check in

My attention kind of got derailed since Fan Expo.

But I think I got the last few bits of reward-model training data that
I needed.

I'm OK.

diff --git a/content/drafts/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md b/content/drafts/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md
index 1127212..f240944 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md
+++ b/content/drafts/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md
@@ -799,6 +799,8 @@ If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die
 
 ]
 
+[TODO: fighting in Eliezerfic]
+
 [TODO: regrets and wasted time
  * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
 ]

diff --git a/notes/memoir-sections.md b/notes/memoir-sections.md
index 802fea1..89c724d 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/memoir-sections.md
+++ b/notes/memoir-sections.md
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 dedicated day?—
+_ dath ilan and Eliezerfic fight
 _ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
 _ psychiatric disaster 
 
@@ -1830,3 +1831,42 @@ it's just so weird that, this cult that started out with "People can stand what
 
 "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.
+
+----
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1054235592961048609
+> rather than, as is more often the case in dath ilan stories, a depiction of a better institution you could build if people were eliezera
+
+(eliezera racial supremacy _is_ the lesson)
+
+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

diff --git a/notes/memoir_wordcounts.csv b/notes/memoir_wordcounts.csv
new file mode 100644 (file)
index 0000000..5aa77e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/notes/memoir_wordcounts.csv
@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+04/30/22,6746
+05/30/22,10305
+06/30/22,13313
+07/31/22,20391
+08/28/22,36784
+09/30/22,49533
+10/30/22,66302
+11/30/22,74002
+12/22/22,74043