists—
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
+
+(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
+
+------
+
+Yudkowsky's hyper-arrogance—
+> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
+
+* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
+Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
+
+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_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff