-waypoints—
-✓ Jessica help with "Unnatural Categories"
-_ wireheading his fiction subreddit
-_ discrediting to the community
-_ let's recap
-_ people-I-usually-respect footnote
-_ Yudkowsky is trying to be a religious leader
-
-medium section now—
-_ existential risk interlude; social justice game theory; I could forgive him
-
-big sections later—
+marked TODO blocks—
+✓ AlphaGo seemed deeper [pt. 5]
+- "Agreeing with Stalin" recap intro [pt. 5]
+- social justice and defying threats [pt. 5]
+_ last email and not bothering him [pt. 5]
+_ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility" [pt. 4]
+_ confronting Olivia [pt. 2]
+_ "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
+_ AI timelines scam [pt. 4]
+_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
+_ progress towards discussing the real thing [pt. 4]
+_ epistemic defense meeting [pt. 4]
+_ State of Steven [pt. 4]
+_ Somni [pt. 4]
+_ rude maps [pt. 4]
+_ culture off the rails; my warning points to Vaniver [pt. 4]
+_ December 2019 winter blogging vacation [pt. 4]
+_ plan to reach out to Rick [pt. 4]
+_ complicity and friendship [pt. 4]
+_ pandemic starts [pt. 4]
+_ autogenderphilia is common [pt. 4]
+_ out of patience email [pt. 4]
+_ "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" [pt. 4]
+_ recap of crimes, cont'd [pt. 5]
+_ lead-in to Sept. 2021 Twitter altercation [pt. 5]
+_ Jessica's experience at MIRI and CfAR [pt. 5]
+_ the Death With Dignity era [pt. 5]
+_ regrets, wasted time, conclusion [pt. 5]
+_ include Wilhelm "Gender Czar" conversation? [pt. 2]
+
+not even blocked—
+_ 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
+
+bigger blocks—
+_ dath ilan and Eliezerfic fight
+_ Dolphin War finish
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
-_ September 2020 Category War victory
-_ Sasha disaster
-_ the dolphin war
+_ psychiatric disaster
+_ the story of my Feb. 2017 Facebook crusade [pt. 2]
+_ the story of my Feb./Apr. 2017 recent madness [pt. 2]
+_ reaction to Ziz
+
+
+
+New (bad) time estimate:
+35 smaller TODO blocks × 3/day = 12 days
+7 bigger blocks × day/2.5 = 17.5 days
+= 29.5 workdays × 7 sidereal days / 6 workdays = 34.4 sidereal days
+= gapless draft on 17 February??
With internet available—
-_ Wentworth on mutual information being on the right track?
-_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
+_ "When you strike at a king"
+_ real-name blog post: jr. member of save/destroy/take-over the world conspiracy
+_ Sequences post making fun of "just make a really big neural net"
+_ DeepMind June 2022 Twitter archive?
+_ January 2021 Capitol riot
+_ No Fire Alarm
+_ "not hard to find": link to more /r/itsafetish-like anecdotes
+_ Keltham's masochism insight
+_ 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
+_ link to Kay Brown's summary of the "Social Desirability Response Set" paper, and footnote paper link and my brief methodology explanation
+_ something to support Metz being a pro for decades
_ "not taking into account considerations" → rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
-_ except when it's net bad to have concluded Y: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BgEG9RZBtQMLGuqm7/[Error%20communicating%20with%20LW2%20server]/comment/LgLx6AD94c2odFxs4
+_ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn
+_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance (MIRI dialogues, knew how to say anything at all)
_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
-_ comments on "Self-Consciousness wants to make"
-_ Scott vs. Ben on Drowning Children
-_ Ray and D. Xu's comments on "The Incentives"
_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
_ that neuroscience paper backing the two-types
-_ compile Categories references from the Dolphin War Twitter thread
-_ tussle with Ruby on "Causal vs. Social Reality"
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
-_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance
-
+_ 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—
+_ 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
+_ "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
+_ 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?
_ 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"
_ 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
_ 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
-_ explain the adversarial pressure on privacy norms
_ 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?
-_ clarify sequence of outreach attempts
-_ clarify existence of a shadow posse member
_ 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
_ 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
+_ "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)
+_ "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.
+_ better explain "lie inflation" ambiguity
+_ 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"
terms to explain on first mention—
+_ Valinor
_ "Caliphate"
_ "rationalist"
_ Center for Applied Rationality
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
+_ Tail (pt. 2 AGP discussion)
_ Iceman
_ Ben/Jessica (Michael)
+_ "Wilhelm"
_ Scott
_ Anna
_ secret posse member
_ Katie (pseudonym choice)
_ Alicorn: about privacy, and for Melkor Glowfic reference link
-_ someone from Alicorner #drama as a hostile prereader (Swimmer?)
-_ maybe Kelsey (very briefly, just about her name)?
+_ hostile prereader (April, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
+_ Kelsey (briefly)
_ maybe SK (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
marketing—
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
-https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
----
-Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our _object-level_ beliefs about (say) [sex, race, and class differences](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—and however much many of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the _meta_ level, our creed requires us to admit _it's an empirical question_, not a moral one—and that [empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-
-Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to _prove_ that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
-
(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):
-
-
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.)
-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
-
-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
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).
I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-
-https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098
-"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
-
The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
-
-
+-------
Yudkowsky complains—not entirely without justification—that I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)
But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.
-You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words: "Men aren't women tho."
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words, which could have been three[^contraction]: "Men aren't women tho."
+
+[^contraction]: I think the contraction [_aren't_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aren%27t) counts as one word in this context; the _tho_ (though) can be dropped to get down to three.
+
+Men aren't women! Men aren't women tho!
+
+It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan McCarthy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan McCarthy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
+It is more than a little insulting to be told, after all this, that the problem is that _I_ don't know how to come to a point, rather than everyone in Berkeley not knowing how to accept a point that contradicts their religion. It's such a stupidly simple stonewalling strategy: when the critic makes their point simply (men aren't women! men aren't women tho!), sneer at them for being ontologically confused, and then when they spend years of their life writing up the exhaustively detailed rigorous version, sneer at them for not being able to come to a point.
+
+Does the elephant in his brain really expect to get away with that? Are Earth people really that gullible?
+
+------
+
+[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
+
+And if _you_ don't think you can politically afford to acknowledge your faithful student's proof that 6 + 7 = 13 [(because Stalin doesn't like it when people use the number 13)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), it can feel like safety or self-justification to issue a Pronouncement that the answer to 6 + 7 depends on what base you're working in[^base]; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with your faithful student's allegation that the only reason you're issuing Pronouncements about alternate bases for arithmetic, is to win favor with the Party by standing by and letting them cite you as a credible authority when they claim that 6 + 7 = 15, while thinking yourself "honest" because you've sold yourself a story about how _you_ were just teaching those vile _kulaks_ an important lesson about place–value arithmetic, and never technically said yourself that 6 + 7 = 15 _in base ten_.
+
+[^base]: For example, in base 8, one would write 6 + 7 = 15, where the symbol "15" represents the number **1** · 8<sup>1</sup> + **5** · 8<sup>0</sup>, which is equal to **1** · 10<sup>1</sup> + **3** · 10<sup>0</sup>, which we normally (in base 10) write as "13".
+
+------
> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead. That's woke filter bubble thinking. I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787
I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+
+
"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
https://www.readthesequences.com/
> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
+Is that not true?
+
+Can you lie about immediate life for political convenience
+
> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
-contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard (supposedly for the benefit of people with your sexuality), you don't take it lying down
-
Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!
Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
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://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus
+
If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but...
->
-> [...too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but [too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I claim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
> It, it—the fe—it, flame—flames. Flames—on the side of my face. Breathing—breathl—heaving breaths, heaving—
-like a crazy ex-girlfriend (["I have no underlying issues to address / I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8))
-
But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732
https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4361.html
Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
-The HEXACO personality model considers "honesty" and "humility" a single factor
-
(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequences—that's what words like _good_ do—but that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)
—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
when I was near death from that salivary stone, I mumbled something to my father about "our people"
-If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
-[Is this the hill he wants to die on? The pronouns post mentions "while you can still get away with disclaimers", referring to sanction from the outside world, as if he won't receive any sanction from his people, because he owns us. That's wrong. Yudkowsky as a person doesn't own me; the Sequences-algorithm does
+
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228
> I don't think it *should* preclude my posting on topics like these, which is something I get the impression Zack disagrees with me about. I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do *know* they're living in a half-Stalinist environment, even though it hugely bugs Zack that the exact degree of Stalinism and filtration can't be explicitly laid out the way they would be in the meta-Bayesian Should Universe... or something. I think people are better off at the end of that.
http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/
-
origins of the strawberry example
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155625884574228
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
lack of trust as a reason nothing works: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ shouldn't the rats trust each other?
-
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way
> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
-
-
-[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 got 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.
-]
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
I'm totally still doing this
----
-
-
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
-
-
------
-Yudkowsky's hyper-arrogance—
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
-"epistemic hero"
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-
-Or as Yudkowsky put it—
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. _Nullius in verba_.
-
- [TODO: asking Anna to weigh in] (I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards was more polite (and funnier) than my recent habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
-
https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
> changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money
> The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section.
> The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead.
+I tried arguing against ideas _first!_
+
I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism
what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true
... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group
-you can't imagine contemporary Yudkowsky adhering to Crocker's rules (http://sl4.org/crocker.html)
-
-(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
-
4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
If we _actually had_ magical sex change technology of the kind described in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality.
-
Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608
-> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
Steve Sailer retweeted me today criticizing Lee Jussim https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1160662220511932416
Yudkowsky's assessment of Moldbug: "Politics mindkilled him; he cannot separate the normative and the descriptive." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs#TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs
+----
+
+2019 comments to "Wilhelm"—
+
+these people are at the center of the rationalist egregore and could steer it if only they were a little bit braver
+
+the prevailing narrative is something like "the rationalist community is doing just fine; poor Zack is just freaking out because he's in denial about being a trans woman, and mean ol' Michael and Ben are preying on his vulnerability"
+
+I'm never gonna get over this
+you can tell your IQ 110 hairdresser, "Men who fantasize about being women don't particularly resemble actual women", and she'll just be like, "yeah"
+and you tell IQ 135 "rationalists" the same thing, and it just becomes this multi-year, 30,000-word ... whatever
+
+people use the word "gaslighting" to refer to the cognitive dissonance between what you're seeing and what the local egregore expects you to see
+
+ being trapped between two egregores is so painful / and even when it's not painful, it's confusing
+
+recently-transitioned MtF Facebook acquaintance had generally positive feedback about my blog, but also says stuff like, "objective autobiography is impossible, ultimately we just tell the stories about ourselves that help us survive and thrive" / "she" went to Caltech / where are all the serious people??
+
+in the new Twilight Zone episode featuring a crew of 5 astronauts, both the commander and the rebellious one are black women (who I have trouble telling apart)
+You sent
+there's a legitimate (really!) social-justice angle to this (the fact that I can't tell them apart proves that my perceptual system is RACIST)
+You sent
+(but the general phenomenon has to do with anchoring on unusual characteristics; at old dayjob, someone once confused me with the other white-guy-with-a-ponytail—we don't really look alike, but long hair on males is unusual)
+
+17 March 19: "I think 'Vanessa Kosoy' is a guy I met at Summer Solstice 2016"
+
+----
+
+messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May
+
+Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity
+
+Greg Egan's "Closer" (1992) predicted language models, and seemed wild at the time
+
+The text of _Inadequate Equilibria_ is more modest than his rhetorical marketing blunder
+
+and the BOTZ ETF I bought in 2020 has a −27.57% unrealized loss! awesome!!
+
+Katie also asked "MTF?" when I told her about the Sasha disaster!!
+
+27 Feb 2019: Ben playing Bad Cop, Sarah playing good cop, me as plantiff/puppydog/victim (not as a coordinated strategy; that's just how our personalities are)
+
+ideological-drivenness—
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/speaking-of-addiction/
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending-heartbreak/
+
+I assume starting a detransition market would be not-OK
+
-----
-I just got off the phone with my mother. I told her that I wouldn't be able to visit her this weekend because I had a terrible week and I'm going to need to do dayjob work on Sunday to catch up with how behind I am.
+FYI, I think this turned out significantly harsher on you than my January 2022 emails made it sound, thus occasioning this one additional email.
-She told me that she believes in angels, that she prays to God for me at night, that the angels are like God's helpers, like how Santa has elves
+I'm planning on publishing the drafts linked below on [dates].
-(My family is ethnically Jewish—you know, like everyone else—but my mother's personal brand of spirituality is very vague; these particular sentences felt unusually Christian-themed given that she identifies as a Jewish Buddhist, but not out of character.)
+ * "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer" (18K words)
+ * "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (46K words)
+ * "Agreeing with Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" (19K words)
+ * **"Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty"** (1.5K word summary of the parts of the Whole Dumb Story that are specifically an attack on your reputation)
-I told her not to bother with the prayers, unless it helps her sleep.
+**If you want to contest any purported factual inaccuracies or my interpretation of the "no direct references to private conversations" privacy norm, get back to me before [date].** If you have anything else to say for yourself, you can say it in the public comments section.
-As I was wrapping up the call, I mentioned that the reason it was a bad week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.
+(Or if you had something to say privately, I would _listen_; it just doesn't seem like a good use of time. I think it's undignified that I have reason to publish a post titled "Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty", but you seem very committed to not meeting my standards of intellectual honesty, so I have an interest in telling everyone else that.)
-"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.
-"They're not fish, right?" I asked.
+[13 November: #drama discussion today (https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041586188961714259) makes me feel like I don't want to put a "Why I Don't Trust ..." post, like it would be too cruel]
-"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."
+[no awareness that people like me or Michael or Jessica would consider this a betrayal coming from the author of the Sequences (even if it wouldn't be a betrayal coming from a generic public intellectual)]
-Thanks, Mom. I'm so lucky to have a mother that's _less retarded than the leadership of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute_.
+----
+
+(If you weren't interested in meeting my standards for intellectual honest before, it's not clear why you would change your mind just because I spent 80,000 words cussing you out to everyone else.)
+
+----
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BbM47qBPzdSRruY4z/instead-of-technical-research-more-people-should-focus-on
+
+I hate that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1405032189708816385
+> Egregore psychology is much easier and more knowable than individual human psychology, for the same reason macroscopic matter is more predictable than individual particles. But trying to tell people what the egregore is doing doesn't work because they don't believe in egregores!!
+
+20 June 2021, "The egregore doesn't care about the past", thematic moments at Valinor
+
+You don't want to have a reputation that isn't true; I've screwed up confidentiality before, so I don't want a "good at keeping secrets" reputation; if Yudkowsky doesn't want to live up to the standard of "not being a partisan hack", then ...
+
+Extended analogy between "Scott Alexander is always right" and "Trying to trick me into cutting my dick off"—in neither case would any sane person take it literally, but it's pointing at something important (Scott and EY are trusted intellectual authorities, rats are shameless about transition cheerleading)
+
+Scott's other 2014 work doesn't make the same mistake
+
+"The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy"
+https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
+
+"English is fragile"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1590460598869168128
+> I now see even foom-y equations as missing the point.
+(!)
+
+----
+
+dialogue with a pre-reader on "Challenges"—
+
+> More to the point, there's a kind of anthropic futility in these paragraphs, anyone who needs to read them to understand won't read them, so they shouldn't exist.
+
+I think I'm trying to humiliate the people who are pretending not to understand in front of the people who do understand, and I think that humiliation benefits from proof-of-work? Is that ... not true??
+
+> No, because it makes you look clueless rather than them look clueless.
+
+-----
+
+compare EY and SBF
+
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly _insinuates_ nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it _does_ present.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown
+
+https://twitter.com/jstn/status/1591088015941963776
+> 2023 is going to be the most 2005 it's been in years
+
+-------
+
+re the FTX debacle, Yudkowsky retweets Katja:
+
+https://twitter.com/KatjaGrace/status/1590974800318861313
+> So I'd advocate for instead taking really seriously when someone seems to be saying that they think it's worth setting aside integrity etc for some greater good
+
+I'm tempted to leave a message in #drama asking if people are ready to generalize this to Kolmogorov complicity (people _very explicitly_ setting aside integrity &c. for the greater good of not being unpopular with progressives). It's so appropriate!! But it doesn't seem like a good use of my diplomacy budget relative to finishing the memoir—the intelligent social web is predictably going to round it off to "Zack redirecting everything into being about his hobbyhorse again, ignore". For the same reason, I was right to hold back my snarky comment about Yudkowsky's appeal to integrity in "Death With Dignity": the universal response would have been, "read the room." Commenting here would be bad along the same dimension, albeit not as extreme.
------
-[TODO: Yudkowsky wireheading his fiction subreddit
+effects on my social life—calculating what I'm allowed to say; making sure I contribute non-hobbyhorse value to offset my hobbyhorse interruptions
-https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/
-https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
-13 November 2019
+----
-The recent thing that was most helpful in making my memoir seem like just a challenging writing project, rather than treason/heresy, was actually Eliezer doing more destroying-language-for-the-sake-of-politeness but in a non-Culture-War context:
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FKJ8yiF3KjFhAuivt/impco-don-t-injure-yourself-by-returning-ftxff-money-for
+when that happens, in EA, I often do suspect that nobody else will dare to speak the contrary viewpoint, if not me.
-comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/
-> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."
+Michael, June 2019
+> If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship
-[the comment claims that "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" is one of the major considerations to be balanced, but this is lip service; Ruby also paid lip service]
+------
-But "I thought X seemed Y to me" and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from an algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try).
+Piper and Yudkowsky on privacy norms—
-It's a little thing (requiring "I" statements is commonplace in therapy groups and non-violent communication), but this little thing _coming from Eliezer Yudwkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space_ makes a pattern click.
+https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1591996891734376449
+> if such promises were made, they should be kept, but in practice in the present day, they often aren't made, and if you haven't explicitly promised a source confidentiality and then learn of something deeply unethical from them you should absolutely whistleblow.
-If everyone is forced to only make narcissistic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby "threaten" them, because [disagreement is disrespect](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/disagreement-is.html)), that's great for reducing social conflict, but it's not great for the kind of collective information processing that actually accomplishes cognitive work like good literary criticism.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1592002777429180416
+> I don't think I'd go for "haven't explicitly promised" here but rather "if you're pretty sure there was no such informal understanding on which basis you were granted that access and information".
-"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors"
+------
-"Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" (I agree that the purpose of public criticism is not solely to help the authors)
+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
-]
+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
+
+My obsession must look as pathetic from the outside as Scott Aaronson's—why doesn't he laugh it off, who cares what SneerClub thinks?—but in my case, the difference is that I was betrayed
+
+-----
+
+dath ilan on advertising (https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1589520#reply-1589520)—
+> So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions. Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.
+
+
+I wrote a Python script to replace links to _Slate Star Codex_ with archive links: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191f1e8f9#patch23
+
+John Wentworth—
+> I chose the "train a shoulder advisor" framing specifically to keep my/Eliezer's models separate from the participants' own models.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas#comment-zL728sQssPtXM3QD9
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1355712437006204932
+> A "Physics-ist" is trying to engage in a more special human activity, hopefully productively, where they *think* about light in order to use it better.
+
+Wentworth on my confusion about going with the sqaured-error criterion in "Unnatural Categories"—
+> I think you were on the right track with mutual information. They key insight here is not an insight about what metric to use, it's an insight about the structure of the world and our information about the world. [...] If we care more about the rough wall-height than about brick-parity, that’s because the rough wall-height is more relevant to the other things which we care about in the world. And that, in turn, is because the rough wall-height is more relevant to more things in general. Information about brick-parity just doesn’t propagate very far in the causal graph of the world; it's quickly wiped out by noise in other variables. Rough wall-height propagates further.
+
+not interested in litigating "lying" vs. "rationalizing" vs. "misleading-by-implicature"; you can be _culpable_ for causing people to be misled in a way that isn't that sensitive to what exactly was going on in your head
+
+-----
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl?comment_id=10159410429909228&reply_comment_id=10159410748194228
+
+> Zack, and many others, I think you have a vulnerability where you care way too much about the reasons that bullies give for bullying you, and the bullies detect that and exploit it.
+
+
+
+> Everyone. (Including organizers of science fiction conventions.) Has a problem of "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies." We also have an inevitable Kolmogorov Option issue but that should not be confused with the inevitable Evil Bullies issue, even if bullies attack through Kolmogorov Option issues.
----
-2019 comments to "Wilhelm"—
+Someone else's Dumb Story that you can read about on someone else's blog
-these people are at the center of the rationalist egregore and could steer it if only they were a little bit braver
+all he does these days is sneer about Earth people, but he _is_ from Earth—carrying on the memetic legacy of Richard Feynmann and Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan
-the prevailing narrative is something like "the rationalist community is doing just fine; poor Zack is just freaking out because he's in denial about being a trans woman, and mean ol' Michael and Ben are preying on his vulnerability"
+"Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma" https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577
-I'm never gonna get over this
-you can tell your IQ 110 hairdresser, "Men who fantasize about being women don't particularly resemble actual women", and she'll just be like, "yeah"
-and you tell IQ 135 "rationalists" the same thing, and it just becomes this multi-year, 30,000-word ... whatever
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business
+> One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in _this_ generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not.
-people use the word "gaslighting" to refer to the cognitive dissonance between what you're seeing and what the local egregore expects you to see
+https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/be-afraid-9802
- being trapped between two egregores is so painful / and even when it's not painful, it's confusing
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TQSb4wd6v5C3p6HX2/the-pascal-s-wager-fallacy-fallacy#pART2rjzcmqATAZio
+> egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now.
+(I remembered this as suggesting some plausibility in sudden Singularity even then, but in context it's more clearly in thought-experimental mode)
-recently-transitioned MtF Facebook acquaintance had generally positive feedback about my blog, but also says stuff like, "objective autobiography is impossible, ultimately we just tell the stories about ourselves that help us survive and thrive" / "she" went to Caltech / where are all the serious people??
+from "Go Forth and Create the Art"—
+> To the best of my knowledge there is _no_ true science that draws its strength from only one person. To the best of my knowledge that is _strictly_ an idiom of cults. A true science may have its heroes, it may even have its lonely defiant heroes, but _it will have more than one_.
-in the new Twilight Zone episode featuring a crew of 5 astronauts, both the commander and the rebellious one are black women (who I have trouble telling apart)
-You sent
-there's a legitimate (really!) social-justice angle to this (the fact that I can't tell them apart proves that my perceptual system is RACIST)
-You sent
-(but the general phenomenon has to do with anchoring on unusual characteristics; at old dayjob, someone once confused me with the other white-guy-with-a-ponytail—we don't really look alike, but long hair on males is unusual)
+contrast Sequences-era "Study Science, Not Just Me" with dath ilan sneering at Earth
-17 March 19: "I think 'Vanessa Kosoy' is a guy I met at Summer Solstice 2016"
+I have no objection to the conspiracies in Brennan's world! Because Brennan's world was just "here's a fictional world with a different social structure" (Competitive Conspiracy, Cooperative Conspiracy, &c.); sure, there was a post about how Eld Science failed, but that didn't seem like _trash talk_ in the same way
+
+contrast the sneering at Earth people with the attitude in "Whining-Based Communities"
+
+from "Why Quantum?" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDL9NDEXPxYpDf4vz/why-quantum)
+> But would you believe that I had such strong support, if I had not shown it to you in full detail? Ponder this well. For I may have other strong opinions. And it may seem to you that _you_ do't see any good reason to form such strong beliefs. Except this is _not_ what you will see; you will see simply that there _is_ no good reason for the strong belief, that there _is_ no strong support one way or the other. For our first-order beliefs are how the world seems to _be_. And you may think, "Oh, Eliezer is just opinionated—forming strong beliefs in the absence of lopsided support." And I will not have time to do another couple of months worth of blog posts.
+>
+> I am _very_ far from infallible, but I do not hold strong opinions at random.
+
+Another free speech exchange with S.K. in 2020: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YE4md9rNtpjbLGk22/open-communication-in-the-days-of-malicious-online-actors?commentId=QoYGQS52HaTpeF9HB
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAfmMTiaSjEY8PxXC/say-it-loud
+
+Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+
+------
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047796598488440843
+
+I'm still pretty annoyed by how easily people are falling for this _ludicrous_ "Ah, it would be bad if people _on Earth_ tried to do this, but it's OK _in dath ilan_ because of how sane, cooperative, and kind they are" excuse.
+
+Exception Handling is depicted as _explicitly_ having a Fake Conspiracy section (<https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952>). Why is that any more okay, than if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department?
+
+Isn't dath ilan just very straightforwardly being _more_ corrupt than Earth here? (Because FTX and Enron were _subverting_ our usual governance and oversight mechanisms, as contrasted to the usual governance mechanisms in dath ilan _explicitly_ being set up to deceive the public.)
+
+I understand that you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that, "it's okay; no one is 'really' being deceived, because 'everybody knows' that the evidence for Sparashki being real is too implausible", and you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that it's necessary to save their world from AGI and mad science.
+
+But someone writing a story about "Effective Altruism" (instead of "Exception Handling") on "Earth" (instead of "dath ilan") could just as easily _assert by authorial fiat_, "it's okay, no one is 'really' being defrauded, because 'everybody knows' that crypto is a speculative investment in which you shouldn't invest anything you can't afford to lose".
+
+What's the difference? Are there _generalizable reasons_ why fraud isn't worth it (not in expectation, and not in reality), or is it just that Sam and Caroline weren't sane, cooperative, and kind enough to pull it off successfully?
+
+What is "It would be OK in dath ilan, but it's not OK on Earth" even supposed to _mean_, if it's not just, "It's OK for people who genetically resemble Eliezer Yudkowsky to deceive the world as long as they have a clever story for why it's all for the greater good, but it's not OK for you, because you're genetically inferior to him"?
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047374488645402684
+
+A. J. Vermillion seems to be complaining that by not uncritically taking the author assertions at face value, I'm breaking the rules of the literary-criticism game—that if the narrator _says_ Civilization was designed to be trustworthy, I have no license to doubt that is "actually" is.
+
+And I can't help but be reminded of a great short story that I remember reading back in—a long time ago
+
+I think it must have been 'aught-nine?
+
+yeah, it had to have been _late_ in 'aught-nine, because I remember discussing it with some friends when I was living in a group house on Benton street in Santa Clara
+
+anyway, there was this story 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 choose between Darkness and Light, and they have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair
+
+and when they get there, the bad guy (spoilers) ||_accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there!!||
+
+and the moral was—or at least, the simpler message I extracted from it was—there's something messed-up about the genre convention of fantasy stories where readers just naïvely accept the author's frame, instead of looking at the portrayed world with fresh eyes and applying their _own_ reason and their _own_ morality to it—
+
+That if it's wrong to murder people with a different racial ancestry from you _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a fantasy kingdom setting and the race in question are ogres.
+
+And that if it's wrong to kill people and take their stuff _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a period piece about pirates on the high seas.
+
+And (I submit) if it's wrong to decieve the world by censoring scientific information about human sexuality _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a social-science-fiction setting about a world called dath ilan.
+
+(You can _assert by authorial fiat_ that Keltham doesn't mind and is actually grateful, but you could also _assert by authorial fiat_ that the ogres were evil and deserved to die.)
+
+but merely human memory fades over 13 years and merely human language is such a lossy medium; I'm telling you about the story _I_ remember, and the moral lessons _I_ learned from it, which may be very different what was actually written, or what the author was trying to teach
+
+maybe I should make a post on /r/tipofmytongue/, to ask them—
+
+_What was the name of that story?_
+
+_What was the name of that author?_
+
+(What was the name of the _antagonist_ of that story?—actually, sorry, that's a weird and random question; I don't know why my brain generated that one.)
+
+but somehow I have a premonition that I'm not going to like the answer, if I was hoping for more work from the same author in the same spirit
+
+that the author who wrote "Darkness and Light" (or whatever the story was called) died years ago
+
+or has shifted in her emphases in ways I don't like
+
+------
+
+"the absolute gall of that motherfucker"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8KRqc9oGSLry2qS9e/what-motte-and-baileys-are-rationalists-most-likely-to?commentId=qFHHzAXnGuMjqybEx
+
+In a discussion on the Eliezerfic Discord server, I've been arguing that the fact that dath ilan tries to prevent obligate sexual sadists from discovering this fact about themselves (because the unattainable rarity of corresponding masochists would make them sad) contradicts the claim that dath ilan's art of rationality is uniformly superior to that of Earth's: I think that readers of _Overcoming Bias_ in 2008 had a concept of it being virtuous to face comfortable truths, and therefore would have overwhelmingly rejected utilitarian rationales for censoring scientific information about human sexuality.
+
+------
+
+https://archive.vn/hlaRG
+
+> Bankman-Fried has been going around on a weird media tour whose essential message is "I made mistakes and was careless, sorry," presumably thinking that that is a _defense_ to fraud charges, that "carelessness" and "fraud" are entirely separate categories [...] If you attract customers and investors by saying that you have good risk management, and then you lose their money, and then you say "oh sorry we had bad risk management," that is not a defense against fraud charges! That is a confession!
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1602215046074884097
+> If you could be satisfied by mortal men, you would be satisfied with mortal reasoning and mortal society, and would not have gravitated toward the distant orbits of my own presence.
+
+it's just so weird that, this cult that started out with "People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so", has progressed to, "But what if a prediction market says they can't??"
+
+"The eleventh virtue is scholarship! Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy" just doesn't have the same ring to it, you know?
+"The first virtue is curiosity! A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy" also does not have the same ring to it, even if you stipulate by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing
+
+------
+
+so, I admitted to being a motivated critic (having a social incentive to find fault with dath ilan), but that I nevertheless only meant to report real faults rather than fake faults, and Yudkowsky pointed out that that's not good enough (you also need to be looking for evidence on the other side), and that therefore didn't consider the criticism to be coming from a peer, and challenged me to say things about how the text valorizes truth
+(and I didn't point out that whether or not I'm a "peer"—which I'm clearly not if you're measuring IQ or AI alignment contributions or fiction-writing ability—shouldn't be relevant because https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority, because I was eager to be tested and eager to pass the test)
+and I thought I wrote up some OK answers to the query
+(I definitely didn't say, "that's impossible because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate truth")
+but he still wasn't satisifed on grounds of me focusing too much on what the characters said, and not what the universe said, and then when I offered one of those, he still wasn't satisfied (because the characters had already remarked on it)
+and I got the sense that he wanted Original Seeing, and I thought, and I came up with some Original Philosophy that connected the universe of godagreements to some of my communication theory ideas, and I was excited about it
+so I ran with it
+
+[...]
+
+Zack M. Davis — Today at 10:18 PM
+but the Original Philosophy that I was legitimately proud of, wasn't what I was being tested on; it legitimately looks bad in context
+
+--------
+
+OK, so I'm thinking my main takeaways from the Eliezerfic fight is that I need to edit my memoir draft to be both _less_ "aggressive" in terms of expressing anger (which looks bad and _far more importantly_ introduces distortions), and _more_ "aggressive" in terms of calling Yudkowsky intellectually dishonest (while being _extremely clear_ about explaining _exactly_ what standards I think are not being met and why that's important, without being angry about it).
+
+The standard I'm appealing to is, "It's intellectually dishonest to make arguments and refuse to engage with counterarguments on political grounds." I think he's made himself very clear that he doesn't give a sh—
+
+(no, need to avoid angry language)
+
+—that he doesn't consider himself bound by that standard.
----
-messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May
-Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity
\ No newline at end of file
+Fool! There is no Equilibrium
+
+and you'd think that people who are so obsessed with prediction markets (whose trustworthiness does not stem from individual traders having unimpeachably perfect cognition) would be able to appreciate the value of the somewhat older social technology of ... debate
+
+> god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that's always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. *i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky*
+https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1542781304621518848
+
+Said Achmiz on Eliezer's degeneration—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=kS4BfYJuZ8ZcwuwfB
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=4kLTSanNyhn5H8bHv
+
+> What I'm saying is that, in the discussion as a whole, which is constituted by the post itself, plus comments thereon, plus related posts and comments, etc., an author has an obligation to respond to reader inquiries of this sort.
+>
+> As for where said obligation comes from—why, from the same place as the obligation to provide evidence for your claims, or the obligation to cite your sources, or the obligation not to be logically rude, or the obligation to write comprehensibly, or the obligation to acknowledge and correct factual errors, etc., etc.—namely, from the fact that acknowledging and satisfying this obligation reliably leads to truth, and rejecting this obligation reliably leads to error. In short: it is _epistemically rational_.
+
+Namespace on standing and warrant—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=c7Xt5AnHwhfgYY67K
+
+I've been playing a Dagny Taggart strategy
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+Michael 19 April 2019—
+> Intellectualism to survive, has to distinguish between having been betrayed and having been defeated. The difference is frequently known as "courage". It's absence causes people like Aaronson, without ever becoming complicit, to nonetheless transition directly from denial of a crisis to advocacy of "The Kolmagorov Option".
+
+during the dispute with James, Jonah said it seemed like the future beyond a year wasn't real to me (this also explains my behavior in college)
+
+you can't trust his behavior, even if you can trust his "conscious intent" which conveniently doesn't do anything
+
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1608191251991662592
+> Keeping a secret is like casting the killing curse—it might be the best option available in a conflict, but even when it's the least bad option it tears your soul a bit regardless.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1599889168234336257
+> One of the retrospective less-obvious lessons of the #FTX blowup: We should have been more worried about the early split in Alameda where half the people left with @Tara_MacAulay to run a less wild trading company. In retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone sane!
+
+Likewise, we should have been more worried about the Vassar split; in retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone principled
+
+The thing that makes Earth bad is that everyone is lying about everything all the time, and when you challenge them on it, they have some clever rationalization for why it isn't really bad.
+
+https://manifold.markets/Alicorn/will-my-son-successfully-get-a-bath#
+I'm not allowed to say, "Which one?"—it's known that I'm the sort of person who believes that, but I'm not allowed to puncture the shared reality
+
+I said I perceived a nearest-unblocked-strategy pattern, where I'm trying to optimize my goals subject to the constraint of maintaining good diplomatic relations. But Anna points out that if I internalized "good diplomatic relations" as my own goal
+
+Speaking of coordination: you know what's useful for coordination? Principles! Common knowledge!
+
+the post introducing the litany of Gendlin was literally titled "You _Can_ Face Reality"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
+
+Re: "it's deception aimed at crazy people"—but if you're so casual about deceiving crazy people, you probably don't care much about sane non-Keepers, either. (Same energy: if your date is rude to the waiter, he won't be a good partner, either. Or parents who lie to their kids for convenience.)—and in fact, empathy towards crazy people _is_ shown in the section on Thellim's mother in "but hurting people is wrong"
+
+"Criticism not welcome, it's just a story; if you don't like it, don't read it" works for normal glowfic, but it doesn't work when you're earnestly spreading memes about how your fictional Society is superior to our Earth; if you're going to make _that_ claim in earnest, you should expect people to subject your fictional Society to scrutiny to check whether it holds together
+
+Clara says to just roll your eyes and ignore him, but in a way, that seems _more_ disrespectful—to just _write someone off_, rather than having faith that they can be reached by argument
+
+There's a difference between jokes where the audience is supposed to "get the joke" (and you're willing to accept collateral damage to people who didn't get the joke), and political moves where
+
+When he says "no one but Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it", I regard that as an abject failure of the community, but he regards it has "working as intended"?
+
+Vassar had once praised me as "Zack is pretty much always right" (when I express an opinion; he still thought I was dumb/unperceptive), and I accepted the praise that it wasn't meant literally—but if someone had a longstanding dispute with me and objected to the praise, I would fundamentally "get" why they were objecting (they don't want Vassar encouraging people to defer to me), rather than assuming _they_ thought it was meant literally
+
+I did "get what I needed" out of the Eliezerfic fight (before, I still had anxiety about whether I should email him before publishing this memoir; and now, I don't)
+
+He could have saved, like, six years of my life, if the March 2016 post had said, "I think 30% of males are gender-dysphoric and might benefit from transitioning"
+
+Fri 14 Jul 2017
+(03:54:42 PM) alicorn24: holy fuck that is a lot of money
+(03:54:53 PM) alicorn24: when I read that blog post I was imagining you'd like, throw fifty bucks at some people
+(03:55:06 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: what? that would be insulting
+(03:57:46 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: there's a calibration thing about being a San Francisco software engineer; and, April could have been really really much worse if I didn't have friends
+
+"probably won't understand" self-comments—
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me/comment/gYSsBbZ6xvaf2b3Eh
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/pK9JHSTTnnpjbbqZp
+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
+
+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.
+
+I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
+
+my father's men's group kicked out a gay man (who was at least still male!); women are too nice to eject MtFs
+
+"Something to Protect" says: "you should never _actually_ end up deliberately believing a useful false statement" (but it's OK for Civilization to end up engineering that you do)
+
+explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks "I'll need a research team and five years" September 2014
+
+May 2019: David MacIver is in on it, too! https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/#comment-366840
+
+"whosever lies _in a journal article_ is guilty of utter heresy"
+
+first I ordered _Nevada_ 24 March 2016; first ordered _MTiMB_ on 6 August 2016
+ordered additional copies of MTiMB 14 September 2016 and 19 December 2016
+
+> We passed word to the Fake Conspiracy section of Exception Handling, and they've spent the last few hours quickly planting evidence consistent with how Civilization should look if the Sparashki are real. The notion being that their apparent fictional status and licensing is just a cover, so Sparashki can walk around if they have to and just get compliments on their incredible cosplay. Since this event is medium-secret, the CEO of Yattel's Less Expensive Tunneling Machines has been photographed by surprise through a window, looking like a Sparashki, to explain why conspiracy-theoretic research is suddenly focusing there and turning up the evidence we've planted."
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952
+
+the generic experience is that the future is more capable but less aligned, and we basically expect this to continue
+people from the past would envy our refrigeration, vaccines, infinite food, &c., but that doesn't mean they would regard our value-drifted-with-respect-to-them culture as superior
+paperclipping is just that turned up to 11 (well, 10¹¹)
+
+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)
+This is not an advanced rationalist skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! People will quote your "Categories Were Made for the Man" in defense of the idea that someone can be biologically male, think of themselves as a boy, be thought of by others as a boy, and yet still actually have been a girl at the time by virtue of deciding to transition years later. I've been told that "Gender is a floating tag which has one substantial consequence, which is comfort of the people being addressed"!
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937
+> Citizens can't control processes they can't see. For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.
+
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 2:09 AM
+Ziz
+Ziz
+To your memory, am I under any confidentiality agreements with you? Or did we mutually release each other from the only one that one time?
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 9:24 AM
+You sent
+you are not under any confidentiality agreements with me
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946
+> This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.
+
+> It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it. Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you. But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom. There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really. But you must never ever mention it in front of her.
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY
+> I am broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism, in that case, as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seems to be the main alternative.
+
+for normal people, when your favorite author gets worse, you just shrug and accept it and enjoy the classics, but when your favorite author is also the Pope of your religion and also in several Discord servers with you, you end up wasting a lot of time scrutinizing their emoji-reacts
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff