-TODO finish before I can vet and ship pt.s 1–3
----------------
-✓ "People ..." introduction
-✓ finish existing 5150 scene scraps
-✓ CCRMC facility note
-✓ footnote about telephone game of "self present"
-✓ interacting with the outpatient program
-✓ Vassar discourse I
-✓ community health check
-✓ Vassar discourse II
-_ Vassar discourse III
-_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence/Cantor/Dreger
-_ asking Anna for promise
-_ ordering DIY hormones
-_ proposed credit-assignment ritual
------
-_ "Roberta" situation
-_ overheating in April, staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase
-_ BABSCon
-_ "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"
-_ chat transcript relevant to War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy
-_ final credit assignment ritual
-_ "Lenore" psychiatric disaster (not in pt.s 1–3, but I want this drafted before I hit Ben and Jessica)
-
-pre-edit phase—
-_ footnote about "density of outright falsehoods"
-_ security code drama?? ("Although, speaking of documenting" 2 March)
-_ integrate 5150 scene scraps into a coherent section
-
-
---------------
-
-from the top editing session— bookmark phrase "With the caveated understanding"
-
-----------------
-
-- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
+slotted TODO blocks—
+✓ psychiatric disaster
+✓ "Agreeing With Stalin" intro recap
+✓ recap of crimes, cont'd
+✓ Dolphin War finish
+✓ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation
+- out of patience email
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
-_ plan to reach out to Rick
-
-- regrets, wasted time, conclusion
-
+_ plan to reach out to Rick / Michael on creepy men/crazy men
_ reaction to Ziz
_ State of Steven
-_ culture off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver
_ complicity and friendship
-_ out of patience email
-_ the hill he wants to die on
-_ recap of crimes, cont'd
-_ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation
-_ Dolphin War finish
+_ repair pt. 5 dath ilan transition
+- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
+
+blocks to fit somewhere—
+_ the hill he wants to die on (insert somewhere in "Standing")
+_ Tail vs. Bailey / Davis vs. Yudkowsky analogy (new block somewhere)
+_ mention that "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
+
+
+
+pt. 3 edit tier—
+_ fullname Taylor and Hoffman at start of pt. 3
+_ footnote clarifying that "Riley" and Sarah weren't core members of the group, despite being included on some emails?
+_ be more specific about Ben's anti-EA and Jessica's anti-MIRI things, perhaps in footnotes
+_ Ben on "locally coherent coordination": use direct quotes for Ben's language—maybe rewrite in my own language (footnote?) as an understanding test
+_ set context for "EA Has a Lying Problem" (written by Sarah, likely with Michael's influence—maybe ask Sarah)
+_ clarify schism (me and Vassar bros leaving the EA/rat borg?)
+_ set context for Anna on first mention in the postq
+_ more specific on "mostly pretty horrifying" and group conversation with the whole house
+_ paragraph to explain the cheerful price bit
+_ cut words from the "Yes Requires" slapfight?
+_ better introduction of Steven Kaas
+_ "Not the Incentives"—rewrite given that I'm not shielding Ray
+_ cut many words from "Social Reality" scuffle
+_ is "long May 2020" link still good?
+_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier
+_ Ben's "financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp" claim may be false
+_ later thoughts on jump to evaluation, translating between different groups' language
+_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
+_ examples of "bitter and insulting" comments about rationalists
+_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (if people want to read them, they can click through)
+_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+_ cut words from NRx denouncement Jessica discussion
+_ "I" statements
+_ we can go stronger than "I definitely don't think Yudkowsky _thinks of himself_ as having given up on Speech _in those words_"
+_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it)
+_ cut lots of words from December 2019 blogging spree
+_ in a footnote, defend the "cutting my dick off" rhetorical flourish
+_ choice quotes in "end of the Category War" thank you note
+_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
+_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
+_ mention "Darkest Timeline" and Skyrms somewhere
+
+pt. 4 edit tier—
+_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
+_ revise and cut words from "bad faith" section since can link to "Assume Bad Faith"
+_ cut words from January 2020 Twitter exchange (after war criminal defenses)
+_ revise reply to Xu
+_ cut lots of words from Scotts comments on Jessica's MIRI post (keep: "attempting to erase the agency", Scott blaming my troubles on Michael being absurd)
+
+pt. 5 edit tier—
+_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrong—obviously the wrong play
+_ "as Soares pointed out" needs link
+_ can I rewrite to not bury the lede on "intent doesn't matter"?
+_ also reference "No such thing as a tree" in Dolphin War section
+_ better brief explanation of dark side epistemology
+_ "deep causal structure" argument needs to be crystal clear, not sloopy
+_ it's a relevant detail whether the optimization is coming from Nate
+_ probably cut the vaccine polarization paragraphs? (overheard at a party is not great sourcing, even if technically admissible)
+_ elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers
+_ Scott got comas right in the same year as "Categories"
+_ cite Earthling/postrat sneers
+_ cite postYud Tweet
------
With internet available—
-_ find the part of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ with the AGP telepathy!!
+_ Earthing/postrat sneers
+_ Is http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/be-a-charity-angel.html the best link for after-the-fact prize funding?
+_ P(doom)
_ Michael on OB in 'aught-eight on smart kids internalizing rules meant for the norm of reaction of a dumber population
_ Tweet from Dreger
_ when were Meeker Four out on bail? how long would they otherwise be held?
_ double-check EnyeWord in archive.is?
_ Eliezerfic fight: where did the super-AIDS example fit in cronologically?
_ Keltham/Peranza exam answer should link specific tags
-_ Susan Fenimore Cooper
_ IQ 143 cite
_ double-check "the mood I thought dath ilan was missing" link target
_ double-check "the power that could not be removed" quote
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
-_ make sure I mention father asking me to wait before re-starting HRT
-_ rename "Trent" again (collision with vaticidalprophet Trent)
-_ "People": say something about the awkward racial/political dynamics of three of my four anecdotes being about black people? Salient because rare? Salient because of my NRx-pilling?
+_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
+_ Caliphate / craft and the community
+_ colony ship happiness lie in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWaJvBMb9HGBwtNqd/qualitative-strategies-of-friendliness
+_ re being fair to abusers: thinking about what behavior pattern you would like to see, generally, by people in your situation, instead of privileging the perspective and feelings of people who've made themselves vulnerable to you by transgressing against you
+_ body odors comment
+_ worry about hyperbole/jumps-to-evaluation; it destroys credibility
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment
_ Christmas with Scott: mention the destruction of "voluntary"?
_ Christmas with Scott: mention the grid of points?
-_ psych ward vs. psych hospital
-_ "A Hill": I claim that I'm not doing much psychologizing because implausible to be simultaenously savvy enough to say this, and naive enough to not be doing so knowingly
_ dath ilan as a whining-based community
_ footnote to explain that when I'm summarizing a long Discord conversation to taste, I might move things around into "logical" time rather than "real time"; e.g. Yudkowsky's "powerfully relevant" and "but Superman" comments were actually one right after the other; and, e.g., I'm filling in more details that didn't make it into the chat, like innate kung fu; and that the fact that I can "enhance" the summaries of my part, but the people I'm talking to don't have the same privilege, should be taken into account—actually, this covers a lot of the memoir; maybe I should mention this earlier (and again in a footnote??)
_ 93's alternate theory of eliezera taste for deception
_ Ruby fight: "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
_ "Even our pollution is beneficial" [pt. 6]
_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science [pt. 6]
-_ Re: on legitimacy and the entrepreneur; or, continuing the attempt to spread my sociopathic awakening onto Scott [pt. 2 somewhere]
-_ running away to Burlingame; Hamilton tickets
-_ include Wilhelm "Gender Czar" conversation? [pt. 2]
_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
_ Anna's heel–face turn
-_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016
_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
_ Brian Skyrms??
-_ psych ward [pt. 2]
-_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence [pt. 2]
-_ HRT (non-)effects, and quitting [pt. 2]
_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
_ meeting with Ray
-_ need to mention Brent's pariah status
-_ be clearer about dates in "Wilhelm" conversations??
-_ "people with fragile identities" dialogue doesn't fit the flow, probably cut or move
-_ "maximize the number of trans ppl" conversation should briefly sample the guy's bogus conjunction of arguments
_ is the Glowfic author "Lintamande ... they" or "Lintamande ... she"?
_ explain plot of _Planecrash_ better
_ CfAR's AI pivot??
_ example of "steelman before criticize" norm
_ explain mods protect-feelings
_ explain MOPs better
-_ also had back-and-forth with "Noreen" on 8 Feb in Rob's thread!!
_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
-_ what exactly goes in the December 2019 blogging spree §?
-_ "Noreen" discussion needs to cover the part where I'd cause less disruption if I transitioned
-_ "Noreen"'s girlfriend definitely needs to be mentioned
-_ get exact dates and correct Sequencing on late 2016 conversations
-_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
_ probably give Amelia as pseudonym?
-_ re Persongen, footnote or sentences about how I knew I was wrong to use naïve-Bayes on facets, but I didn't know what was right
_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
_ clarify Sarah dropping out of the coordination group
_ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not
_ New York NRx conversation, flesh out "mostly guys"; I was acknowleding diversity as unrealistic and hypocritical; he outright doesn't believe in "people" as opposed to men/women
_ fold in observations from "trapped priors—at home"
_ earlier reference the children's books?! "And the Methods of Pre-Rationality"
-_ "Do not ask for additional services" doxxable? revise?
_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
_ "typographical attack surface" isn't clear
_ voting reputation section is weak, needs revision
-_ edit "still published under a pseudonym" remark in "A Hill"
_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
_ D. also acknowledged AGP
_ "no one else would have spoken" should have been a call-to-action to read more widely
-_ explain who Kay Brown is
-_ "Great Common Task" is probably capitalized
_ mention Will MacAskill's gimped "longtermism" somehow
_ re-read a DALL-E explanation and decide if I think it's less scary now
_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821
_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
-_ mention my "trembling hand" history with secrets, not just that I don't like it
-_ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to as part of December 2019 blogging streak
-_ It's not clear anyone he usually respects was making this mistake; it seems likely that the original thread was subtweeting Eric Weinstein, who was not making this mistake
+_ Bostrom email scandal, Oli's comment about him staying off of the pause letter
_ "I Wish You Well" as breakup song
-_ the function of privacy norms is to protect you from people who want to selectively reveal information to hurt you, so it makes sense that I'm particularly careful about Yudkowsky's privacy and not Scott's, because I totally am trying to hurt Yudkowsky (this also protects me from the charge that by granting more privacy to Yudkowsky than Scott, I'm implying that Yudkowsky said something more incriminating; the difference in treatment is about _me_ and my expectations, rather than what they may or may not have said when I tried emailing them); I want it to be clear that I'm attacking him but not betraying him
_ acknowledge that
_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
_ at some point, speculate on causes of brain damage
_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general ("Let's say that the true level of negativity"), does that seriously undermine my thesis, or does it only merit a footnote?
-_ 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"
+_ 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
_ consistent-ize reference to Somni getting it in pt. 4, with mention of protest in pt. 3
_ 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
+_ explains that the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from conversation with Ben
_ 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
_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
-_ clarify why Michael thought Scott was "gaslighting" me, include "beeseech bowels of Christ"
-_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
-_ explain "court ruling" earlier
_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ first EY contact was asking for public clarification or "I am being silenced" (so Glomarizing over "unsatisfying response" or no response isn't leaking anything Yudkowksy cares about)
-_ Nov. 2018 continues thread from Oct. 2016 conversation
-_ better explanation of posse formation
_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
-_ mention Nov. 2018 conversation with Ian somehow; backref on bidding for attention again; subject line from Happy Price 2016
_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
-_ mention the fact that Anna had always taken a "What You Can't Say" strategy
-_ late 2016 meeting with Ziz
_ when to use first _vs. last names
-_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
-_ better summary of Littman
_ explain Rob
_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics?
-_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
_ why doesn't he apply his anti-optimism to his gender statements?!
_ notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
_ contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
_ archive.is karma history for Jessica's post
_ "tossed in a bucket" is ignoring advice from Sept. 2022 clarification to be clear about the type distinction
-_ explicitly explain "Hill of Validity" title inversion
_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
_ update "80,000 words" refs with the near-final wordcount
_ the "outright bad faith" clause in "Your Price for Joining"
-_ less afraid of hurting O.
-_ secret posse member pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
+_ mention "special simulator attention" in cxn with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference
+_ born five years too early
+_ you didn't do a good job explaining to me why someone would think that being bullied into selective silence doesn't constitute a conflict strategy
+_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016??
+_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
+_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
_ update "karma at press time"
_ better explain "lie inflation" ambiguity
_ Facing Reality
_ backlink Yudkowsky's implicit political concession
_ backlink "again grateful" for doctor's notes
+pt. 1½ posterity tier (probably not getting published)—
+_ "People": say something about the awkward racial/political dynamics of three of my four anecdotes being about black people? Salient because rare? Salient because of my NRx-pilling?
+_ Re: on legitimacy and the entrepreneur; or, continuing the attempt to spread my sociopathic awakening onto Scott [pt. 2 somewhere]
+_ include Wilhelm "Gender Czar" conversation? [pt. 2]
+_ emailing Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence [pt. 2]
+
+
+
terms to explain on first mention—
_ inpatient/outpatient
_ NRx
_ eliezera
+
+
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
-_ Tail (pt. 2 AGP discussion)
_ Iceman
-_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
-_ "Wilhelm" (not leaking info about his identity, and damage to him if info was leaked)
_ Scott
-_ Anna
-_ "Noreen"
-_ secret posse member
-_ "Chaya" (pseudonym choice)
-_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
_ hostile prereader (April—if not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
_ Kelsey
_ NRx Twitter bro
_ afford various medical procedures
_ Buck? (get the story about Michael being escorted from events)
_ A/a alumna??
-_ Sarah (name mention, whether to name conversation)
_ Ray
_ Ruby
_ Kay Brown?? (assuming I include the delusional emails to her)
Friend of the blog Ninety-Three has been nagging me about my pathetic pacing—looking at the diffs of my wordcount spreadsheet, I have four thousand-word days in January, two in February, and two in March (which is half-over). He ... has a point. With no dayjob and no responsibilities, four-figure wordcount days should be normal, something that happens four times a week, not four times a month.
--------
-
-It might actually make sense for this to get split into eight parts??—I'm going to finish the five-part draft first before doing any more splitting. But—
-
-Here's where we stand now—
-
-24K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-21K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-31K Standing Under the Same Sky
------
-115K
-
-What if that became something more like—
-19K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-10K My Recent Madness (working title)
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-18K Dignity (working title)
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
- 3K Epilogue (working title)
------
-139K
-
-If I did this, I would need three more good (non-working) titles and epigraph quotes. For epigraphs, I'm thinking—
-My Recent Madness—Zoolander "crazy pills" quote
-Dignity—it has all been said before, but you must say it again
-Epilogue—the truth is great and shall prevail
-
-... I don't think I want to go to eight parts, though—that's way too self-indulgent! (I think I can go to six, because the dath ilan discussion actually is long and separable; I probably don't need a separate epilogue-post.) If one of my existing parts runs over 30K words, that's strong evidence that it can be cut.
-
-30K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-20K Dignity (working title)
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
----
-139K
-
-—which implies that I'm 25 double-digit writing days away, such that finishing a gapless ms. in April is at least thinkable ... but only if I stop daydreaming and get to work.
-
-17K Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-13K People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks
-23K A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-30K If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
-16K Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-20K Zevi's Choice
-20K Standing Under the Same Sky
----
-139K
-
-
-------
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
> 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
+The fact that I flipped out at Nate's dolphin thing was a misplay on my part, but it generated more Twitter discussion (including Eliezer's "never told anyone to go trans" remarks and Vorobey's comments) makes it a "win" for the cause even if I was out of line? My freaking out was "rational".
But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
+https://twitter.com/avorobey/status/1404769388969054210
+
> 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://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+At least I don't have to link the rebuttal myself every time:
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38755.html
+https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10vx6gk/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/j7k8fjc/
+
------
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.
(Terrorism wouldn't work)
-Sep 27 text to "Chaya"—
+Sep 27 text to "Rebecca"—
In theory, the bad influence could go both ways: first, successful playdate, then I mention to A. afterwards (not before) that C. is actually a boy and I think it's crazy everyone is pretending otherwise (which remark is out of their censorship jurisdiction); then if C. wants a repeat with new friend (far from guaranteed, but plausible), it's not your fault if A. leaks information of her own will ...
> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
(180 comments)
-the other week, "Chaya" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+the other week, "Rebecca" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
Seems significant in light of Jack blaming me for sleep nagging with "Lenore"
-My crazy verbosity: "when I asked what were the ways he thought I could help" → "when I asked how I could help" (cut 5 words)
+My crazy verbosity: "when I asked 'what were the ways he thought' I could help" → "when I asked 'how' I could help" (cut 5 words)
+"they 'don't know how to interpret observations of' someone not buying it" → "they're 'incapable of seeing' someone not buying it (cut 4 words)
"Circling" meta-trainwreck was weeks before appealing to Said to critique Jessica's thing; in retrospect, that was probably causal (even if I wasn't thinking at the time, "I wouldn't be emailing Said if it weren't for that trainwreck thread)
> Dear Suzanne Martin & Albert Lee—please learn auction theory; it will help you actually be an effective altruist, which is something your currently not trying to do, but which you'll realize was important later. I have the honor to be, your obedient servant,
> Zack M. Davis
-(I had promised my father to wait a month after my psych ward ordeal to re-start HRT, but I [would restart](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/).)
\ No newline at end of file
+(I had promised my father to wait a month after my psych ward ordeal to re-start HRT, but I [would restart](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/).)
+
+ * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
+
+To the extent that I was seeing things that weren't there, it was a matter of misinterpreting actual sensory inputs rather than having de novo hallucinations.
+
+What I thought was a dog turd inside the kitchen actually turned out to be a cork.
+
+When I was borrowing someone's computer, I thought I saw an icon peek out from the side of the screen, as if a possibly-malevolent agent were spying on me—a disturbing visual hallucination. Later that year, when trying out the stock Ubuntu Unity desktop on my new computer, I discovered that the app-notification animation actually does feature an app icon "sliding out" and shaking, like I remembered seeing—I wasn't imagining it!
+
+I remember seeing text on my phone and being distinctly convinced that it was misspelled. Five years later, looking at the distorted lettering output by text-to-image models that can't spell seemed subjectively similar. (Good news for alignment, if it looks like deep learning and sleep-deprived human brains are doing "the same thing"?)
+
+[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
+
+ * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
+ *
+
+> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+
+> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
+
+> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
+
+ * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
+
+activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+(link to Moldbug on 20 year fashion flowing from academia)
+> I do not think a sane society could deal with 3% of males transitioning [...] I can't quite visualize what such a world would look like
+me—
+> It looks like my social circle. (This is why I'm worried about suboptimal social norms getting locked in for the wrong reasons—what's fashionable in Berkeley in year X is likely to be mainstream in year X+20.)
+
+
+
+[something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019
+
+as long as energy is conserved.
+
+I conflated "feminist" with the kind of woman I want
+
+https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/
+my moral compass puts me to the right of the politically vocal tech nerds, especially the more androgynous type of tech nerd
+
+(There had been a moment during my psych imprisonment the other month, when I had noticeable diffculty dialing a phone. I was still a _person_, even when not all of my usual cognitive abilities were online.)
+
+The fact that I ghosted on music lessons from "Tricky" for being nonbinary, is an example of phenotypic capture ruining everything
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1668419201101615105
+
+> As usual, I got there first and solved the relatively easy philosophy problems, so the sensible people have nothing to talk about, and the unsensible ones can't just use my answer sheet.
+
+(I thought about apologizing if some of the content was "weird" or offensive, but I figured if you've been a professional editor for 15 years and list memoirs as a specialty, you've probably seen everything.)
+
+After this, the AI situation is looking worrying enough, that I'm thinking I should try to do some more direct xrisk-reduction work, although I haven't definitely selected any particular job or project. (It probably won't matter, but it will be dignified.) Now that the shape of the threat is on the horizon, I think I'm less afraid of being directly involved. Something about having large language models to study in the 'twenties is—grounding, compared to the superstitious fears of the paperclip boogeyman of my nightmares in the 'teens.
+
+Like all intellectuals, as a teenager I imagined that I would write a book. It was always going to be about gender, but I was vaguely imagining a novel, which never got beyond vague imaginings. That was before the Sequences. I'm 35 years old now. I think my intellectual life has succeeded in ways I didn't know how to imagine, before. I think my past self would be proud of this blog—140,000 words of blog posts stapled together is _morally_ a book—once he got over the shock of heresy.
+
+[TODO conclusion, cont'd—
+ * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+ * even young smart AGPs who can appreciate my work have still gotten pinkpilled
+ * Jonah had told me that my planning horizon was too short—like the future past a year wasn't real to me. (This plausibly also explains my impatience with college.) My horizon is starting to broaden as AI timelines shorten
+ * less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
+]
+
+> Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids! The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless, folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and your shame! Said Achmiz in his felon stripes stands far above you now, and Said Achmiz _dead_ will live on, immortal in the race he died to free! Kill him!
+>
+> —[Voltairine de Cleyre](https://praxeology.net/VC-SS.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+[TODO—early 2023 moderation drama
+ * In early 2023, I was trying to finish up this memoir, but while procrastinating on that, I ended up writing a few other posts for _Less Wrong_; I thought the story of my war with the "rationalists" was relevantly "over"; I didn't anticipate things getting any "worse"
+ * I happened to see that Duncan Sabien's "Basics of Rationalists Discourse" was published
+ * Backstory: Sabien is a former CfAR employee whose Facebook posts I had used to comment on. He had a history of getting offended over things that I didn't think were important—all the way back to our very first interaction in 2017 (I remember being in Portland using Facebook/Messenger on my phone)
+
+ ...
+
+ * I was reluctant to ping Oli (the way I pung Babcock and Pace) because I still "owed" him for the comment on "Challenges", but ultimately ended up sending a Twitter DM just after the verdict (when I saw that he had very-recent reply Tweets and was thus online); I felt a little bit worse about that one (the "FYI I'm at war"), but I think I de-escalated OK and he didn't seem to take it personally
+
+ ...
+
+ * Said is braver than me along some dimensions; the reason he's in trouble and I'm not, even though we were both fighting with Duncan, is that I was more "dovish"—when Duncan attacked, I focused on defense and withheld my "offensive" thoughts; Said's points about Duncan's blocking psychology were "offensive"
+
+ ...
+
+ * I'm proud of the keeping-my-cool performance when Duncan was mad at me, less proud of my performance fighting for Said so far
+
+ ...
+
+ * In the Ruby slapfight, I was explicit about "You shouldn't be making moderation decisions based on seniority"—this time, I've moved on to just making decisions based on seniority; if we're doing consequentialism based on how to attract people to the website, it's clear that there are no purer standards left to appeal to
+]
+
+insane religious fantatics who "merely" want heretics to know their place (as opposed to wanting to hurt or exile them) are still insane religious fanatics.
+
+A hill of validity in defense of meaning.
+
+playing a Dagny Taggart strategy: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+-------
+
+I actually thought, "It's so weird to have the psychological upper hand over Vasar" ... I can see a possible story where we was unnerved that I was holding my own in the email argument, so he switched venues to in-person
+
+I _do_ think about psych warfare sometimes (like with Ray)
+
+A possible counterargument to that would be that (at a minimum for many people in many contexts), emotion can't be effectively faked.
+
+I get better criticism from 93, in that he tells me that my ideas are full of shit without making it personal
+
+> No I think there's a case for this approach. Like you see the argument for why you might want to be laboriously fair to Yud because it's important that no one dismiss your complaints on the grounds of "I dunno, doesn't seem fair enough for me".
+> Whereas doing that for every random person you mention would be a lot of work.
+
+I never got an answer to why it was wrong for me to talk to Scott!! And the contradiction between that, and Ben's emphasis on privacy being unjust!
+
+It would have been a lot simpler if you could _just_ make object-level criticisms: "'yelling' is a tendentious description, from our perspective we were arguing passionately"—rather than first
+
+If someone ran over a pedestrian in their car, at the trial you would actually argue about how culpable they are (if they were drunk, it would be worse than if it could be proven to be a freak accident), and "The victim is so much worse off than you!!" isn't actually an argument relevant to determination of culpability
+
+
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" said that it was a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the traditional (_i.e._, evolutionarily stable) strategies of relating had been relabeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous woman I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a dab of patriarchy works better than none.
+
+https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/should-we-fear-ai-james-w-phillips-and-eliezer-yudkowsky-in-conversation/
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1680166329209466881
+> I am increasingly worried about what people start to believe in after they stop believing in Me
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683659276471115776
+> from a contradiction one may derive anything, and this is especially true of contradicting Eliezer Yudkowsky
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683694475644923904
+> I don't do that sort of ridiculous drama for the same reason that Truman didn't like it. I don't have that kind of need to be at the center of the story, that I'd try to make the disaster be about myself.
+
+
+
+------
+
+I'm thinking that for controversial writing, it's not enough to get your friends to pre-read, and it's not enough to hire a pro editor, you probably also need to hire a designated "hostile prereader"
+
+
+
+--------
+
+[revision comment]
+
+The fifth- through second-to-last paragraphs of the originally published version of this post were bad writing on my part.
+
+I was summarizing things Ben said at the time that felt like an important part of the story, without adequately
+
+I've rewritten that passage. Hopefully this version is clearer.
+
+---------
+
+[reply to Wei]
+
+
+----------
+
+Ben explained: Yudkowsky had set in motion a marketing machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on the claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he, almost uniquely, was not. "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically. If the claim was true, it was important to make, and to actually extract that labor.
+
+But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If, after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to either live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built, then we had a right to talk about what we thought was going on.
+
+This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
+
+Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my short story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the initial intent, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't survive long-term in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry (instead of playing savvy power games) to live, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+
+-----
+
+I mostly kept him blocked on Twitter (except when doing research for this document) to curb the temptation to pick fights, but I unblocked him in July 2023 because it was only fair to let him namesearch my promotional Tweet of pt. 2, which named him. I then ended up replying to a thread with him and Perry Metzinger, but only because I was providing relevant information, similar to how I had left a few "Less Wrong reference desk"-style messages in Eliezerfic in 2023
+
+it got 16 Likes
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1682100362357121025
+
+I miss this Yudkowsky—
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why
+> I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary. In fact I try to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I have achieved acceptance in my tribe. When my brain begins thinking something that generates a sense of high status within the tribe, I stop thinking that thought.
+
+----
+
+I thought I should have avoided the 2022 Valinor party to avoid running into him, but I did end up treating him in a personality-cultish way when I was actually there
+
+"Ideology is not the movement" had specifically listed trans as a shibboleth
+
+https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1684947017502433281
+> Keir Starmer agrees that a woman is an adult human female. Will Ed Davey also rejoin the real world, science & the English language by reversing his view that a woman can "quite clearly" have a penis? Inability to face reality in small things bodes ill for more serious matters.
+
+Analysis of my writing mistake
+https://twitter.com/shroomwaview/status/1681742799052341249
+
+------
+
+I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit "Arcadia" again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
+
+I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
+
+The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to "Arcadia". There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the "Arcadia" edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
+
+The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
+
+At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
+
+It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the purview of my double-dog promise.
+
+There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
+
+> even making a baby ML dude who's about to write a terrible paper hesitate for 10 seconds and _think of the reader's reaction_ seems like a disimprovement over status quo ante.
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/1006685798227267736
+
+Also, the part where I said it amounted to giving up on intellectual honesty, and he put a check mark on it
+
+The third LW bookset is called "The Carving of Reality"? Did I have counterfactual influence on that (by making that part of the sequences more memetically salient, as opposed to the "categories are made for man" strain)?
+
+Yudkowsky on EA criticism contest
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HyHCkK3aDsfY95MoD/cea-ev-op-rp-should-engage-an-independent-investigator-to?commentId=kgHyydoX5jT5zKqqa
+
+Yudkowsky says "we" are not to blame for FTX, but wasn't early Alameda (the Japan bitcoint arbitrage) founded as an earn-to-give scheme, and recrutied from EA?
+
+https://twitter.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355639903080691
+> [SBF] wanted to build a machine—a growing sphere of influence that could break past the walls of that little office in Berkeley and wash over the world as a force for good. Not just a company, but a monument to effective altruism.
+
+Scott November 2020: "I think we eventually ended up on the same page"
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38799.html#msg38799
+
+SK on never making a perfectly correct point
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P3FQNvnW8Cz42QBuA/dialogue-on-appeals-to-consequences#Z8haBdrGiRQcGSXye
+
+Scott on puberty blockers, dreadful: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes
+
+https://jdpressman.com/2023/08/28/agi-ruin-and-the-road-to-iconoclasm.html
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould
+> there comes a point in self-deception where it becomes morally indistinguishable from lying. Consistently self-serving scientific "error", in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud.
+
+https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309037/eliezer-yudkowsky/
+> "I expected to be a tiny voice shouting into the void, and people listened instead. So I doubled down on that."
+
+-----
+
+bullet notes for Tail analogy—
+ * My friend Tailcalled is better at science than me; in the hours that I've wasted with personal, political, and philosophical writing, he's actually been running surveys and digging into statistical methodology.
+ * As a result of his surveys, Tail was convinced of the two-type taxonomy, started /r/Blanchardianism, &c.
+ * Arguing with him resulted in my backing away from pure BBL ("Useful Approximation")
+ * Later, he became disillusioned with "Blanchardians" and went to war against them. I kept telling him he _is_ a "Blanchardian", insofar as he largely agrees with the main findings (about AGP as a major cause). He corresponded with Bailey and became frustrated with Bailey's ridigity. Blanchardians market themselves as disinterest truthseekers, but a lot of what they're actually doing is providing a counternarrative to social justice.
+ * There's an analogy between Tail's antipathy for Bailey and my antipathy for Yudkowsky: I still largely agree with "the rationalists", but the way especially Yudkowsky markets himself as a uniquely sane thinker
+
+Something he said made me feel spooked that he knew something about risks of future suffering that he wouldn't talk about, but in retrospect, I don't think that's what he meant.
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
+> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff