X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fa-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md;h=63c01d2b27909ec53640572ffa99f5c413a24354;hp=125a2e7c041dd510930bc7c6132e4b6f88511d38;hb=9ae6a77b8f022c0619abdcd7cdd939bf74a64d58;hpb=3f505f984fd4e0cd99c19868282eaa8762a83cd2 diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md index 125a2e7..63c01d2 100644 --- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md +++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md @@ -198,7 +198,7 @@ The other year, Alexander had written a post, ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Pa It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted. -(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define that category boundary however I want.) +(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.) If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a _convenient rhetorical shorthand_ for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_. @@ -211,7 +211,28 @@ Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the func ... Scott didn't get it. [TODO: -Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben, and Anna + * Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben—and with Anna + +[TODO: +on ostracism— + * There's a view that says, as long as everyone is being polite, there's no problem + * I think there's a problem where the collective discourse is biased, even if it's surface-level polite + * Berkley rats are very good at not being persecutory (we might not have been if Scott hadn't a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college) +] + +[TODO: + * Ben thought the bullshit nitpicking was meaningfully anti-epistemic: the game is that I have to choose between infinite interpretive labor, or being cast as "never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections + * I was inclined to meet the objections, to say, "well, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly" rather than "you're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me"; by meeting the objections I become a stronger writer + * Ben thought that being a better writer by responding to nitpicks from people who are trying not to understand was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to explain how people were failing to engage, rather than continuing to press the object-level itself—like, I had a model of "the rationalists" that keeps making bad predictions, what's going on there? + * I guess I'm only now, years later, taking Ben's advice on this. Sorry, Ben. + +[TODO: + * If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?" + * There have been times when I thought, "What the Hell am I doing?" [...] +] + +[TODO: + * Anna and intellectual property ]