The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort
bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
-I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/
+I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/ (not a coincidence that are positions aren't reversed)
Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons
it's naive to think you can win against an egregore 1000 times bigger than you
-MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
-
the Church
-won't you be embarrassed to leave if we create utopia
-
won't all those trans women be embarrassed after the singularity
we live in a world where reason doesn't work
_not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
-I don't think I'm setting my price for joining particularly high here?
-
-if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even on things that don't matter
-
There could be similarly egregious errors that I'm not as sensitive too
I don't think you can build an aligned superintelligence from a culture this crazy
_everyone else shot first_, and I'm _correct on the merits_
competence forcing conclusions: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
-
-language as an AI capability
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions
-
-"the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value. [...] There are many such shards of desire, all different values."
+https://archive.is/nb5rH
analogy to school
I _have_ to keep escalating, because I don't have a choice
-I'm trying to keep the rheotrical emphasis on "tale of personal heartbreak, plus careful analysis of the sociopolitical causes of said heartbreak" rather than "attacking my friends and heros"
-
It shouldn't be a political demand; people should actually process my arguments because they're good arguments
-"Actually, we're Ashkenazi supremacists"
-
James Watson 'aught-seven
Arguing is not a punishment https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/
I will try to be less silly about "my thing is actually important for the world" claims, when what I really mean is that I'm just not a consequentialist about speech
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory
"Outside the Laboratory" dumbness could be selection rather than causal
I don't expect anyone to take a stand for a taboo topic that they don't care about
TWAW is a positive-valence instance of the worst-argument-in-the-world, but it's still the SAME THING; if you can't see that, you're dumb
-[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)
-
I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)
The "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want" argument is bullshit. All the actually-smart people know that it's bullshit at _some_ level, perhaps semi-consciously buried under a lot of cognitive dissonance. But it's _socially load-bearing_ bullshit that _not only_ does almost no one have an incentive to correct—
_Why_ is it humorous? Because you don't like sports? (["Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge))
+It's alarming when someone who shattered all your dreams with logic ten years ago, then turns around and tells you your dreams can be real by definition
+
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1065666629155995648 "The only leaders in the current ecosystem who express any kind of controversial opinion, ever, are organisms that specialize in subsisting on the resource flows produced by expressing that kind of controversial opinion."
if THAT is now too politically contentious to affirm in public, we're DEAD
-http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/ "you yourself admit that your model won't assign literally all of its probability mass to the exact outcome?!"
-
-"category boundaries" were just a visual metaphor for talking about beliefs? There's a little naive Bayes model in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that I can use observations to update my beliefs about category-membership, and use my beliefs about category-membership to predict observations. The set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than p is conveniently visualized as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space, but the beliefs are the important thing.
-
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
-(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/ "you yourself admit that your model won't assign literally all of its probability mass to the exact outcome?!"
"Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info
casuistry
-Schelling: "One must seek, in other words, a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."'— this was basically what I was hoping to do with "Where to Draw The Boundaries?"—I was hoping to get a victory on _just_ the philosophy-of-language part
-
Eliezer's NRx 2013 vs. 2019 takes
In the English language as it is spoken today, third-person singular gender pronouns _do_ have truth conditions. If a stranger crossing your path is rude to you, you'll say, "What's _her_ problem?" or "What's _his_ problem?" depending on your perception of their secondary sex characteristics.
If an Outer Party member in the world of George Orwell's 1984 says, "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," even though they clearly remember events from last week, when Oceania was at war with Eurasia instead [...] even if it's not really their fault
-
> but not worth starting over over
I mean, this is the part where I do a very not Effective Altruist-themed thing, and stop talking as if I do anything for the good of the lightcone. (Maybe see Ben on "Against Responsibility" and "The Humility Argument for Honesty".) I internalized a particular vision [...] of what conduct is appropriate to a "rationalist"; I'm didn't that standard upheld with respect to my Something to Protect; so I am doing a halt–melt–catch-fire on "the community." It's worth starting over over _for me_. If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
the appeal to arbitrariness technically extends in both directions (if there's no rule saying you can't use the word to talk about self-identity, there's no rule saying I can't use the word to talk about sex), but systematically favors one side—sex is a pretty robust abstraction, and there's no reason to deny the appeal of robustness
-https://wnww.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/
-
Inadequate Equilibria!
I'm expressing the same kind of frustration as the Great Teacher complaining about cryo not being standard—my personal benchmark of "sanity" isn't realistic
Julia Serano
-You "can't" define a word any way you want, or you "can"—what actually matters is the math
-
words don't have intrinsic definitions, but the only reason you would want to repurpose an _existing_ word is either becasuse you think you can carve the joints better, or mindfucking
cat/dog gaslighting; even if you don't particularly need that particular classification for a practical purpose, even so ...
Extropians "changing sex is difficult" https://archive.is/En6qW
The _original_ meaning of the word "woman" points to a cluster in
+
+No one is actually surprised in System 1; it's just that the parts of us that talk aren't supposed to believe in psychological sex differences (since before my time—and I still prefer not to believe) or physical sex (since 2015).
+
+Slate Star-power: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/ 1,476 people attended SSC meetups,
+
+not-lying is most usefully constraining when a situation is suspected to be adversarial (if you're trying to hurt someone with your speech, not being allowed to outright make shit up constrains you quite a lot)
+
+to which my attitude is: if your behavior is optimized to respond to political threats, but _not_ optimized to respond to carefully reasoned arguments from your friends, at some point your friends have to stop being your friends and start threatening you politically because you've made it clear from your behavior that _that's all you'll respond to_
+
+I think if the so-called "rationality" community is going to not be FRAUDULENT, we should at LEAST be able to publicly clear up the philosophy-of-language mistake (I DON'T expect a community consensus on gender politics; that would be crazy! I JUST expect public consensus on "You can't define a word any way you want", which was not controversial when Eliezer taught us in 2008)
+
+I'm grateful to [...] for actually helping me, but I feel incredibly betrayed that Scott is playing dumb about philosophy (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore), Eliezer will PRIVATELY admit that he has no objections to my philosophy arguments but is playing dumb about how the things he said in public were incredibly misleading (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore). I have more conversation-bandwidth with Anna because I've been friends with her for 10 years, but Anna doesn't believe in free speech; she'll privately sympathize that it's bad that we're in a situation where political factors are interfering with being able to have an honest public conversation about philosophy, but
+
+> "friendship, supplication and economics"
+
+This whole multi-year drama _should_ have been a three-comment conversation. If we were _actually trying_ to do the systematically-correct-reasoning thing
+
+Random Commenter: Hey, that can't be right—we had a whole Sequence about
+
+Robot cult leaders:
+
+> "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."
+
+Steve said it's funny that Ziz and I are ragequitting over opposite things, and I couldn't help but want to phrase it as "She thinks our institutions are transphobic; I don't think they're transphobic enough"
+
+"I guess an "only delusional people get to self-actualize" equilibrium is better than "no one gets to self-actualize, because the general public wouldn't allow it if they knew the truth" if those _really were_ the only two options
+
+> Katie quoting my comment: "Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\" 01/15/2017
+
+> [I am actively hostile](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600) to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.
+
+; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
+
+genetic heuristic and progressivism
+
+I don't _care_ if the blatantly-misleading statements were carefully worded to permit a true interpretation such that they're not technically "lying."
+
+This situation is _fucked_. I don't care whose "fault" it is. I don't want to "blame" anyone. But as the first step to making things less fucked, I need to _write about the world I see_—and you are, still, a pretty prominent part of my mental universe.
+
+Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal
+
+Heinlein
+
+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.
+
+Ooh, how I wish they'd want me to stay.
+
+[trade arrangments: if that's the world we live in, fine]
+
+that's what makes it so hard: the only thing that actually helped me stop being bitter about school, was exiting the entire social context that made it an issue: once I had a grown-up software job
+it became irrelevant
+I was able to ragequit school (which was claiming to be one thing, education, but I don't think was living up to its marketing message) because I had somewhere else to go
+the obvious analogy here is to ragequit the "rationalist community" (which is claiming ot be one thing, but I don't think is living up to its marketing message)
+but ... that's my entire social circle
+
+If I can't ragequit the community, I have to do the analogue of going to grad school, while hating school—I don't have an exit this time
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity adaptation of the Great Teacher's famous _Harry Potter_ fanfic (Emma Watson having loaned me a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try
+> it's a lens through which you can view many-but-not-all personal dilemmas—"What standard am I holding myself to? Is it high enough?"
+
+see, you're doing this "reasoning about sex differences" thing, and you're allowed to do the reasoning-about-sex-differences thing because you're female. (Same reason Nixon could go to China, and I'm allowed to express gender-identity skepticism.) But since everyone else is required to speak as if gender identity is real and sex differences aren't (because those are the rules for being a good person in Berkeley), we get an equilibrium where discrimination against transfems is a huge Issue
+I'm being incredibly cynical here and it feels awful, but I just ... can't take the things people say literally anymore; I tried, and it drove me crazy
+
+everything anyone says is "true" if the speaker is allowed to define their own category boundaries!
+
+if I'm allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about other people, then those people are also allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about me—not just as a matter of procedural fairness, but "symmetry" in the physics sense (the Rules are universal and don't depend on who "I" am)
+
+"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything." —Daniel Dennett
+
+> "The Choice between Good and Bad," said the Lord of Dark in a slow, careful voice, as though explaining something to a child, "is not a matter of saying 'Good!' It is about deciding which is which."
+
+inside views are just outside views against a finer-grained method of constructing reference classes
+
+["Fear not to touch the best / The truth shall be thy warrant"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
+
+more of my Overcoming-Bias-era sex differences denialism: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Evc7xKXjd4LaRR26c
+
+"Preferences about how other people model you" is very general, though! Lots of people would prefer that others model them as smart and funny and attractive, and feel genuine pain when other people don't see them that way. It might be tempting to say, "Ah! We can alleviate that pain by redefining 'smart' and 'funny' and 'attractive' to include the people who are hurt by not being included in those categories" ... and in the short term, if you only look at the emotional state of the people who are now being acclaimed as smart/funny/attractive who previously weren't, it works. But the reason it works is what, from an AI-design perspective, we would call "wireheading": manipulating the map, not the territory; it works because of equivocating between the old cutoff for smart/funny/attractive (what people were originally sad about not having) and the new, artificially lowered bar (which you'll be happy about meeting if you don't realize that it's not the same as the old cutoff).
+smart transhumanism is about keeping the map as accurate as possible (don't destroy language in order to wirehead ourselves) and then using the accurate map to actually make the territory better (e.g., by developing nootropics and cosmetic surgeries to actually make people smarter/funnier/more-attractive, in real life, and not just by linguistic fiat)
+
+> 'that in 10 to 20 years, every male with some kind of autogynephilia will "transition" if something isn't done stop reverse things. That is about 2-3% of the male population.' https://twitter.com/TransRadically/status/1212102282499829761
+
+getting in repetitive arguments on Discord is a form of culture change maybe????
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/
+
+karaoke "some cis women sing bass"
+
+What I'm up against: "you can have a social context wherein nobody is incentivized to figure out who's deserving of Real Woman Status and who's not."
+
+speaking in Sequences links: in my review of "Origins of Unfairness", the phrase "suggestively named Lisp tokens" just came out
+
+Nice Job Breaking It Hero feels relevant to my about-face on sex differences
+
+If the explanation that predicts your observations makes you unhappy, then the explanation—and the unhappiness—are functioning as designed.
+
+fitness subs: https://np.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/et231b/qt_what_good_reason_is_there_to_allow_tw_to_post/
+
+Discord arguments get _very_ repetitive; I wish there was a way to make progress and move on rather than having to keep yelling.
+
+my Culture War struggle is actually structurally similar to AI alignment: the economy/social-justice provides vast riches in the process of eating your soul. (I can have my hair long, I can get HRT and surgeries—but at the cost of not being able to explain why.)
+
+sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica was outside), because it was what Harry would do (but notably, not Hermione)
+
+playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles
+
+[Discord comment about creating a space where no one questions whether someone deserves real woman status]
+
+
+The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [Arthur Blair](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)—you _actually know the math_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff