-with internet available—
-_ when did I ask Leon about getting easier tasks?
+sections—
+_ Yes Requires the Possibility of No scuffle
+_ wireheading his fiction subreddit
+_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
+_ September 2020 Category War victory
+_ Sasha disaster
+_ the dolphin war
+
+
+With phone—
+_ Signal history with Anna and Michael
+
+
+With internet available—
+_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
+_ "not taking into account considerations" → rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
+_ except when it's net bad to have concluded Y: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/[Error%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server]/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
+_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
+_ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
+_ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning Children
+_ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
+_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
+_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
+_ that neuroscience paper backing the two-types
+_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
+_ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
_ 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
far editing tier—
+_ elaborate on why I'm not leaking sensitive bits, by explaining what can be inferred by what was and wasn't said in public
+_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
+_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
+_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
+_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
+_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
+_ make sure to quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy before calling back to it
_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
+_ explain earlier that my practice of "throw money at things" also applied to my friendship with Anna
+_ mention my robot cult history (I've been here since the late 'aughts)
+_ ask Anna what she meant by "soldiers in an ambulance"; I was going to write up an explanation for Ben, but I don't seem to remember
_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
_ conversation with Ben about physical injuries (this is important because it explains where the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from)
_ context of his claim to not be taking a stand
_ clarify "Merlin didn't like Vassar" example about Mike's name
+_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
_ Iceman
-_ Ben/Jessica
+_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
_ Scott
_ Anna
_ secret posse member
+_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader (Swimmer?)
_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
-_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)?
-(probably don't bother with Michael?)
+_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
+
+marketing—
+_ Twitter
+_ Facebook
+_ Less Wrong
+_ should I buy Twitter ads to increase reach??
+_ TheMotte.org
things to bring up in consultation emails—
_ dropping "and Scott" in Jessica's description of attacking narcissim
]
-Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context. Coming from _anyone else in the world_, I would have considered the thread fine—a solidly above-average performance,
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context.
really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
bitter comments about rationalists—
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7
+
-(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
------
"epistemic hero"
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
+
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.
-
Yudkowsky did [quote-Tweet Colin Wright on the univariate fallacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124757043997372416)
(which I got to [cite in a _Less Wrong_ post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)
(Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip")
-Since arguing at the object level had failed (["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), and arguing at the strictly meta level had failed (["... Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)), the obvious thing to do next was to jump up to the meta-meta level and tell the story about why the "rationalists" were Dead To Me now, that [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) was not being met. (Just like Ben had suggested in December and in April.)
-
-I found it trouble to make progress on. I felt—constrained. I didn't know how to tell the story without (as I perceived it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing bitter and insulting comments whenever I saw someone praise "the rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy-of-language blogging!
-
-In August's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passion mention in "... Boundaries?": sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was of course generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occured to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
-
-[TODO— more blogging 2019
-
-"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
-
-"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
-
-I was _furious_ at "Against Lie Inflation"—oh, so _now_ you agree that making language less useful is a problem?! But then I realized Scott actually was being consistent in his own frame: he's counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent lying-accusations) as a cost; but, if everyone _is_ lying, maybe they should be angry!
-
-"Heads I Win" Sep 2019: I was surprised by how well this did (high karma, later included in the best-of-2019 collection); Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering after I
-
-"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019: combatting Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying shenanigans
-
-]
-
-
Scott said he liked "monastic rationalism _vs_. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben was proposing.
(I wish I could use this line)
26 November 14:38 p.m.
> I'm not sure what "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" is supposed to mean if it doesn't cash out to "it's okay to enforce social norms preventing other people from admitting out loud that they have correctly noticed your biological sex"
+In contrast to Yudkowsky's claim that you need to have invented something from scratch to make any real progress, this is a case where the people who _did_ invent something can't apply it anymore!!
+
+-----
+
+Examples of non-robot-cult authors using rationality skills that they visibly didn't get from being a robot-cult loyalist—
+
+James C. Scott, _Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts_, Ch. 4, "False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?", 1990
+
+> The thick theory [of false consciousness] claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation. In its most subtle form, the thin theory is eminently plausible and, some would claim, true by definition. I believe, nevertheless, that it is fundamentally wrong and hope to show why in some detail after putting it in as persuasive a form as possible, so that it is no straw man I am criticizing.
+
+(Steelmanning! One of us!)
+
+Kathryn Paige Harden, _The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality_, Ch. 9, "Using Nature to Understand Nurture", 2021
+
+> [P]olicies that are built on a flawed understanding of which environments are truly causal are wasteful and potentially harmful. In this specific example, even if the state of Texas was successful at delaying teenagers' sexual activity, such a change would not actually improve their mental health—and an emphasis on such programs potentially diverts investment away from educational programs that _would_ be helpful. (Proponents of teenage abstinence might argue that abstinence is a valuable end for its own sake, but that is a different justification for the policy than the empirical claim that abstinentce is a means toward increased adolencent well-being.)
+
+("Fake Optimization Critiera")
+
+John Snygg, _A New Approach to Differential Geometry Using Clifford's Geometric Algebra_ (§4.7.3) recounts the Arabic mathematician al-Biruni (973–1048).
+
+> More is known about al-Briruni than most Islamic mathematicians because he included bits of autobiographical writings in some of his academic publications. In one of these, _Shadows_, he relates an encounter with a hard-line orthodox cleric. The cleric admonished al-Biruni because he had used an astronomical instrument with Byzantine months engraved on it to determine the time of prayers. Al-Briuni replied:
+>> "The Byzantines also eat food. Then do not imitate them in this!"
+
+(Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence)
+
+-----
+
+I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
+
+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. This does not seem remotely credible to me any more.
+
+_It will never stop hurting until I write it down._ ("I've got a thick tongue / Brimming with the words that go unsung.")
+
+_My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter. What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.
+
+An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by people—I've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fans—all four of you!) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...
+
+And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.
+
+----
+
+imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bible—or at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on.
+
+You _know_ this is wrong. Okay, maybe there's _some_ way that same-sex marriage could be compatible with the Church's teachings. But you would have to _argue_ for that; you _can't_ just say there's no arguments _against_ it and call that the end of the discussion! [1 Corinthians 6:9–10](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NKJV): "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators [...] nor homosexuals, nor sodomites [...] will inherit the kingdom of God." It's _right there_. There's [a bunch of passages like that](https://www.livingout.org/the-bible-and-ssa). You _can't possibly_ not see it.
+
+As a man of faith and loyal parishioner, you would _expect_ to be able to resolve the matter by bringing your concern to the priest, who would then see how the sermon had been accidentally misleading, and issue a clarification at next week's sermon, so that the people would not be led astray from the path of God.
+
+The priest doesn't agree; he insists on the contrived technically-not-heresy interpretation. This would be a shock, but it wouldn't, yet, shatter your trust in the Church as an institution. Even the priest is still a flawed mortal man.
+
+Then the Pope misinterets the Bible in the same way in his next encyclical. With the help of some connections, you appeal your case all the way to the Vatican—and the Pope himself comes back with the same _bullshit_ technically-not-heresy.
+
+You realize that you _cannot take the Pope's words literally_.
+
+That would be _pretty upsetting_, right? To lose faith in, not your religion itself—_obviously_ the son of God still died for our sins—but the _institution_ that claims to faithfully implement your religion, but is actually doing something else. You can understand why recovering from that might take a year or so.
+
+Or maybe imagine an idealistic young lawyer working for the prosecution in the [Selective Draft Law Cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Draft_Law_Cases) challenging the World War I draft. Since 1865, the Constitution _says_, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If the words "involuntary servitude not as a punishment for a crime" _mean anything_, they surely include the draft. So the draft is unconstitutional. Right?
+
+----
+
+I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember Erin recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)
+
+It needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
+
+people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)—
+
+> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)
+
+That ended up being quite a lot of effort!—but at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work.
+
+This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
+
+If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically expensive for me. Sorry," I can't say I'm not _disappointed_, but I can respect that they labor under different constraints from me.
+
+But we can't even have that, because saying "You're right, but I can't admit this in public" requires _trust_.
+
+_socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+
+I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+Alicorn writes (re Kelsey's anorexia): "man it must be so weird to have a delusion and know it's a delusion and still have it"
+what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true
+... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group
+
+you can't imagine contemporary Yudkowsky adhering to Crocker's rules (http://sl4.org/crocker.html)
+
+(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
+
+4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
+
+If we _actually had_ magical sex change technology of the kind described in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality.
+
+
+Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608
+> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
+
+Steve Sailer retweeted me today criticizing Lee Jussim https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1160662220511932416
+
+I'm a natural true believer in Yudkowskian ideology https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/187004568356/your-ideology-if-it-gets-off-the-ground-at-all
+
+Yudkowsky's assessment of Moldbug: "Politics mindkilled him; he cannot separate the normative and the descriptive." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs#TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs
+
+-----
+
+I just got off the phone with my mother. I told her that I wouldn't be able to visit her this weekend because I had a terrible week and I'm going to need to do dayjob work on Sunday to catch up with how behind I am.
+
+She told me that she believes in angels, that she prays to God for me at night, that the angels are like God's helpers, like how Santa has elves
+
+(My family is ethnically Jewish—you know, like everyone else—but my mother's personal brand of spirituality is very vague; these particular sentences felt unusually Christian-themed given that she identifies as a Jewish Buddhist, but not out of character.)
+
+I told her not to bother with the prayers, unless it helps her sleep.
+
+As I was wrapping up the call, I mentioned that the reason it was a bad week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.
+
+"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.
+
+"They're not fish, right?" I asked.
+
+"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."
+
+Thanks, Mom. I'm so lucky to have a mother that's _less retarded than the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute_.
+
+------
+
+On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from New York Times reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
+
+He never got back to me.
+
+[TODO: three weeks later, Slate Star Codex went down]
+
+
+------
+
+[TODO: Yudkowsky wireheading his fiction subreddit
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/
+https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
+13 November 2019
+
+The recent thing that was most helpful in making my memoir seem like just a challenging writing project, rather than treason/heresy, was actually Eliezer doing more destroying-language-for-the-sake-of-politeness but in a non-Culture-War context:
+
+comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
+> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."
+
+[the comment claims that "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced, but this is lip service; Ruby also paid lip service]
+
+But "I thought X seemed Y to me" and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from an algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try).
+
+It's a little thing (requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and non-violent communication), but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudwkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ makes a pattern click.
+
+If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby "threaten" them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work like good literary criticism.
+
+"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors"
+
+"Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" (I agree that the purpose of public criticism is not solely to help the authors)
+
+]
+
+----
+
+2019 comments to "Wilhelm"—
+
+these people are at the center of the rationalist egregore and could steer it if only they were a little bit braver
+
+the prevailing narrative is something like "the rationalist community is doing just fine; poor Zack is just freaking out because he's in denial about being a trans woman, and mean ol' Michael and Ben are preying on his vulnerability"
+
+I'm never gonna get over this
+you can tell your IQ 110 hairdresser, "Men who fantasize about being women don't particularly resemble actual women", and she'll just be like, "yeah"
+and you tell IQ 135 "rationalists" the same thing, and it just becomes this multi-year, 30,000-word ... whatever
+
+people use the word "gaslighting" to refer to the cognitive dissonance between what you're seeing and what the local egregore expects you to see
+
+ being trapped between two egregores is so painful / and even when it's not painful, it's confusing
+
+recently-transitioned MtF Facebook acquaintance had generally positive feedback about my blog, but also says stuff like, "objective autobiography is impossible, ultimately we just tell the stories about ourselves that help us survive and thrive" / "she" went to Caltech / where are all the serious people??
+
+in the new Twilight Zone episode featuring a crew of 5 astronauts, both the commander and the rebellious one are black women (who I have trouble telling apart)
+You sent
+there's a legitimate (really!) social-justice angle to this (the fact that I can't tell them apart proves that my perceptual system is RACIST)
+You sent
+(but the general phenomenon has to do with anchoring on unusual characteristics; at old dayjob, someone once confused me with the other white-guy-with-a-ponytail—we don't really look alike, but long hair on males is unusual)
+
+17 March 19: "I think 'Vanessa Kosoy' is a guy I met at Summer Solstice 2016"
+
+----
+
+messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff