Title: "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: other
-Tags: categorization, personal, my robot cult
+Tags: anecdotal, autogynephilia, categorization, cathartic, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences
Status: draft
> _And I tell myself to let the story end
But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Starting with the shared canon of knowledge of [cognitive biases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnZbHi873v9vcpGpZ/what-s-a-bias-again), [reflectivity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection), and [Bayesian probability theory](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)—and [not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth), but as a result of _understanding how intelligence works_—[the reduction of "thought"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7ftQ6acRkgo6hqHb/dreams-of-ai-design) to [_cognitive algorithms_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms). Intelligent systems that construct predictive models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals.
+So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Starting with the shared canon of knowledge of [cognitive biases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnZbHi873v9vcpGpZ/what-s-a-bias-again), [reflectivity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection), and [Bayesian probability theory](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)—and [not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth), but as a result of understanding _how intelligence works_—[the reduction of "thought"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7ftQ6acRkgo6hqHb/dreams-of-ai-design) to [_cognitive algorithms_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms). Intelligent systems that construct predictive models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals.
Oh, and there was also [this part about](https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf) how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.
But I shouldn't let that worry control what I write in _this_ post, because _this_ post isn't about making arguments that might convince anyone of anything: I _already_ made my arguments, and it _mostly didn't work_. _This_ post is about telling the story about that, so that I can finish grieving for the systematically-correct-reasoning community that I _thought_ I had, and make peace with the world I _actually_ live in.
-So, some backstory about me. Ever since I was thirteen years old—
+So, some backstory about me. Ever since I was fourteen years old—
(and I _really_ didn't expect to be blogging about this eighteen years later)
[section: another thing about me: my psychological sex differences denialism]
-[section: Overcoming Bias rewrites my personality over the internet; gradually getting over sex differences denialism: my reactions to "Failed Utopia 4-2" and "Changing Emotions"]
+[section: Overcoming Bias rewrites my personality over the internet; gradually getting over sex differences denialism]
+
+The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
+
+At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back eleven years later (my deconversion from my teenage religion being pretty thorough at this point, I think), the _argument makes sense_ (though you need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other).
+
+On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_, rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, and judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ what, in the story, has been lost.
+
+[section: reaction to "Changing Emotions"]
[section: moving to Berkeley, realized that my thing wasn't different; seemed like something that a systematically-correct-reasoning community would be interested in getting right (maybe the 30% of the ones with penises are actually women thing does fit here after all? (I was going to omit it)]
[section: had a lot of private conversations with people, and they weren't converging with me]
-[section: flipped out on Facebook; those discussions ended up containing a lot of appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halters, appeal to "Categories Were Made"]
+[section: flipped out on Facebook; those discussions ended up getting derailed on a lot of appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halters, appeal to "Categories Were Made"]
+
+[section: quit my job for gender-blogging]
[...]
[section: the community is politically constrained]
-[section: "Against Lie Inflation" (and less violently https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSemJckYr29Gnxod2/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science ) made me scream in fury, because]
+[section: "Against Lie Inflation" (and less violently https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSemJckYr29Gnxod2/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science ) made me scream in fury (punch the lightswitch cover), because]
[section: the success of "Heads I Win" made me feel better; interesting how re-shared de-emphasized the political aspect]
"The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."
- [my Facebook tantrum kept getting derailed]
-
-to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
-
And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, met a lot of trans women in real life for the first time, and did some more reading that convinced me of the at-least-approximate-correctness of the homosexual/autogynephilic two-types theory of MtF transgenderism that I had previously assumed was false (while being privately grateful that [there was a _word_ for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)) because everyone _said_ it was false
(As usual, no one cares about trans men.)
We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, [less wrong](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop) than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
-
I confess that I _may have [overreacted](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [somewhat](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)_ when people weren't converging (or [even engaging](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)) with me on the two-types/autogynephilia thing. Psychology is a genuinely difficult empirical science
I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to [take the Outside View seriously](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html): no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a systematically-correct-reasoning community_.
The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort
bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
+I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/
Losing faith in guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
+the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me _already_ not believing in guided-by-the-beauty
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/12/forged-by-status.html
+
"I ought to accept ... within the conceptual boundaries" is a betrayal of everything we stand for
(I don't consider "if it'll save someone's life" to be a compelling consideration here, for the same reason that "What if Omega punishes all agents who don't choose the alphabetically first option?" doesn't seem like a compelling argument against timeless decision theory. Specifying punishments for agents that don't follow a particular ritual of cognition doesn't help us understand the laws that make intelligence work.)
what about _my_ mental health?
-Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
-
-my friend thinks I'm naive to have expected such a community—she was recommending "What You Can't Say" in 2009—but in 2009, we did not expect that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue, which is new evidence about the wisdom of the original vision
-
but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care
it's naive to think you can win against an egregore 1000 times bigger than you
won't all those trans women be embarrassed after the singularity
-invent a fake epistemology lesson
-
we live in a world where reason doesn't work
_not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
(I'm not making this up! I _couldn't_ make this up!)
-the frame in which I'm
-
-outside view hobby-horse
-
-standards
-
-cognitive dissonance
-
-smart people clearly know
+smart people clearly know, but I can't be allowed to win the argument in public
free-speech norms
-I'll be alright. Just not tonight.
-
maybe 50,000 years from now we'll all be galatic superminds and laugh about all this
-(probably tell the story with no external links, only this-blog links)
-
-I'll be alright. Just not tonight. But someday.
-
Avoiding politically-expensive topics is fine! Fabricating bad epistemology to support a politically-convenient position and then not retracting it after someone puts a lot of effort into explaining the problem is not OK.
I guess this issue is that the mob thinks that arguments are soldiers and doesn't understand local validity, and if you're trying to appease the mob, you're not even allowed to do the local-validity "This is a bad argument, but the conclusion might be true for other reasons" thing?
"the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value. [...] There are many such shards of desire, all different values."
-I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/
-
analogy to school
(["_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake_. _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening_."](http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good))
This is, of course, a much harder problem to solve, because "Speaker gets shouted down" is easy for third parties to detect as a discourse-norm violation, whereas "Speaker's (polite!) interlocutors are engaging in motivated continuation" is a subtle judgment call that a lot of third-parties are going to get wrong. But if and to the extent that such a thing does happen in our community—and you shouldn't take my word for it—I think it's causally downstream of silencing going on elsewhere in the trash fire that is Society (which we're not isolated from).
-http://www.sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html
-
probably the strongest is "These people have ignored their own carefully gathered experimental evidence for decades in favor of stuff that sounds more intuitive." : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
power is weird: I feel a bit icky when I notice Sophia or Rachel or Tetra changing their description in a way that seemed influenced by me
The "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want" argument is bullshit. All the actually-smart people know that it's bullshit at _some_ level, perhaps semi-consciously buried under a lot of cognitive dissonance. But it's _socially load-bearing_ bullshit that _not only_ does almost no one have an incentive to correct—
-
But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public.
"woah, [toddler]'s learning about the facts of life
stroop test https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
-the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me already not believing in guided-by-the-beauty
-
I was pretty surprised how well the coinflip post did
speculating that people are lying for political cover may be "uncharitable", but what else can I do when I _can't_ take people seriously?!
I didn't not have any reason to _invent the hypotheses_ that I had some undiagnosed brain-intersex condition, or that I was literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
-Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems pretty obvious, really?
-
[This is something where I _actually need the right answer_]
Ultimately, I think this is a pedagogy decision that Eliezer got right. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking a useful discussion about the exact, precise ways that specific, definite things are, in fact, relative to other specific, definite things.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent
-Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill
-
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
-> I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other’s deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we’re talking about here.
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement
-
-"Failed Utopia #4-2" portrays
-
-[on my reading, it's an important part of the argument that _verthandi_ are a _separate thing_, not just synthesized women]
+> I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
>
> Zachary Michael Davis
+Arguing with a specific person's published words is important, because otherwise you can strawman
+
+[Am I the asshole?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/)
+
+(I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone.)
+
+blegg commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode#aAgSDZ4ddHpzj9fNN
+
+if it's objective, there is truth; if it's not-objective social construction for coordination purposes (like money or Christmas), it is at least subject to _negotiation_ (so "words don't mean anything" isn't a valid excuse)
+
+http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
+
+If we _actually_ had the sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would be motivated to invent these category-gerrymandering mind games in the first place
+
+at some point, maybe tell my "leading intellectual figure of the alt-right" anecdote??
+
+anyone else I thought was being dumb about philosophy, I would just shrug and write off rather than spend a _goddamned year_ prosecuting the mistake
+
+canary
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff