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-Eliezer Yudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities. 1/
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+I've now told enough of my Whole Dumb Story that it's time for the part where I explain how @ESYudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities: 1/
+If the world is ending either way, I prefer to die with my committment to public reason intact. It's been heartbreaking coming to terms with the apparent reality that the person who long ago once wrote the Sequences doesn't feel the same way. I thought you deserved to know.
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-> Anyone who's worked with me on public comms knows that among my first instructions is "We only use valid arguments here." (Which makes hiring writers difficult; they have to know the difference.) I've never called for lying to the public. Label the shit you make up as made-up.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1760133310024671583
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-So, I'm almost ready to publish my loud public denunciation of Yudkowsky for intellectual dishonesty (as pt. 4 of my memoir sequence). Is anyone interested in offering advice or "hostile advice" (trying to talk me out of something you see as destructive, _e.g._ infighting while the world is about to end)?
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-I'm eager for advice because this is a high-stakes political move and needs to be a _flawless performance_. (When you strike at a king, _you must kill him_.) My ideal outcome is for Eliezer to actually learn something, but since that's probably not going to happen (by the Law of Continued Failure), I'll settle for dealing targeted reputational damage.
+So, I'm almost ready to publish pt. 4 of my memoir sequence, which features a loud public denunciation of Yudkowsky for intellectual dishonesty. Is anyone interested in offering advice or "hostile advice" (trying to talk me out of something you see as destructive, _e.g._ kicking up intra-cult infighting while the world is about to end)?
-It's unpleasant for it to come to this, but at this point, I don't think I have any other options besides "lay down and die." I tried the good-faith object-level argument thing for years, and he made it very clear that he reserves the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (because that's where his political incentives point), and that he thinks it's insane (his word choice) to get angry at people who are just following their political incentives. At that point, _my_ incentive is to cry "Fraud!" for the benefit of people who still erroneously trust him not to think that intellectual honesty is insane.
+My ideal outcome is for Eliezer to actually learn something, but since that's probably not going to happen (by the Law of Continued Failure), I'll settle for dealing reputational damage.
-(It's really striking how, despite sneering about the lost of art of perspective taking, he acts as if he's incapable of entertaining the perspective under which the published text of the Sequences might have led someone to form higher expectations of him. 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.)
+I thought about taking out a Manifold market for "Will Yudkowsky reply to [post tile] in a way that an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 would consider non-evasive, as assessed by [third party judge]?" and buying some NO. (I think Ben Pace is credibly neutral and would agree to judge.) The idea being that the existence of the market incentivizes honesty in a potential reply, because it would look very bad for him if he tries the kind of high-verbal-IQ ass-covering I've seen from him in the past and the judge rules that a 2008 _Overcoming Bias_ reader wouldn't buy it.
-An key aspect of this situation from my perspective is that it's very obviously a conflict and not an honest disagreement. It's prudent for me to strategize about what his defense is going to be—if any. He _could_ just ignore it. But he does occasionally respond to critics, and I think my voice carries enough intra-cult weight that he'll plausibly want to defend against the reputational damage. We've seen that he's _very_ skilled at high-verbal-IQ ass-covering. Is there anything I can do to preëmpt the ass-covering maneuvers, separately from what's already in the post?
+But I'm leaning against the Manifold gambit because I don't want it look like I'm expecting or demanding a reply. I've more than used up my lifetime supply of Eliezer-bandwidth. The point is for me to explain to _everyone else_ why I think he's a phony and I don't respect him anymore. If he actively _wants_ to contest my claim that he's a phony—or try to win back my respect—he's welcome to do so. But given that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity, I'm just as happy to prosecute him _in absentia_.
-I thought about taking out a Manifold market for "Will Yudkowsky reply to [post tile] in a way that an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 would consider non-evasive, as assessed by [third party judge]?" and buying some NO. (I think Ben Pace is credibly neutral and would agree to judge.) The idea being that the existence of the market incentivizes honesty, because it would look very bad for him if he tries to ass-cover and the judge rules that a 2008 _Overcoming Bias_ reader wouldn't buy it.
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-But I'm leaning against the Manifold gambit because I don't want it look like I'm expecting or demanding a reply. I've more than used up my lifetime supply of Eliezer-bandwidth. The point is for me to explain to _everyone else_ why he's a phony and I don't respect him anymore. If he actively _wants_ to contest my claim that he's a phony—or try to win back my respect—he's welcome to do so. But given that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity (if he wanted to be honest, he could have done it seven years ago), I'm just as happy to prosecute him _in absentia_.
[TODO: reply to message in question]
I do quote this November 2022 message in the post, which I argue doesn't violate consensus privacy norms, due to the conjunction of (a) it not being particularly different-in-character from things he's said in more public venues, and (b) there bring _more than 100 people in this server_; I argue that he can't have had a reasonable expectation of privacy (of the kind that would prohibit sharing a personal email, even if the email didn't say anything particularly different-in-character from things the author said in a more public venue). But I'm listening if someone wants to argue that I'm misjudging the consensus privacy norms.
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+My guess is that that's what the mutual best response looks like: I deal reputational damage to him in the minds of people who care about the intellectual standards I'm appealing to, and he ignores it, because the people who care about the standards I'm appealing to aren't a sufficiently valuable political resource to him. If there's a Pareto improvement over that, I'm not seeing it?
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[TODO: at this point, the entire debate tree has been covered so thoroughly that Caliphate loyalists don't have anything left other than, "accusing people of bad faith is mean". E.g., Xu and Kelsey. Did I stutter?]
[TODO: maybe he'll try to spin complaints about the personality cult into more evidence for the personality cult]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff