[TOC]
-### The _New York Times_'s Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)
+### _The New York Times_'s Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)
On 13 February 2021, ["Silicon Valley's Safe Space"](https://archive.ph/zW6oX), the [anticipated](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#the-new-york-times-pounces-june-2020) _New York Times_ piece on _Slate Star Codex_, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (_Just_ lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while [pushing hard on the subtext](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310) to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of _Slate Star Codex_. ["Nominally"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally)?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing.
### The Politics of the Apolitical
-Why do I [keep](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#tragedy-of-recursive-silencing) [bringing](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#literally-a-white-supremacist) up the claim that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ readers)?
+Why do I [keep](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#tragedy-of-recursive-silencing) [bringing](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#literally-a-white-supremacist) up the claim that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ readers)?
-It's because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalists" and mainstream progressives, the defensive strategy of the "rationalists" is one of deception.
+It's because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalists" and mainstream progressives, the defensive strategy of the "rationalists" is one of deception.
In this particular historical moment, 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 most 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).
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 about what they say in public. (I am not smart.)
-So the _New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]
+So _The New York Times_ implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist _like Charles Murray_ is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.[^deny-everything]
[^deny-everything]: In January 2023, when Nick Bostrom [preemptively apologized for a 26-year-old email to the Extropians mailing list](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) that referenced the IQ gap and mentioned a slur, he had [some](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi) [detractors](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old) and a [few](https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi/comment/h9gdA4snagQf7bPDv) [defenders](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NniTsDNQQo58hnxkr/my-thoughts-on-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old-email), but I don't recall seeing much defense of the 1996 email itself.
### A Leaked Email Non-Scandal (February 2021)
-On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan, disapproving of the community's defense against the _Times_, [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/) on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
+On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan, disapproving of Scott and the community's defense against the _Times_, [claimed that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in February 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/) on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
I think that to people who have read _and understood_ Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. He said that biologically mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's intelligentsia is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing _vis á vis_ the neoreactionaries and his own popularity. But again, none of it is surprising if you know Scott from his writing.
I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote [a widely Liked comment](/images/davis-why_they_say_they_hate_us.png): I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving.
-If you listened to why _they_ said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response seemed to be trending toward, "That's obviously false—Scott voted for Elizabeth Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._ They're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."
+If you listened to why _they_ said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response seemed to be trending toward, "That's obviously false: Scott voted for Elizabeth Warren, look at all the social democrats on the _Less Wrong_/_Slate Star Codex_ surveys, _&c._ They're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."
But if "sexism" included "It's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's ["Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/)), then the "_Slate Star Codex_ _et al._ are crypto-sexists" charge was absolutely correct. (Crypto-racist, crypto-fascist, _&c._ left as an exercise for the reader.)
-You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've been trained in using empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes. People whose education came from California public schools plus Tumblr didn't already know that. ([I didn't know that](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone who was more preoccupied by the wrong of bigotry than the right to privacy might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".[^no-promises]
+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've been trained in using empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes. People whose education came from California public schools plus Tumblr didn't already know that. ([I didn't know that](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism) at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone who was more preöccupied with eradicating bigotry than protecting the right to privacy might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".[^no-promises]
[^no-promises]: It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In [Brennan's account](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857), Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.
I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.
-But I think it's important to notice both problems, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy. It's one thing to believe that people should keep promises that they, themselves, explicitly made. But instructing commenters not to link to the email seems to suggest not just that Brennan should keep _his_ promises, but that everyone else should participate in a conspiracy to conceal information that Alexander would prefer concealed. I can see an ethical case for it, analogous to returning stolen property after it's already been sold and expecting buyers not to buy items that they know have been stolen. (If Brennan had obeyed Alexander's confidentiality demand, we wouldn't have an email to link to, so if we wish Brennan had obeyed, we can just act as if we don't have an email to link to.)
-
-But there's also a non-evil-bully case for wanting to reveal information, rather than participate in a cover-up to protect the image of the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the progressive egregore. If the orchestrators of the cover-up can't even acknowledge to themselves that they're orchestrating a cover-up, they're liable to be confusing themselves about other things, too.
+But I think it's important to notice both problems, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy. Without defending Brennan's actions, there's a non-evil-bully case for wanting to reveal information, rather than participate in a cover-up to protect the image of the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the progressive egregore. If the orchestrators of the cover-up can't even acknowledge to themselves that they're orchestrating a cover-up, they're liable to be confusing themselves about other things, too.
As it happened, I had another social media interaction with Yudkowsky that same day, 18 February 2021. Concerning the psychology of people who hate on "rationalists" for alleged sins that don't particularly resemble anything we do or believe, [he wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608):
### Yudkowsky Doubles Down (February 2021)
-I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title]. Briefly: given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's not going to be a "right answer", but we can at least be objective in describing what the conflict is about, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that. Given that we can't coordinate a switch to universal singular _they_, the pronouns _she_ and _he_ continue to have different meanings in the minds of native English speakers, in the sense that your mind forms different probabilistic expectations of someone taking feminine or masculine pronouns. That's _why_ trans people want to be referred to by the pronoun corresponding to their chosen gender; if there were literally no difference in meaning, there would be no reason to care. Thus, making the distinction on the basis of gender identity rather than sex [has consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences); by proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best, Yudkowsky was [falsely portraying the policy debate as one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided).
+I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/),[^challenges-title]. Briefly: given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's not going to be a "right answer", but we can at least be objective in describing what the conflict is about, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that. Given that we can't coordinate a switch to universal singular _they_, the pronouns _she_ and _he_ continue to have different meanings in the minds of native English speakers, in the sense that your mind forms different probabilistic expectations of someone taking feminine or masculine pronouns. That's _why_ trans people want to be referred to by the pronoun corresponding to their chosen gender: if there were literally no difference in meaning, there would be no reason to care. Thus, making the distinction on the basis of gender identity rather than sex [has consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences); by proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best, Yudkowsky was [falsely portraying the policy debate as one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided).
[^challenges-title]: The title is an allusion to Yudkowsky's ["Challenges to Christiano's Capability Amplification Proposal"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal).
Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.
-But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was because the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).
+But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was because the November 2018 Twitter thread in question was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).
In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size", on the grounds that it's "logically rude to demand that other people use only your language system and interpretation convention in order to communicate, in advance of them having agreed with you about the clustering thing."
But "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? There's nothing ambiguous about these cases: if you haven't, in fact, changed your hair color, then your hair is, in fact, its original color. The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer are, today, going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.[^pronoun-roles]
-[^pronoun-roles]: If the problem is with the pronoun implying stereotypes and social roles in the language as spoken, such that another pronoun should be considered more correct despite that lack of corresponding hair color, you should be making that case on the empirical merits, not appealing to hypothetical surgeries.
+[^pronoun-roles]: If the problem is with the pronoun implying stereotypes and social roles in the language as spoken, such that another pronoun should be considered more correct despite the lack of corresponding hair color, you should be making that case on the empirical merits, not appealing to hypothetical surgeries.
Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.
But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that I didn't like it, but that the bucket was wrong on the empirical merits: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition. The system was in the wrong for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".
-And because my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to update to the extent that the empirical merits showed _I_ was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.
+And because my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to update to the extent that the empirical merits showed that _I_ was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.
In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a _C_. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts" and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.
-_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a less reflective person doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
+_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a less reflective person doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
I knew better than to behave like that. My failure didn't mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it did mean that I must have been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory or unreal about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the differential equations textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this) while also [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)
In an article titled ["Actually, I Was Just Crazy the Whole Time"](https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole), FtMtF detransitioner Michelle Alleva contrasts her current beliefs with those when she decided to transition. While transitioning, she accounted for many pieces of evidence about herself ("dislikes attention as a female", "obsessive thinking about gender", "doesn't fit in with the girls", _&c_.) in terms of the theory "It's because I'm trans." But now, Alleva writes, she thinks she has a variety of better explanations that, all together, cover the original list: "It's because I'm autistic," "It's because I have unresolved trauma," "It's because women are often treated poorly" ... including "That wasn't entirely true" (!).
-This is a rationality skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, which she revised upon further consideration of the evidence. Beliefs about oneself aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transistors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)[^the-form-of-the-inference]
+This is a rationality skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, which she revised upon further consideration of the evidence. Beliefs about oneself aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transistors "in the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)[^the-form-of-the-inference]
[^the-form-of-the-inference]: Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about themself, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some specific objective sense on the empirical merits, that would also be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-atypical same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michelle Alleva, the story doesn't [pay rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).
At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post also explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?
-I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) If Yudkowsky just wanted to post about how gendered pronouns are unnecessary and bad as an apolitical matter of language design, he could have written a post just making that narrow point. What ended up happening is that he wrote a post featuring sanctimonious flag-waving about the precious feelings of people "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", and concluding with a policy proposal that gives the trans activist coalition everything they want, proclaiming this "the simplest and best protocol" without so much as acknowledging the real arguments on [the other side of the policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided). I don't think it's crazy for me to assume this was the intended result, and to ask who benefitted.
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_—no, obviously not. I have been ["trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866), such that it's informative ["to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited."](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47) If Yudkowsky just wanted to post about how gendered pronouns are unnecessary and bad as an apolitical matter of language design, he could have written a post just making that narrow point. What ended up happening is that he wrote a post featuring sanctimonious flag-waving about the precious feelings of people "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", and concluding with a policy proposal that gives the trans activist coalition everything they want, proclaiming this "the simplest and best protocol" without so much as acknowledging the arguments on [the other side of the policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided). I don't think it's crazy for me to assume this was the intended result, and to ask who benefited.
When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents [_optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."
>
> But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.
-The explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is laughable. The point I articulated at length in ["Challenges"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/)) (that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore, given that the existing meanings are what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place) is obvious.
+The explanation of [the problem of political censorship filtering evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is laughable. The point I articulated at length in ["Challenges"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore, given that the existing meanings are what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place) is obvious.
It would arguably be less embarrassing for Yudkowsky if he were lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't that bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he just didn't put any effort into thinking about why someone might disagree. I don't have a problem with selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such: there's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology _X_, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive or even-handed; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself."
Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If the community is so bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one who can talk about the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual culture war, why would you pay attention to the community _at all_? Insofar as the community is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the world for reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that's optimized to move resources to itself). It needs to either rebrand—or failing that, disband—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
-The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky assumes that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.
+The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky assumes that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making since 2016, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.
I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as [Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock) or [Corinna Cohn](https://corinnacohn.substack.com/) or [Aaron Terrell](https://aaronterrell.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-my-agp-normalization)—or for that matter [Steve Sailer](https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/)—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) the way I do. _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without [the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.
And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular subcultures (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans if they lived in a different subculture.
-I claim that (a′) and (b′) are overwhelmingly likely to be true. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story [I've](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [been](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [telling](/2023/Nov/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) you about how I wasted the last seven years of my life on this, I'm going to guess that the answer is broadly No: "we" can't talk about that. (I can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)
+I claim that (a′) and (b′) are overwhelmingly likely to be true. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story [I've](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [been](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [telling](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) you about how I wasted the last eight years of my life on this, I'm going to guess that the answer is broadly No: "we" can't talk about that. (I can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)
-But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's actually going on with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole post in a different light: making sense of the discussion requires analyzing what _isn't_ being said.
+But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's actually going on with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole post in a different light: making sense of the discussion requires analyzing what isn't being said.
In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in his [November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](/images/yudkowsky-wrong_place_to_pack_it.png):
Sure, if we were designing a constructed language from scratch with the understanding that a person's "gender" is a contested social construct rather than their sex being an objective and undisputed fact, then yes: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their existing native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, by your own admission, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
-(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is much better than not admitting it, so huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
+(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is much better than not admitting it, so huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point.)
-[As discussed in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#t-v-distinction), there's an instructive comparison to languages that have formality-based second person pronouns, like [_tú_ and _usted_ in Spanish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted). It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.
+[As discussed in "Challenges"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#t-v-distinction), there's an instructive comparison to languages that have formality-based second person pronouns, like [_tú_ and _usted_ in Spanish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted). It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.
-It's another thing altogether to try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist) while also refusing to entertain the speaker's arguments for why their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons).
+It's another thing altogether to try to prevent a speaker from using _tú_ to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist) while also refusing to entertain the speaker's arguments for why their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's psychologically abusive.
-If Yudkowsky actually possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be obvious to him that "Gendered Pronouns for Everyone and Asking To Leave the System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on if it weren't a Schelling point. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be overjoyed to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists" and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy of pronouns is because they suspect, correctly, that pronouns are being used as a rhetorical wedge to keep people from talking or thinking about sex.
+If Yudkowsky actually possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be obvious to him that "Gendered Pronouns for Everyone and Asking To Leave the System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on [if it weren't a Schelling point](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/). A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be overjoyed to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists" and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy of pronouns is because they suspect, correctly, that pronouns are being used as a rhetorical wedge to keep people from talking or thinking about sex.
### The Stated Reasons Not Being the Real Reasons Is a Form of Community Harm
... which is why it's bizarre that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your actual bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can _totally_ find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.
-"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where, presumably, "getting shot" is a generic metaphor for any undesirable consequence, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation. And any other partisan hack could say exactly the same, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot (being fired from the campaign).
+"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where, presumably, "getting shot" is a metaphor for any undesirable consequence, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation. And any other partisan hack could say exactly the same, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot (being fired from the campaign).
Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings) [quotes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832) _Calvin and Hobbes_: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low." If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is so terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job or your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price.
Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But [as Zvi Mowshowitz points out, the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used to justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex, then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex even when it's extremely relevant.
-But if everybody knew, then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the appeal of censorship to dictators like Stalin is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to keep it that way.
+But if everybody knew, then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because [the appeal of censorship to dictators like Stalin is precisely to maintain a state of not everyone knowing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech).
-For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be convenient if everyone secretly knew: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
+[For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be convenient if everyone secretly knew](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DpTexwqYtarRLRBYi/conflict-theory-of-bounded-distrust): then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).
[Policy debates should not appear one-sided.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) Faced with this dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really were no options besides deceiving your readers and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers is the right thing to do.
"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky claims. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is enacting that policy the right thing to do?
-Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I've [been](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [telling](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [you](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) this 100,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
+Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I've [been](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [telling](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [you](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) this 85,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
<a id="thellim-vs-jane-austen"></a>In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand—
-_It was a compliment!_ That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and _done something to pass better next time_. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's [hostile](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) [stereotype](/2022/Feb/link-never-smile-at-an-autogynephile/) of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.
+_It was a compliment!_ That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and _done something to pass better next time_.[^limitations-of-passing] The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's [hostile](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) [stereotype](/2022/Feb/link-never-smile-at-an-autogynephile/) of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.
+
+[^limitations-of-passing]: Also, passing as a woman isn't the same thing as actually being female. But expecting people to accept an imitation as the real thing _without the imitation even succeeding at resembling the real thing_ is seriously nuts.
In a sane world, people would understand that the way to ameliorate the sadness of people who aren't being perceived how they prefer is through things like better and cheaper facial feminization surgery, not [emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see. I don't _want_ to relinquish [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't one. I can endure being sad about that if the alternative is forcing everyone to doublethink around their perceptions of me.
But seven years later, in a March 2016 Facebook post, Yudkowsky [proclaimed that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women."
-This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in "Changing Emotions". The two posts weren't _necessarily_ inconsistent, if you assumed gender identity is a real property synonymous with "brain sex", and that the harsh (almost mocking) skepticism of the idea of true male-to-female sex change in "Changing Emotions" was directed at the sex-change fantasies of cis men (with a male gender-identity/brain-sex), whereas the 2016 Facebook post was about trans women (with a female gender-identity/brain-sex), which are a different thing.
+This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in "Changing Emotions". The two posts weren't _necessarily_ inconsistent, if you assume gender identity is a real property synonymous with "brain sex", and that the harsh (almost mocking) skepticism of the idea of true male-to-female sex change in "Changing Emotions" was directed at the sex-change fantasies of cis men (with a male gender-identity/brain-sex), whereas the 2016 Facebook post was about trans women (with a female gender-identity/brain-sex), which are a different thing.
-But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially if trans women were purported to be "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!) in some population. After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_. So in October 2016, [I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occurred.
+But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially given how the 2016 Facebook post posits that trans women are "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!) in some population, while the 2004 mailing list post notes that "spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy". After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_. So in October 2016, [I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occurred.
-Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning". But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky proclaimed that "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" and that "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." But _that_ seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
-(And this November 2018 reversal on the philosophy of language was much, much worse than the March 2016 reversal on the psychology of sex, because the latter is a complicated empirical question about which reasonable people might read new evidence differently and change their minds. In contrast, there's no plausible good reason for him to have reversed course on whether words can be wrong.)
+(And this November 2018 reversal on the philosophy of language was much more inexplicable than the March 2016 reversal on the psychology of sex, because the latter is a complicated empirical question about which reasonable people might read new evidence differently and change their minds. In contrast, there's no plausible good reason for him to have reversed course on whether words can be wrong.)
After attempts to clarify via email failed, I eventually wrote ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the relevant error in general terms, and Yudkowsky eventually [clarified his position in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228).
In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.
-Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try forcibly administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not to forcibly adminster any kind of drug, it might switch to forcibly implanting electrodes in humans' brains, or just _paying_ the humans to take heroin, _&c._
+Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try forcibly administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not to forcibly administer any kind of drug, it might switch to forcibly implanting electrodes in humans' brains, or just _paying_ the humans to take heroin, _&c._
-It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that his own writings from fifteen years ago [explain why that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that his earlier writings also explain why [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that [that's not what's going on](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/), he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of something—but at this point, _I have no reason to care_. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a waste of everyone's time; he has a [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) that doesn't involve trying to inform you.
+It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that his own writings from seven years before [explain why that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that his earlier writings also explain why [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that [that's not what's going on](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/), he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of something—but at this point, _I have no reason to care_. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a waste of everyone's time; he has a [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) that doesn't involve trying to inform you.
Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress.
-Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing first. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I should be allowed to notice the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is obviously happening. I think there's some number of years and some number of thousands of words of litigating the object level (about gender) and the meta level (about the philosophy of categorization) after which there's nothing left to do but jump up to the meta-meta level of politics and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been empirically falsified.[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]
+Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing first. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be allowed to notice the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is obviously happening. I think there's some number of years and some number of thousands of words of litigating the object level (about gender) and the meta level (about the philosophy of categorization) after which there's nothing left to do but jump up to the meta-meta level of politics and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been empirically falsified.[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]
[^symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith]: Obviously, if we're abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly mendaciously arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they have a case that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.
### The Battle That Matters
-In February 2021, Yudkowsky [defended his behavior](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176) (referring back to [his November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter statement](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)):
+In February 2021, Yudkowsky [defended his behavior](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176) (referring back to [his November 2018 Tweets](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)):
> I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.
[^gould-analogy]: Yudkowsky [once wrote of Stephen Jay Gould](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould) that "[c]onsistently self-serving scientific 'error', in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud." I think the same standard applies here.
-[^gullible]: Perhaps some readers will consider this post to be more revealing about my character rather than Yudkowsky's: that [everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) his bluster wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, so I have no more right to complain about "false advertising" than purchasers of a ["World's Best"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) ice-cream who are horrified (or pretending to be) that it may not objectively be the best in the world.
+[^gullible]: Perhaps some readers will consider this point to be more revealing about my character rather than Yudkowsky's: that [everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) his bluster wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, so I have no more right to complain about "false advertising" than purchasers of a ["World's Best"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) ice-cream who are horrified (or pretending to be) that it may not objectively be the best in the world.
Such readers may have a point. If _you_ [already knew](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info) that Yudkowsky's pose of epistemic superiority was phony (because everyone knows), then you are wiser than I was. But I think there are a lot of people in the "rationalist" subculture who didn't know (because we weren't anyone). This post is for their benefit.
> It's strange and disingenuous to pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history, must all have been blurting out everything they knew in public, at all times, on pain of not possibly being able to retain their Art otherwise. I doubt Richard Feynman was like that. More likely is that, say, he tried to avoid telling outright lies or making public confusions worse, but mainly got by on having a much-sharper-than-average dividing line in his mine between peer pressure against saying something, and that thing being _false_.
-I've read _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_. I cannot imagine Richard Feynman trying to get away with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" excuse. I think if there were topics Richard Feynman didn't think he could afford to be honest about, he—or really, anyone who valued their intellectual integrity over their public image as a religious authority—would just not issue sweeping public proclamations on that topic while claiming the right to ignore counterarguments on the grounds of having "some confidence in [their] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [themself] before speaking".
+I've read _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_. I cannot imagine Richard Feynman trying to get away with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" excuse. I think if there were topics Richard Feynman didn't think he could afford to be honest about, he—or really, anyone who valued their intellectual integrity more than their image as a religious authority fit to issue proclamations about all areas of life—would just not issue sweeping public statements on that topic while claiming the right to ignore counterarguments on the grounds of having "some confidence in [their] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [themself] before speaking".
-The claim to not be making public confusions worse might be credible if there were no other public figures doing better. But other science educators in the current year such as [Richard Dawkins](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments), University of Chicago professor [Jerry Coyne](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/08/27/on-helen-joyces-trans/), or ex-Harvard professor [Carole Hooven](https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard) _have_ been willing to stand up for the scientific truth that biological sex continues to be real even when it hurts people's feelings.
+The claim to not be making public confusions worse might be credible if there were no comparable public figures doing better. But other science educators in the current year such as [Richard Dawkins](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments), University of Chicago professor [Jerry Coyne](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/08/27/on-helen-joyces-trans/), or ex-Harvard professor [Carole Hooven](https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard) _have_ been willing to stand up for the scientific truth that biological sex continues to be real even when it hurts people's feelings.
-If Yudkowsky thinks he's too important for that (because his popularity with progressives has much greater impact on the history of Earth-originating intelligent life than Carole Hooven's), that might be the right act-consequentialist decision, but one of the consequences he should be tracking is that he's forfeiting the trust of everyone who expected him to live up to the epistemic standards successfully upheld by UChicago or Harvard biology professors.
+If Yudkowsky thinks he's too important for that (because his popularity with progressives has much greater impact on the history of Earth-originating intelligent life than Carole Hooven's), that might be the right act-consequentialist decision, but one of the consequences he should be tracking is that he's forfeiting the trust of everyone who expected him to live up to the basic epistemic standards successfully upheld by biology professors.
It looks foolish in retrospect, but I did trust him much more than that. Back in 2009 when _Less Wrong_ was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic ["Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) (in the style of [Chuck Norris facts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts)). ["Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts/comment/Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND), said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would _need_ to.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff