-near editing tier—
-✓ scan through "far editing tier" list and scoot anything applicable to the near editing tier
-✓ explain that "A Human's Guide to Words" / 37 Ways are the same text
-✓ explain the title
-✓ happy price subject line in pt. 1
-✓ incentives of gatekeeping and system-mandated lies
-✓ explain back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era
-✓ smooth out "still had his email" callback
-✓ better summary of Littman
-✓ clarify that I'm not a sex work prohibitionist
-✓ Autoheterosexual as secondary literature
-
-_ scan through pt. 1½ and extract highlights to include
-
-pt. 1—
-_ say more about why omit pt. 1½
-_ "Margaret" discussion needs to cover the part where I'd cause less disruption if I transitioned
-_ so embarrassed after the Singularity
-_ mention HRT pause / stop in pt. 1 end
-
-pt. 2—
-_ explain Michael's gaslighting charge, using the "bowels of Christ" language
-_ 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
-_ mention my "trembling hand" history with secrets, not just that I don't like it
-_ Eric Weinstein, who was not making this mistake
-_ "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
-
-
-------
-_ mention "special simulator attention" in cxn with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference
-_ pt. 1 end needs to mention BABSCon (back referenced)
-_ 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
-_ psych ward vs. psych hospital
-_ running away to Burlingame; Hamilton tickets
-_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016??
-_ "people with fragile identities" dialogue doesn't fit the flow, probably cut or move
-_ get exact dates and correct Sequencing on late 2016 conversations
+_ comment to lc
+_ bully Jeff Ladish
+_ finish pt. 5
+_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
+_ solicit red team pt. 5
+_ solicit pro edit pt. 5
+_ apply red team pt. 5
+_ apply pro edit pt. 5
+
+✓ consult Tail
+
+_ consult David Xu
+_ psychiatric disaster private doc
+
+pt. 5 edit tier—
+✓ sucking Scott's dick is helpful because he's now the main gateway instead of HPMOR
+_ Previously-on summary
+_ graf about Christiano could use a rewrite
+_ Dolphin War: after "never been published", insert "still citing it" graf
+_ Dolphin War: simplify sentence structure around "by cherry-picking the features"
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment in Dolphin War https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary
+_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrong—obviously the wrong play
+_ Meghan Murphy got it down to four words
+_ Dolphin War needs more Twitter links: "as Soares pointed out" needs link, "threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum" (probably screenshot), tussling
+_ replace anti-black joke with misogynist joke?
+_ end of voting conversation needs links
+_ 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
+_ revise reply to Xu
+_ cite Earthling/postrat sneers
+_ cite postYud Tweet
+_ 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)
+_ Sarah's point that Scott gets a lot of undeserved deference, too: https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1435609950303162370
+_ clarify that Keltham infers there are no mascochists, vs. Word of God
+_ "Doublethink" ref in Xu discussion should mention that Word of God Eliezerfic clarification that it's not about telling others
+_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray/comment/git7xaE2aHfSZyLzL
+_ "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
+_ the hill he wants to die on
+_ humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
+_ Leeroy Jenkins Option
+_ consult 93 about Jessica's dramapost §
+_ historical non-robot-cult rationality wisdom
+_ work in the "some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other"
+_ finale: mention that I'm not doing the dumb reversed-stupidity thing
+_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
+_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
+_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
+_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
-_ 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
-_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
-_ address the "maybe it's good to be called names" point from "Hill" thread
-_ better explanation of posse formation
-_ explain why I'm not being charitable in 2018 thread analysis, that at the time, I thought it had to be a mistake
-
-
-
-people to consult specifically before pt. 1–3:
-sent, need approval for pt. 1-2—
-✓ Tail (AGP discussion)
-✓ Anna
-✓ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
-✓ "Riley"
-✓ Scott
-- professional editor
-- "Thomas"
-- "Rebecca"
-- Sarah
+_ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+_ "List of Lethalities" mentioning quantilizers + https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704 + https://twitter.com/paulfchristiano/status/1301992757007847425
+_ screenshot Xu thread
+
+
+Vassar et al.—
+✓ "What You Can't Say"
+✓ reached out to Garrison Lovely
+✓ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
+✓ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
+✓ elided Sasha disaster (new)
+✓ Ben publish "Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation" doc?
+✓ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+✓ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight), or calling Ruby a MOP
+✓ what should I say to Iceman? https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1730025195413410129
+✓ footnote about FTX
+✓ revision of "yelling" description
+
+
+pt. 3–5 prereaders—
+_ Iceman
+_ Anna
+_ Said
+_ Joel
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
+_ Steven Kaas
+_ David Xu
+_ Ray
+_ Ruby
+_ Alicorner #drama ("Is anyone interested in offering political advice or 'hostile advice'")
-to write—
-_ Sophia
-_ "Margaret"
+-------
-to send (Discord) only needed for pt. 2—
-_ Alicorn
+later prereaders—
+_ afford various medical procedures
+slotted TODO blocks for pt. 6 and dath ilan ancillary—
+- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
+_ Keltham's section in dath ilan ancillary
+_ objections and replies in dath ilan ancillary
+_ kitchen knife section in dath ilan ancillary
-----------------
+pt. 6 edit tier—
+_ coach suggests, "Arguably this doesn't count as punishment for the same reason we don't say we're "punishing" a rabid animal by euthanizing it: it's not about disincentivizing the behaviour."
-_ "Lenore" psychiatric disaster
-- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
-_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
-_ plan to reach out to Rick
+dath ilan ancillary tier—
+_ Who are the 9 most important legislators called?
+_ collect Earth people sneers
+_ what kind of person wants to delete history? History would tell you
+_ psyops don't require people taking them seriously, only that they make people think the govenment is doing psyops
+_ the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is general; can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
+_ "telling people things would be meddling" moral needs work; obvious objection is that different rules apply to Keepers
+_ "obligate" is only Word of God, right?—I should probably cite this
+_ damnatio memoriae is traditionally a punishment
-- regrets, wasted time, conclusion
-_ 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
------
With internet available—
-_ define ersatz
-_ link to my Facebook post for Coming Out Day
-_ "All You Zombies"
-_ links to PA hospitals
-_ link to my Facebook posts on Azkaban, prematuring conceding the bet, and correcting the bet record
-_ what did the comments on my Pittsburg/Azkaban post say?
-_ check that the Feb. Blanchard Tweet is the one with the screenshot-quote
-_ link to Kevin Hsu and James Cantor
+_ 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
_ 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
_ lc on elves and Sparashki
_ Michael Bailey's new AGP in women study
_ footnote "said that he wishes he'd never published"
-_ replace "Oh man oh jeez" Rick & Morty link
-_ Nevada bona fides
_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
_ double-check correctness of Keltham-on-paternalism link
_ Arbital TDT explanation
_ find Sequences cite "if you don't know how your AI works, that's bad"
_ cover reply to my initial conspiracy complaint about dath ilan?
-_ "not hard to find": link to more /r/itsafetish-like anecdotes
-_ compile ancillary KP doctor's notes page and linky
_ acknowledging Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's decision theory contributions
_ go back and read all the masochism tags: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
-_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
_ footnote about Scott writing six times faster than me
_ include Eric Weinstein in archive.is spree
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
-_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
-_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
+
+
far editing tier—
-_ Caliphate / craft and the community
+_ You cannot comprehend it, I cannot comprehend it
+_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
_ 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
-_ "Density in Thingspace" comment
-_ Christmas with Scott: mention the destruction of "voluntary"?
-_ Christmas with Scott: mention the grid of points?
+_ worry about hyperbole/jumps-to-evaluation; it destroys credibility
_ 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]
+_ "Even our pollution is beneficial"
+_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science
_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
_ Anna's heel–face turn
_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
-_ Brian Skyrms??
_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
-_ meeting with Ray
_ 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
-_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
-_ probably give Amelia as pseudonym?
_ 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
-_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
_ re "EY is a fraud": it's a _conditional_ that he can modus tollens if he wants
_ NRx point about HBD being more than IQ, ties in with how I think the focus on IQ is distasteful, but I have political incentives to bring it up
_ "arguing for a duty to self-censorship"—contrast to my "closing thoughts" email
-_ explain Amelia Davis Ford ref
-_ 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"
_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
-_ "typographical attack surface" isn't clear
-_ voting reputation section is weak, needs revision
-_ 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
-_ mention Will MacAskill's gimped "longtermism" somehow
+_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
_ 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"
_ 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)
-_ illustrate "student dysphoria is worse" with anecdote about leaving physics class and going to the counselor to see if I could graduate earlier?
-_ hate for secrecy probably correlates with autogynephilia blogging
-_ 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?
_ 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
-_ 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)
_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
-_ 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
-_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ maybe quote Michael's Nov 2018 texts?
-_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
-_ when to use first _vs. last names
-_ 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?
_ 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
-_ "Common Interest of Many Causes" and "Kolmogorov Complicity" offer directly contradictory strategies
_ Vassar's about-face on gender
_ better introduction of S.K.
-_ risk of people bouncing off progressivism
_ an AGP teen boy could at least consent to transition, and make plans based on knowing what the thing is (you'd actually want to go through a little bit of male puberty)
-_ 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
_ 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"
-_ "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
+_ 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??
+
+_ 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 condemning Emperor Norton Conspiracy
-_ backlink AGP in women post (time permitting) in pt. 2 "don't think it's the same thing"
-_ backlink "I've decided to drop the pseudonym" to pen name drop post
-_ backlink (/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/)
-_ backlink "I again refer to" Happy Price
-_ backlink "(again) whether he accepted the Cheerful Price"
-_ backlink "alter the beacon"
-_ backlink only seen an escort once before (#confided-to-)
-_ 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
-_ TERF?
-_ Civilization (context of dath ilan)
-_ Valinor (probably don't name it, actually)
-_ "Caliphate"
-_ "rationalist"
-_ Center for Applied Rationality
-_ MIRI
-_ "egregore"
-_ eliezera
-
-
-
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
_ Iceman
_ Scott
_ hostile prereader (April—if not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
-_ Kelsey
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
_ NRx Twitter bro
-_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
-_ Megan (that poem could easily be about some other entomologist named Megan) ... I'm probably going to cut that §, though
+_ Steven Kaas (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
_ David Xu? (Is it OK to name him in his LW account?)
_ afford various medical procedures
_ Buck? (get the story about Michael being escorted from events)
-_ A/a alumna??
_ Ray
_ Ruby
-_ Kay Brown?? (assuming I include the delusional emails to her)
+_ Teortaxes??
marketing—
_ Twitter
-------
-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
-
-
--------
+2011
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
Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
-
Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
(!!)
-
> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
-
It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."
-humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
-
The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!
> just the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men, and that this is obvious if you are rational, and a hidden truth most people are too cowardly to speak, until you retreat in misery and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us....
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'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 Murphy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan Murphy'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.
> 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://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
-> I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time.
"Why Quantum" has another reference to "doesn't seem possible to think and trust"
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+Still citing it (13 Feb 24): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kSq5qiafd6SqQoJWv/technologies-and-terminology-ai-isn-t-software-it-s-deepware
+
+Still citing it (22 Feb 24): https://twitter.com/mlbaggins/status/1760710932047577282
+
+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/
+https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1744304380503904616
+
------
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.
If you _don't_ have intent-to-inform, but make sure to never, ever say false things (because you know that "lying" is wrong, and think that as long as you haven't "lied", you're in the clear), but you don't feel like you have an obligation to acknowledge criticisms (for example, because you think you and your flunkies are the only real people in the world, and anyone who doesn't want to become one of your flunkies can be disdained as a "post-rat"), that's potentially a much worse situation, because the errors don't cancel.
-----
-
-bitter comments about rationalists—
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare?commentId=Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7
-
------
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
> If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary.
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ExssKjAaXEEYcnzPd/conversational-cultures-combat-vs-nurture-v2/comment/4qJk3BZ2oQtFskYLh
+William Clifford on "The Ethics of Belief": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Clifford_ethics.pdf
+
-----
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_.)
------
-14 November conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
+14 November 2022 conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
The problem isn't just the smugness and condescension; it's the smugness and condescension when he's in the wrong and betraying the principles he laid out in the Sequences and knows it; I don't want to be lumped in with anti-arrogance that's not sensitive to whether the arrogance is in the right
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WijMw9WkcafmCFgj4/do-scientists-already-know-this-stuff/comment/EFg4p7KRbthgH3SnR
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/r5H6YCmnn8DMtBtxt/you-are-a-brain/comment/CsqYAeCPnsAsdQb7d
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QB9eXzzQWBhq9YuB8/rationalizing-and-sitting-bolt-upright-in-alarm/comment/2FfTFrA7iKK6kxqMq
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8yCXeafJo67tYe5L4/and-all-the-shoggoths-merely-players/comment/AsedCtPfKAef7DdHw
I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
Bostrom's apology for an old email—who is this written for?? Why get ahead, when you could just not comment?
-[TODO:
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-
-If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-]
-
the rats were supposed to be an alternative to academic orthodoxy (such that we could just jump to the correct decision theory without the political fighting needing to dethrone CDT), but we're still under the authority of the egregore
(from October 2016 email to Scott)
In October 2016,
-
if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
-> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information—or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves—the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
-
I said that I couldn't help but be reminded of a really great short story that I remembered reading back in—it must have been 'aught-nine. I thought it was called "Darkness and Light", or something like that. It was about a guy who gets transported to a fantasy world where he has a magic axe that yells at him sometimes, and he's prophecied to defeat the bad guy, and he and his allies have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair. And when they get there, the bad guy _accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there.
(The story was actually Yudkowsky's ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), but I was still enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog" æsthetic.)
Everyone believed this in 2005! Everyone _still_ believes this!
-
> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
> 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—
+
+
+----
+
+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://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
+
+> It can also be naive to assume that all the damage that people consistently do is unintentional. For that matter, Sam by being "lol you mad" rather than "sorry" is continuing to do that damage. I'd have bought "sorry" rather a lot better, in terms of no ulterior motives.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1706861603029909508
+
+-------
+
+On 27 September 2023, Yudkowsky told Quentin Pope, "If I was given to your sort of attackiness, I'd now compose a giant LW post about how this blatant error demonstrates that nobody should trust you about anything else either." (https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1707142828995031415) I felt like it was an OK use of bandwidth to point out that tracking reputations is sometimes useful (https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1707183146335367243). My agenda here is the same as when I wrote "... on Epistemic Conduct for Author Criticism": I don't want Big Yud using his social power to delegitimize "attacks" in general, because I have an interest in attacking him. Later, he quote-Tweeted something and said,
+
+> People need to grow up reading a lot of case studies like this in order to pick of a well-calibrated instinctive sense of what ignorant criticism typically sounds like. A derisory tone is a very strong base cue, though not an invincible one.
+
+Was he subtweeting me?? (Because I was defending criticism against tone policing, and this is saying tone is a valid cue.) If it was a subtweet, I take that as vindication that my reply was a good use of bandwidth.
+
+-----
+
+In particular, I think the conspiracy theory "Yudkowsky sometimes avoids nuanced arguments that he doesn't trust people to understand" is true, because ... you've said so (e.g., "without getting into any weirdness that I don't expect Earthlings to think about validly"). https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/2NncxDQ3KBDCxiJiP/cosmopolitan-values-don-t-come-free/comment/dMHdWcxgSpcdyG4hb
+
+----
+
+(He responded to me in this interaction, which is interesting.)
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242
+> Zack, you missed this point presumably because you're losing your grasp of basic theory in favor of conspiracy theory.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qbcuk8WwFnTZcXTd6/thomas-kwa-s-miri-research-experience
+> The model was something like: Nate and Eliezer have a mindset that's good for both capabilities and alignment, and so if we talk to other alignment researchers about our work, the mindset will diffuse into the alignment community, and thence to OpenAI, where it would speed up capabilities.
+
+27 January 2020—
+> I'm also afraid of the failure mode where I get frame-controlled by the Michael/Ben/Jessica mini-egregore (while we tell ourselves a story that we're the real rationalist coordination group and not an egregore at all). Michael says that the worldview he's articulating would be the one that would be obvious to me if I felt that I was in danger. Insofar as I trust that my friends' mini-egregore is seeing something but I don't trust the details, the obvious path forward is to try to do original seeing while leaning into fear—trusting Michael's meta level advice, but not his detailed story.
+
+Weird tribalist praise for Scott: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions/comment/ez8xrquaXmmvbsYPi
+
+-------
+
+I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)).
+
+I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
+
+
+
+------
+
+At "Arcadia"'s 2022 [Smallpox Eradication Day](https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1391248651167494146) party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
+
+[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
+
+I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+
+My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+
+If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+
+The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+
+I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+
+From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I know some things about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in a world that makes sense.
+
+-------
+
+I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine.
+
+-----
+
+Michael said that we didn't want to police Eliezer's behavior, but just note that something had seemingly changed and move on. "There are a lot of people who can be usefully informed about the change," Michael said. "Not him though."
+
+That was the part I couldn't understand, the part I couldn't accept.
+
+The man rewrote had rewritten my personality over the internet. Everything I do, I learned from him. He couldn't be so dense as to not even see the thing we'd been trying to point at. Like, even if he were ultimately to endorse his current strategy, he should do it on purpose rather than on accident!
+
+(Scott mostly saw it, and had [filed his honorable-discharge paperwork](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). Anna definitely saw it, and she was doing it on purpose.)
+
+-----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology?commentId=Z7kyiPAfmtztueFFJ
+
+----
+
+"there just wasn't any reliable similarity between biology and AI" is an interesting contrast with the constant use of the evolution analogy despite credible challenges
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1738464784931025333
+
+-----
+
+What if, in addition to physical punishments and Detect Thoughts, Cheliax also had Adjust Thoughts, a "gradient descent for the brain" spell (given a desired behavior, nudge the spell target's psychology to be more likely to emit that behavior)? Does Carissa still have a winning strategy? Assume whatever implementation details make for a good story. (Maybe Cheliax is reluctant to use Adjust Thoughts too much because Asmodeus wants authentic tyrannized humans, and the Adjust Thoughts sculpting makes them less tyrannized?)
+
+> One thing is sure, the path that leads to sanity and survival doesn't start with lies or with reasoning by Appeal to (Internal) Consequences.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1743522277835333865
+
+> To clarify a possibly misunderstood point: On my model, dath ilan's institutions only work because they're inhabited by dath ilani. Dath ilani invent good institutions even if they grow up in Earth; Governance on Earth lasts three days before Earth voters screw it up.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1565516610286211072
+
+July 2023
+https://twitter.com/pawnofcthulhu/status/1680840089285582848
+> man i feel like the orthodox viewpoint on this has moved on from "let's define trans women as women" to like
+> "arguing about metaphysics is boring; letting people chose pronouns as part of self-expression seems like a thing a free society should allow for the same reason we should let people choose clothes; for many social purposes trans women are in fact empirically women"
+
+(If your "moderately serious" plan for survival is ["AI research journals banned, people violating that ban hunted down with partial effectiveness"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1739705063768232070), that might be your least-bad option as a consequentialist, but one of the things your consequentialist calculation should take into account is that you've declared war on people who want to do AI science on Earth.)
+
+public intellectual death
+https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
+
+> "Racism" is so commonly used weirdly that I think there are few circumstances left where I'd try to use the word to communicate. Instead I'd say, "X seems to be judging people negatively in a hard-to-shake-off way based on their skin color."
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1755624226550387013
+
+> "Study science, not just me!" is probably the most important piece of advice Ayn Rand should've given her followers and didn't. There's no one human being who ever lived, whose shoulders were broad enough to bear all the weight of a true science with many contributors.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
+
+He's still dunking instead of engaging—
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1760701916739194949
+> Every time I've raised an inscrutable alien baby to hyperintelligence by giving it shots of heroin whenever it correctly predicts the exact next word spoken by fictional good characters, it's learned to be a genuinely good person inside!
+
+
+-----
+
+> I recently advised somebody to distinguish firmly in her mind between "X is actually true" and "X is the politic thing to say"; I advised drawing a great line and the creation of separate mental buckets. The words you write, taken at face value, seem to be missing some...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493665988829186
+> ...similar distinctions. There's a distinction between honesty in the form of blurting out the whole truth, and honesty in the form of not uttering lies, and a related thing that's not making public confusions *worse* even if you aren't trying to unravel them. There's...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984
+> ...being honest in the privacy of your own mind, and being honest with your friends, and being honest in public on the Internet, and even if these things are not perfectly uncorrelated, they are also not the same. Seeking truth is the first one. It's strange and disingenuous...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752
+> ...to pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history, must all have been blurting out everything they knew in public, at all times, on pain of not possibly being able to retain their Art otherwise. I doubt Richard Feynman was like that. More likely is that, say, ...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976
+> ...he tried to avoid telling outright lies or making public confusions worse, but mainly got by on having a much-sharper-than-average dividing line in his mine between peer pressure against saying something, and that thing being *false*. That's definitely most of how I do it.
+
+-----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1076155800144363520
+> I got a lot further as an adolescent on "Ask what a superintelligence would think". Eventually I used that up and have now moved on to "What would Anna Salamon think?"
+
+https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1766115590429618347
+> Please note that this is extremely, extremely true, and if you follow that to its logical conclusion, certain blogs are on the org chart of e.g. the U.S. in the same haha but absolutely serious way the NYT editorial page is.
+(quote-Tweeting someone noting Demis Hassabis linking to Slate Star Codex)
+
+----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1766144388890243108
+> Some social media company finally went and added easy phone calls to Congress. Personally, I was a little "how noneliezeran!" that Google didn't do this way earlier, or Uber under Travis. But I can see how this would be too scary in the USA, such that China did it first.
+
+This is kind of scummy behavior! Interesting that he calls scummy consequentialism eliezerian
+
+-----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1767276710041686076
+> What about optimising for finding and error-correcting invalid arguments?
+
+> In my own experience those are the same mental skill, but perhaps your mileage varies. But at any rate, sure.
+
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1212913739196669963
+
+-------
+
+Unfortunately, there's still some remaining tension here insofar as the guy continues to lean on "you gotta trust me, bro; I'm from dath ilan and therefore racially superior to you" personality-cult-leader intimidation tactics, which I consider myself to have a selfish interest in showing to third parties to be unfounded.
+
+With anyone else in the world, I'm happy to let an argument drop after it's been stalemated at 20K words, because no one else in the world is making a morally fraudulent claim to be a general-purpose epistemic authority that has a shot at fooling people like me. (_E.g._, Scott Alexander is very explicit about just being a guy with a blog; Scott does not actively try to discourage people from thinking for themselves.)
+
+New example from today: a claim that MIRI is constrained by the need to hire people who make only valid arguments, and (in response to a commenter) that in his experience, finding and error-correcting invalid arguments is the same mental skill. <https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1767276710041686076>
+
+But elsewhere, this _motherfucker_ has been completely shameless about refusing to acknowledge counterarguments that would be politically inconvenient for him to acknowledge!
+
+[]
+
+(Screenshot took place in a publicly-linked server and is therefore OK to share)
+
+My heart racing, it's tempting to leave a Twitter reply saying, "Actually, in my exhaustively documented experience, you don't give a shit about error-correcting invalid arguments when that would be politically inconvenient for you"
+
+But ... what good would that do, at this point? As I wrote in the memoir, "We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?"
+
+The function of getting the Whole Dumb Story written down that I was supposed to _move on_. I have _other things to do_.
+
+---------
+
+ Oli Habryka gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal/comment/he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY>)
+ Vaniver gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yFZH2sBsmmqgWm4Sp/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/comment/dSiBGRGziEffJqN2B>)
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky either doesn't get it, or is pretending not to get it. I almost suspect it's the first one, which is far worse
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions
+> Various people who work or worked for MIRI came up with some actually-useful notions here and there, like Jessica Taylor's expected utility quantilization.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704
+> That is: they had to impose a (new) quantitative form of "conservatism" in my terminology, producing only results similar (low KL divergence) to things already seen, in order to get human-valued output. They didn't directly optimize for the learned reward function!
+
+-----
+
+Metzger is being reasonable here
+
+https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1773340617671667713
+> That's a fairly inaccurate way of putting it. It wasn't "poked with a stick", what happened was that gradient descent was used to create a function approximator that came as close as possible to matching the inputs and outputs. It's not like someone beat a conscious entity until it deceptively did what its masters demanded but it secretly wants to do something else; in fact, the process didn't even involve GPT-4 itself, it was the process that *created* the weights of GPT-4.
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1433206619135823878
+> I don't know if that quite answers your question - but my answer to a lot of "Well, what about *this* kind of AI?" is "Well, what about it? What does one do with that kind of AI, that stops the world from ending 6 months later when some other kind of AI builds nanotech?"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1433207431627042819
+> For concreteness: One can see how AlphaFold 2 is working up towards world-ending capability. If you ask how you could integrate an AF2 setup with GPT-3 style human imitation, to embody the human desire for proteins that do nice things... the answer is roughly "Lol, what? No."
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1775233618035736819
+(in response to Jessica saying that LLM pretraining favors short term)
+> True for now, at least.
+
+He didn't already know this from the discussion when the Sleeper Agents paper came out?
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1778938096123359256
+
+https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1726860200421085589
+> i was on a 3-month trial for this position, and the terms of the trial were: i would not, at any point, get to field an actual question from the researchers, because all of their actual questions were *too sensitive* for me to know about
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff