-battle stations—
-✓ outline NYT defense/prelude to pronouns
-✓ flesh out prelude to pronouns I
-- flush out prelude to pronouns II
-_ outlining existential stakes and social justice FDT
-- outlining Dolphin War II
-_ flesh out existential stakes and social justice FDT
-_ flesh out Dolphin War II
-
-
dedicated day?—
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
_ psychiatric disaster
✓ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
✓ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
✓ The End (of Sequences)
+_ double-check that "Changing Emotions" was in January
_ No such thing as a tree
_ Yudkowsky on AlphaGo
_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
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://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 Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
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
-
-
+-------
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: "Men aren't women tho."
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words, which could have been three[^contraction]: "Men aren't women tho."
+
+[^contraction]: I think the contraction [_aren't_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aren%27t) counts as one word in this context; the _tho_ (though) can be dropped to get down to three.
+
+Men aren't women! Men aren't women tho!
+
+It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan McCarthy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan McCarthy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
+It is more than a little insulting to be told, after all this, that the problem is that _I_ don't know how to come to a point, rather than everyone in Berkeley not knowing how to accept a point that contradicts their religion. It's such a stupidly simple stonewalling strategy: when the critic makes their point simply (men aren't women! men aren't women tho!), sneer at them for being ontologically confused, and then when they spend years of their life writing up the exhaustively detailed rigorous version, sneer at them for not being able to come to a point.
+Does the elephant in his brain really expect to get away with that? Are Earth people really that gullible?
+------
+
+[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
> 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
+
+And if _you_ don't think you can politically afford to acknowledge your faithful student's proof that 6 + 7 = 13 [(because Stalin doesn't like it when people use the number 13)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), it can feel like safety or self-justification to issue a Pronouncement that the answer to 6 + 7 depends on what base you're working in[^base]; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with your faithful student's allegation that the only reason you're issuing Pronouncements about alternate bases for arithmetic, is to win favor with the Party by standing by and letting them cite you as a credible authority when they claim that 6 + 7 = 15, while thinking yourself "honest" because you've sold yourself a story about how _you_ were just teaching those vile _kulaks_ an important lesson about place–value arithmetic, and never technically said yourself that 6 + 7 = 15 _in base ten_.
+
+[^base]: For example, in base 8, one would write 6 + 7 = 15, where the symbol "15" represents the number **1** · 8<sup>1</sup> + **5** · 8<sup>0</sup>, which is equal to **1** · 10<sup>1</sup> + **3** · 10<sup>0</sup>, which we normally (in base 10) write as "13".
+
+------
> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead. That's woke filter bubble thinking. I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787
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?
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.
+Is that not true?
+
+Can you lie about immediate life for political convenience
+
> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff