* "gamete size"—this is a tic where everyone knows what sex is, but no one is allowed to acknowledge the cluster
* maybe worth explaining why I keep saying "sex category" instead of "gender"—and be consistent about it
* transition interventions are bundled: asking for pronouns could only plausibly be a good idea if coupled with further interventions—but that's not the picture we'd get if we took Yudkowsky literally
- * also take a crack at the Aristotelan binary sports Tweet
* this post needs to exist because I can't let him have the last word
* I need to acknowledge the
> In a wide variety of cases, sure, they can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
* maybe by "much more strongly ... different firm attachments", he's pointing to different people having different intuitions about what male/female clusters map to; that's definitely a thing, but it's wrong to conflate that with "Maybe it's like not being named Oliver"; people do agree on the approximate meaning of blue and green even if there are edge cases, cite fallacy of gray
- * introductory sentence before referencing "we" or "the community"
- * can some of the asides be yanked into footnotes??
+ * need introductory sentence before first reference to "we" or "the community"
+
+4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
More Yudkowsky playing dumb—
> (Though considering I've literally never heard anyone else define "gender" this way, it's more like, "I consider 'cheddar' to refer to only cheese from the Parma region in Italy, and I don't appreciate being asked to lie" and that so many people give different definitions is part of the issue here; but let's set that all aside for now.)
+If we can't talk about that, then your rationality community is a _fraud_. If there's anything at all to your rationality stuff https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LqjKP255fPRY7aMzw/practical-advice-backed-by-deep-theories it should be _useful_ high-stakes pratical decisions that your community members need to make, like _whether or not to cut my dick off_. If we can't talk about the information I need to make an informed decision about that, then your rationalists are worse than useless. (Worse, because false claims to authority are more misleading than dead air.) You _motherfuckers_ need to rebrand, or disband, or be destroyed
+
+I know none of this matters (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
+
+If you don't actually believe in the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes) anymore, you could _say_ that—rebrand your thing as a more narrowly-scoped existential-risk-reduction cult, rather than falsely claiming to be about modeling-and-optimizing the world
+
-----
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
Your faithful student,
Zack M. Davis
+
+For a while, I've been meaning to write up a _different_ multi-thousand word blog post telling the Whole Dumb Story about that—not because it's an interesting story, but because I'll never be able to stop grieving and move on with my life until I get it all out of my system. (Working title: ["A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). Epigraph quote: Zora Neale Hurston, "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.")
+
+It's been hard to write. It _hurts_ to write. It's hard and it hurts because it's not something that _should_ need to be written.
+
+[TODO outlining coda—
+
+We prefer to have a good-faith discussion of ideas in themselves; talking about your interlocutors and speculating about their hidden motives is not what we do
+I tried the good-faith debate thing first. I tried it for years; at some point, you have to jump up a meta level and explain what you think is actually going on
+Since the Whole Dumb Story is longer and harder to write, I hope it's OK if I _briefly_ hit some of the highlights here that are relevant to analyzing Yudkowsky's comments on "speakable" arguments, with the understanding that I might write a longer post later
+
+The Sequences taught me some really important things about sex differences and why not to take my cross-sex fantasies literally; I wrote about this in ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)
+
+The ]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff