srv.pid
notes/private
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A little bit of lipstick rubbed off on the sandwich and the straw.
-At the convention hotel, I waited in the lobby for a while, still with the jacket over my uniform, reading the Janet Mock autobiography on my PADD, until it was time to check in. After buying my Sunday wristband ($70), I wandered over to the photo-op/autograph ticketing table and bought a ticket to get a photo with Michael Dorn at 11:10 ($40). (Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell herself would have been my first choices for a celebrity photo, but they weren't there that day.)
+<a id="reading-the-janet-mock-autobiography"></a>At the convention hotel, I waited in the lobby for a while, still with the jacket over my uniform, reading the Janet Mock autobiography on my PADD, until it was time to check in. After buying my Sunday wristband ($70), I wandered over to the photo-op/autograph ticketing table and bought a ticket to get a photo with Michael Dorn at 11:10 ($40). (Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell herself would have been my first choices for a celebrity photo, but they weren't there that day.)
There was still a lot of time to hang out before the theater opened for the actual convention programming, but that was fine, because actual convention programming is kind of boring; the actual point of conventions is to have an excuse to dress up and wander around and talk to people and get vanity photos of other people who are using the convention as an excuse to dress up.
After de Lancie, there was a discussion with some writer-folk (the schedule _said_ the topic would be the [new series next year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery), but they didn't seem to know anything about it), and soon enough, it was time for my photo op with Michael Dorn.
-The photo session was very assembly-line—here (unlike the autograph sessions I witnessed at other conventions) there was no pretense of your $40 giving you the opportunity to actually _meet_ your heroes for even half a minute: this was pose, _click_, and it's over, time for the next fan to get in position. I had time to say to Dorn, "I'm Jadzia," but that was it.
+<a id="photo-assembly-line"></a>The photo session was very assembly-line—here (unlike the autograph sessions I witnessed at other conventions) there was no pretense of your $40 giving you the opportunity to actually _meet_ your heroes for even half a minute: this was pose, _click_, and it's over, time for the next fan to get in position. I had time to say to Dorn, "I'm Jadzia," but that was it.
Not that I was disappointed. A woman on the event staff commented on how happy I looked skipping down the room after the photo was taken. "[My future husband!](http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/You_Are_Cordially_Invited_%28episode%29)" I said.
> THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. _There's a word for it._ I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.
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+
And:
> Scarcity is a _metaphysical_ fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic _without_ being gender-dysphoric—_or am I?_ _If_ transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It _has_ to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.
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+
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+
<a id="views-have-changed"></a>My views on gender have changed a _lot_ over the past ten years—most notably, I'm not a psychological sex differences denialist anymore, so I'm afraid I can no longer endorse that "gender shouldn't exist" stance. (Given that sex differences exist and people aren't going to _pretend not to notice_, social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around them.)
I remember (and [the Diary entry](/ancillary/diary/296/) helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
-I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
+I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. <a id="narrative-optimization"></a>I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
(I still have the "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
The young James Boylan had a question. What's it _like_, how does it _feel_. The question deserves an answer.
-I bought my first pair of breastforms in January 2008 (I was 20 years old). I think those mysteriously disappeared around that one time my mother unilaterally cleaned out my closet, but I bought another pair (a very high-quality model, plus accessories, for $240 that I probably couldn't afford at the time, but this was _important_) in July 2010. And I would wear them in private from time to time, and that was nice, but they were still, noticeably ... not actually part of my body. Not an answer to the question.
+<a id="first-breastforms"></a>I bought my first pair of breastforms in January 2008 (I was 20 years old). I think those mysteriously disappeared around that one time my mother unilaterally cleaned out my closet, but I bought another pair (a very high-quality model, plus accessories, for $240 that I probably couldn't afford at the time, but this was _important_) in July 2010. And I would wear them in private from time to time, and that was nice, but they were still, noticeably ... not actually part of my body. Not an answer to the question.
And later, on one of the few occasions when I was alone in bed with a woman, I complemented her on her breasts, and mused out loud that, though I had some amount of breast tissue, my chest wasn't interesting like hers.
I don't want to live in that world.
-So here is my policy, I, Taylor Saotome-Westlake, at least on this blog, at least under this name—
+So here is my policy, at least on this blog—
If I say something that is later shown to me to be _factually incorrect_, that's something I take _very_ seriously, and I will do everything in my power to make it right.
This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in common with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common with each other. If we [imagine entities as existing in a high-dimensional configuration space](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/), there would be a _mammals_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a _water-dwellers_ cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to _both_ of them, in the way that the vector *x⃗* = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈ ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the _x₁-x₂_ plane, but also close to [−8, −9, −10, −9] in the _x₃-x₄_ plane.
-If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and [information-theoretically](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/)—rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_. Before shrugging and saying, "Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it," we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others. That there exists an element of subjectivity in what you choose to pay attention to, doesn't negate the fact that there _is_ a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.
+<a id="describing-the-conflict"></a>If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and [information-theoretically](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/)—rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_. Before shrugging and saying, "Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it," we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others. That there exists an element of subjectivity in what you choose to pay attention to, doesn't negate the fact that there _is_ a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.
In terms of the Lincoln riddle: you _can_ call a tail a leg, but you can't stop people from _noticing_ that out of a dog's five legs, one of them is different from the others. You can't stop people from inferring decision-relevant implications from what they notice. (_Most_ of a dog's legs touch the ground, such that you'd have to carry the dog to the vet if one of them got injured, but the dog can still walk without the other, different leg.) And if people who live and work with dogs every day find themselves habitually distinguishing between the bottom-walking-legs and the back-wagging-leg, they _just might_ want _different words_ in order to concisely _talk_ about what everyone is thinking _anyway_.
I _am_, however, supposing that the late-onset type or types is either not an intersex condition, or at _most_, a very mild one: we could perhaps imagine a gender identity "switch" in the brain that can get flipped around (explaining the eventual need to transition) without much affecting other sexually-dimorphic parts of the brain (explaining how transition could be delayed so long, and come as such a surprise to others). This hypothesis is weaker than the autogynephilia theory, but still has implications for the ways in which transgender identity claims might or might not be validated by natural, prediction-motivated categorization schemes. If most trans women's traits are noticeably _not drawn from from the female distribution_, that's a factor making it less practical to insist that others categorize them as women.
-<a id="anchor-different-types-of-women-objection"></a>To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women?
+<a id="different-types-of-women-objection"></a>To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women?
What makes this difficult is that—_conditional_ on the two-types hypothesis and specifically gender dysphoria in non-exclusively-androphilic biological males being mostly not an intersex condition—most trans women aren't just not part of the female cluster in configuration space; they're specifically part of _male_ cluster along most dimensions, which people _already_ have a concept for. This doesn't mean that we can't get away with classifying them as women—there's nothing _stopping_ us from drawing the category boundary however we want. But it [isn't an arbitrary choice](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—the concepts of _women_-as-defined-by-biological-sex, _women_-as-defined-by-self-identity, and _women_-as-defined-by-passing are picking out different (though of course mostly overlapping) regions of the configuration space, which has inescapable logical [consequences](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx/categorizing_has_consequences/) on the kinds of inferences that can be made using each concept.
People should get what they want. Social science is hard and I want to _try_ to avoid politics as much as I can.[ref]Unfortunately, a very challenging goal in the gender blogging business.[/ref] When different people's wants come into conflict, it's not for me to say what the optimal compromise is; it's too much for me to compute.
-<a id="anchor-pronoun-sticker-discourse"></a>What I can say is that _whatever_ the right thing to do is, we stand a better chance of getting there if we can be _honest_ with each other about the world we see, using the most precise categories we can, to construct maps that reflect the territory. My model of the universe doesn't stop at the boundary of your body, and yours shouldn't stop at mine.
+<a id="pronoun-sticker-discourse"></a>What I can say is that _whatever_ the right thing to do is, we stand a better chance of getting there if we can be _honest_ with each other about the world we see, using the most precise categories we can, to construct maps that reflect the territory. My model of the universe doesn't stop at the boundary of your body, and yours shouldn't stop at mine.
This is definitely compatible with transitioning. It is _not_, I claim, compatible with the ideology of gender-as-self-identification that is rapidly establishing a foothold in Society. Consider this display at a recent conference of the American Philosophical Association (note, the people whose _job_ it is to use careful conceptual distinctions to understand reality)—
-----
-Alexander ends his post by citing, as "one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one of my favorite places in the world," the case of 19th century San Francisco resident [Joshua Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton), who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of Mexico and whose claims to power were widely humored by local citizens. Restaurants accepted currency issued in his name; the city's Board of Supervisors bought him a uniform.
+<a id="emperor-norton"></a>Alexander ends his post by citing, as "one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one of my favorite places in the world," the case of 19th century San Francisco resident [Joshua Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton), who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of Mexico and whose claims to power were widely humored by local citizens. Restaurants accepted currency issued in his name; the city's Board of Supervisors bought him a uniform.
Norton's story is certainly _entertaining to read about_ a hundred and forty years after the fact. But before endorsing it as a model of humane behavior, I think it's worth dwelling on what it would be like to live through, not just read about as a historical curiosity.
<a id="post-ideas-list"></a>
- * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
+ * <a id="reply-to-ozy"></a>I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
* I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a _lot_ more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post
* A _brief_ (only ~350 words) summary—
* I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as trying to make a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument, claiming that my arguments relying on the relevance of psychological sex differences would imply that lesbians aren't women, which is absurd.
And somehow it _doesn't land_. It's like talking to a tape recorder that just endlessly repeats, "Ha-ha! [I can define a word any way I want](http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/)! You can't use that concept unless you can provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases!"
-Although I do have a couple favorite edge cases of my own. I generally prefer not to involve named individuals in arguments, even public figures: it's unclassy. But having nothing left, I pull out a [photograph of Danielle Muscato](http://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg). "Look," I say. "This is a photograph of a man. You can see it, too, right? Right?"
+<a id="photo-of-danielle-muscato"></a>Although I do have a couple favorite edge cases of my own. I generally prefer not to involve named individuals in arguments, even public figures: it's unclassy. But having nothing left, I pull out a [photograph of Danielle Muscato](http://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg). "Look," I say. "This is a photograph of a man. You can see it, too, right? Right?"
And they say, "It's possible to be mistaken about cis people's genders, too."
Maybe with more time and more effort I could find _exactly_ the right words to cover every possible caveat and nitpick and _finally_ be able to communicate the thing—
-But maybe I just need to relax. Not take it so seriously. Forget about the topic for a few days or a few months. Wash the goddamned dishes, write some goddamned code. _Maybe_ it's not [the end of the world](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/) if someone is Wrong on the Internet.
+But maybe I just need to relax. Not take it so seriously. Forget about the topic for a few days or a few months. Wash the goddamned dishes, write some goddamned code. _Maybe_ it's not [the end of the world](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/) if someone is Wrong on the Internet.
I think another part of it is an intuition about—how do I put this? Not wanting to commit fraud?—or not wanting to commit _obvious_ fraud. The reason I'm so glad that [there's a word for the thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/) that isn't "crossdresser" or "transvestite" is because it's not about the clothes; it's about wanting to actually have the body of the other sex. The clothes are just a prop. And the prop ... _noticeably doesn't work_. I don't pass; I have _never_ passed. My voice is wrong; my skeleton is wrong; my movement is wrong; my face continues to be wrong despite makeup. At least at Fanime (where everyone _and her dog_ is in costume) there's no pretense that the pretense is anything more than that. If you fool someone—if only for a moment—then great, but if not, then at least you're not fooling anyone about whether you're fooling yourself.
-I'm probably just _bad_ at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of _effort_ into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, [the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out](/images/discover_related_products.png) the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 ["Story for Steven"](https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven). (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: [as Ens. Silvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francsico Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)).
+I'm probably just _bad_ at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of _effort_ into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, [the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out](/images/discover_related_products.png) the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 ["Story for Steven"](https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven). (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: [as Ens. Sylvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francisco Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)).
<a id="tech-conference"></a>As far as other special events go, I'm flying out to Portland—the real Portland—tonight for a tech conference, and to visit friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/). You'd think a few days of vacation should do me good—I've been an psychological wreck all year (I mean, even more than my average year) over having accidentally catalyzed a civil war in my local robot cult—except that the same cultural forces that have subtly-yet-fatally corrupted my beautiful robot cult, just _own_ the open-source tech scene outright, which is likely to present a source of additional stress. The spirit of bravery that sings, [_I will fight for the place where I'm free—for the world I was made in_](https://genius.com/16627280), must subsist in a brain wracked by constant emotional pain that—sometimes—is just tired of fighting.
<a id="ace-model"></a>The third part of the book is about genetic influences on class structure! Untangling the true causes of human variation is a really hard technical philosophy problem, but behavioral geneticists have at least gotten started with their simple _ACE_ model. It works like this: first, assume (that is, "pretend") that the genetic variation for a trait is _additive_ (if you have the appropriate SNP, you get more of the trait), rather than exhibiting _epistasis_ (where the effects of different loci interfere with each other) or Mendelian _dominance_ (where the presence of just one copy of an allele (of two) determines the phenotype, and it doesn't matter whether you heterozygously have a different allele as your second version of that gene). Then we pretend that we can partition the variance in phenotypes as the sum of the "additive" genetic variance _A_, plus the environmental variance "common" within a family _C_, plus "everything else" (including measurement "error" and the not-shared-within-families "environment") _E_. Briefly (albeit at the risk of being _cliché_): nature, nurture, and _noise_.
-Then we can estimate the sizes of the _A_, _C_, and _E_ components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they mean—_not_ case studies of identical twins raised apart, which _are_ really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment _C_ at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, _&c._), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were _already_ similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the _quantitative_ effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!
+<a id="twin-studies"></a>Then we can estimate the sizes of the _A_, _C_, and _E_ components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they mean—_not_ case studies of identical twins raised apart, which _are_ really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment _C_ at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, _&c._), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were _already_ similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the _quantitative_ effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!
Anyway, it turns out that the effect of the shared environment _C_ for most outcomes is smaller than most people intuitively expect—actually close to zero for personality and adult intelligence specifically! Sometimes sloppy popularizers summarize this as "parenting doesn't matter" in full generality, but it depends on the trait or outcome you're measuring: for example, the shared environment component gets up to 25% for years-of-schooling ("educational attainment") and 36% for "basic interpersonal interactions." _Culture_ obviously exists, but for underlying psychological traits, the part of the environment that matters is mostly not shared by siblings in the same family—not the part of the environment we know how to control. Thus, a lot of economic and class stratification actually ends up being along genetic lines: the nepotism of family wealth can buy opportunities and second chances, but it doesn't actually live your life for you.
Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.
-This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
+<a id="the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad"></a>This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
It probably wouldn't have mattered either way, with so many messages flying by in the chat. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter: you can get surprisingly far into discussing the actual substance of ideas as long as no one _says a bad word_ like "eugenics".
-—if we even have enough _time_ for things like embryo selection to help, if AI research somehow keeps plodding along [even as everything _else_ falls apart](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/). The [GPT-3 demos](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3) have been tickling my neuroticism. Sure, it's "just" a language model, doing nothing more but predicting the next token of human-generated text. But [you can do a lot with language](https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models/). As _disgusted_ as I am with my robot cult as presently constituted, the _argument_ for why you should fear the coming robot apocalypse in which all will be consumed in a cloud of tiny molecular paperclips, still looks solid. But I had always thought of it as a long-term thing—this unspoken sense of, okay, we're probably all going to die, but that'll probably be in, like, 2060 or whatever. People freaking out about it coming _soon_-soon are probably just [following the gradient into](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) being [a doomsday cult](https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/11/the-ai-timelines-scam/). Now the threat, [and the uncertainty around it](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), feel more real—like maybe we'll all die in 2035 instead of 2060.
+<a id="if-we-even-have-enough-time"></a>—if we even have enough _time_ for things like embryo selection to help, if AI research somehow keeps plodding along [even as everything _else_ falls apart](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/). The [GPT-3 demos](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3) have been tickling my neuroticism. Sure, it's "just" a language model, doing nothing more but predicting the next token of human-generated text. But [you can do a lot with language](https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models/). As _disgusted_ as I am with my robot cult as presently constituted, the _argument_ for why you should fear the coming robot apocalypse in which all will be consumed in a cloud of tiny molecular paperclips, still looks solid. But I had always thought of it as a long-term thing—this unspoken sense of, okay, we're probably all going to die, but that'll probably be in, like, 2060 or whatever. People freaking out about it coming _soon_-soon are probably just [following the gradient into](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult) being [a doomsday cult](https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/11/the-ai-timelines-scam/). Now the threat, [and the uncertainty around it](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/), feel more real—like maybe we'll all die in 2035 instead of 2060.
At some point, I should write a post on the causes and consequences of the psychological traits of fictional characters not matching the real-life distributions by demographic. [The new _Star Trek_ cartoon](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Lower_Decks) is not very good, but I'm obligated to enjoy it anyway out of brand loyalty. One of the main characters, Ens. Beckett Mariner, is [brash and boisterous and dominant](https://youtu.be/64obsPsXxkE?t=45)—[friendly, but in a way](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CVJGy0Do5I) that makes it clear that she's _on top_. If you've seen _Rick and Morty_, her relationship with Ens. Brad Boimler has the Rick and Morty dynamic, with Mariner as Rick. ([Series creator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahan) Mike McMahan actually worked on _Rick and Morty_, so it likely _is_ the same dynamic, not just superficially, but generated by the same algorithm in McMahan's head.)
Title: Link: "Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬"
Date: 2021-09-30 09:35
Category: other
-Tags: categorization, epistemology, linkpost
+Tags: categorization, epistemology, linkpost, whale metaphors
Ha ha, [those _Less Wrong_ guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) [(Alternative viewer.)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to [the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize _sex_ in humans](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#chromosomes)—it's not that anyone directly sees chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; it's that chromosomes are the "switch" upstream of the development of all other sex differences. Talking about the setting of the switch (which you don't _intrinsically_ care about) is a concise way to sum over the many, many high-dimensional details that you do care about.
From the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, "normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing" is actually a _great_ outcome—the _ideal_ outcome. Let me explain.
-The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accommodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where ["magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)).
+<a id="secret-fantasy-frame-stories"></a>The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accommodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where ["magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)).
So imagine having something like [the transporter in _Star Trek_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter), but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) [Nana Visitor (circa 1998)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg). (In the folklore of [female-transformation erotica](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), this machine is often called the ["morphic adaptation unit"](https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html).)
From context, it seems like the idea was targeted at men who disdain women as a mysterious Other—but the same moral applies to men who are in ideologically-motivated denial about how male-typical they are, and whether this has implications. [At the time, I certainly didn't want to think of myself _as a man_.](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) And yet ...
-For example. When I read things from the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
+For example. When I read things from the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
[But the map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). We don't have unmediated access to reality beyond [the Veil of Maya](https://web.archive.org/web/20020606121040/http://singinst.org/GISAI/mind/consensus.html); system-ness in the empathizing/systematizing sense is a feature of our _models_ of the world, not the world itself.
(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this.)
-A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
+A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror. My face ruins it and makeup doesn't help.)
My [laser beard removal sessions](/tag/lasers/) were ... arguably a waste of money, since I still have to shave even after 13 treatments?—but it at least got the density of my ugly–gross facial hair down a bit. Trying it was definitely a _smart move_ given what I knew at the time, and I _just might_ be rich enough and disgusted-by-facial-hair enough to go back for more density-reduction. (Electrolysis gets better results than laser, but it's more expensive and a lot more painful.)
-People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a _smarter move_ to check out [movie-grade latex masks](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/) first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror _without_ taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)
+<a id="movie-grade-mask"></a>People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a _smarter move_ to check out [movie-grade latex masks](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/) first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror _without_ taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)
And I should probably look into [figuring out if there's anything to be done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_hair_loss#Treatment) for my hairline before it gets any worse?
The author probably doesn't believe in the typology (if she's even heard of it), but _the traits line up anyway_. Carrie is straight—gynephilic (["Guys just aren't my thing"](http://www.dolari.org/cs/16.htm), she tells her sister). Carrie's gay (androphilic) drag queen friend Victor/Victoria [doesn't understand Carrie's motivations](http://www.dolari.org/cs/67.htm): "Not to mention you don't _think_ like one of 'them'", she comments on Carrie's lack of innate femininity. (Anyone can see that effeminate gay men taking on female roles "make sense"; autogynephilia is harder to understand if you haven't yourself felt the tug of the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.) Allison's recollection of her origins includes a moment of envy about a girl: ["she looks so pretty ... so pretty"](http://www.dolari.org/cs/342.htm). Heidi the (male) dominatrix [displays a working knowledge of the typology while coming on to Carrie](http://www.dolari.org/cs/268.htm): "We're both crossdressers, and we aren't anything like drag queens [...] sometimes I want to hang out with someone like me. Someone like you." Indeed!
-Likewise, Carrie's [beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) (["And I feel a longing ... like I'd have a body like that once upon a time, and want it back"](http://www.dolari.org/cs/231.htm)) and [stirring post-transition](http://www.dolari.org/cs/239.htm) [meta-attraction](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/meta-attraction-cannot-account-for-all-autogynephiles-interest-in-men/) are _on type_.
+Likewise, Carrie's [beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) (["And I feel a longing ... like I'd had a body like that once upon a time, and want it back"](http://www.dolari.org/cs/231.htm)) and [stirring post-transition](http://www.dolari.org/cs/239.htm) [meta-attraction](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/meta-attraction-cannot-account-for-all-autogynephiles-interest-in-men/) are _on type_.
A point of skepticism on the premise: it doesn't feel realistic to me that Allison doesn't clock Carrie given that Carrie is [_not on hormones yet_](http://www.dolari.org/cs/55.htm). Passing is _hard_, especially when you're _living with someone_, rather than just seeing them "in passing" in public. No one mistakes [the Texas insurrectionist woman](http://www.dolari.org/cs/23.htm) as a man even though she has short hair and wears men's clothes. And Carrie _sings_! (Vocal pitch is hugely sexually dimorphic; [one study reports](/papers/puts_et_al-masculine_voices_signal_mens_threat_potential.pdf) the sex difference in mean [fundamental frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency) at Cohen's _d_ ≈ 5.7, which is so huge that I can't quite take it at face value insofar as it implies that Tracy Chapman (whose [singing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwrHwZyFN7M) I've mis-sexed) should outright not exist, rather than merely being very rare.) I feel kind of vindicated that a [guest illustrator gave Carrie a realistically unfortunate face](http://www.dolari.org/cs/357.htm).
Author: GPT-3
Date: 2022-04-24 23:04
Category: other
-Tags: autogynephilia
+Tags: autogynephilia, language modeling
_(A brief guest post by friend of the blog [GPT-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3) (text-davinci-002, [temperature](https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/edits/create#edits/create-temperature) 0.7, [best of](https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create#completions/create-best_of) 3).)_
* a post about how sex concepts represent _both_ categorical differences _and_ the conjunction of statistical differences of various effect sizes, such that if you try to unpin the word from the categorical differences, you end up (as per the usual gender-critical complaint) defining gender in terms of stereotypes because there's nothing _left_ for the word to attach to (working title: "Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes")
* a post about how gender identity ideology is actually _not_ very compatible with the traditional liberal impulse to make gender less of a big deal, because there's a huge difference between omitting category information that's not relevant, _vs._ letting people choose their category-membership (working title: "Elision _vs_. Choice")
* a steelperson of the "assigned at birth" terminology (working title: "'Assigned at Birth' Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)")
- * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) where AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
+ * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) whether AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
* a post about the motivation for positing peseudobisexuality or meta-attraction as part of the two-type taxonomy of MtF: it may _sound_ like a suspicious _ad hoc_ patch to save the theory from falsification by bi trans women, but it's actually needed to explain the commonality of (a) AGP males expressing attraction to men _only while in "girl mode" themselves_, and (b) self-reports of sexual orientation changing post-transition in trans women who weren't androphilic _before_
* (a) is suspicious is because "bi + AGP, independently" doesn't explain why the interest would be dependent on one's _own_ presentation; (b) is suspicious is because everything else we know about sexual orientation in males (but [not females](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf)) makes it look awfully _stable_. (Conversion therapy doesn't work; criminally convicted pedophiles still show genital response to child stimuli despite the huge incentives to conceal/repress it; [correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) makes it look like a [prenatal organizational effect, rather than an activational effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis) that would respond to HRT as an adult.)
* Maybe these two bullet points suffice and I don't need to pad it out into a whole post?
* a critique of the implicit [presentism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) in Holden Karnofsky's [_Cold Takes_](https://www.cold-takes.com/) blog
- * For a blog that [aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old](https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/), there's just something very _off_ about proclaiming with a straight face that ["one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current era, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is [about sixty years old](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism).
+ * For a blog that [aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old](https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/), there's just something very _off_ about proclaiming with a straight face that ["one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current year, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is [about sixty years old](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism).
"Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information, as an apolitical matter of language design," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of the policy of keeping both _she_ and _he_ but asserting that the difference doesn't mean anything.
-This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less emotionally and politically fraught than sex/gender in the current year. [Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns that distinguish the speaker's relationship to the listener as being more familiar/intimate, or more formal/hierarchical.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction) In Spanish, for example, [the familiar pronoun is _tú_ and the formal pronoun is _usted_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted): one would address friends, family members, children, or personal servants as _tú_, but strangers or social superiors as _usted_. Using the wrong pronoun can be the cause of offense or awkwardness. A speaker switching from _usted_ to _tú_ for an interlocutor who they're getting along with might ask if it's okay with _¿Te puedo tutear?_ (Can I call you _tú_?) or _Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad?_ (We call each other _tú_, right?); this is somewhat analogous to an English speaker asking if they may address someone by first name, rather than with a courtesy title or honorific (Ms./Mr. Lastname, or ma'am/sir).
+<a id="t-v-distinction"></a>This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less emotionally and politically fraught than sex/gender in the current year. [Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns that distinguish the speaker's relationship to the listener as being more familiar/intimate, or more formal/hierarchical.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction) In Spanish, for example, [the familiar pronoun is _tú_ and the formal pronoun is _usted_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted): one would address friends, family members, children, or personal servants as _tú_, but strangers or social superiors as _usted_. Using the wrong pronoun can be the cause of offense or awkwardness. A speaker switching from _usted_ to _tú_ for an interlocutor who they're getting along with might ask if it's okay with _¿Te puedo tutear?_ (Can I call you _tú_?) or _Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad?_ (We call each other _tú_, right?); this is somewhat analogous to an English speaker asking if they may address someone by first name, rather than with a courtesy title or honorific (Ms./Mr. Lastname, or ma'am/sir).
One could argue that the _tú_/_usted_ distinction is bad language design for the same reason Yudkowsky opposes the _she_/_he_ distinction: you shouldn't be forced to make a call on how familiar your relationship with someone is just in order to be able to use a pronoun for them. The modern English way is more flexible: you _can_ indicate formality if you want to by saying additional words, but it's not baked into the grammar itself.
Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." How else am I supposed to interpret those words?
-Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.
+Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, by dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.
For example, in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
Title: Comment on a Scene from <em>Planecrash</em>: "Crisis of Faith"
Date: 2022-06-12 20:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, worldbuilding
+Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, literary critcism, worldbuilding
Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the ["empathic inference"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing [alleged aliens or AIs that _just happen_ act like humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits), or allegedly foreign cultures that _just happen_ to share all of the idiosyncratic taboos of the author's own culture. The manifestations of this can be very subtle, even to authors who know about the trap.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Context Is For Queens
+Date: 2022-12-08 20:03
+Category: other
+Tags: anecdotal, cosplay, Star Trek, review (webcomic/graphic novel)
+
+> NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.
+>
+> PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.
+>
+> —_Star Trek: Voyager_, ["Repentance"](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Repentance_(episode))
+
+_(Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.)_
+
+(**SPOILERS** notice for _Star Trek: Discovery_ Season 1, _Fan Fiction_ by Brent Spiner, and [_TransCat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/))
+
+I [continue](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) to [maintain](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy _consuming_ fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don't seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. At best, you might hope to _meet_ someone at a convention, and then make friends with them over time?—which I've never actually done. And so, surrounded by tens of thousands of people ostensibly with common interests, invited to a calvacade of activities and diversions put on at no doubt monstrous expense, the predominant emotion I feel is the loneliness of anonymity.
+
+<a href="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg"><img src="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+But that's okay. Ultimately, I did not come to [Fan Expo San Francisco 2022](https://archive.ph/2OI4H) for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.
+
+I came because of the _loophole_. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not _crossdress_ in public. That would be _weird_. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, _out-of-distribution_ weird.)
+
+But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
+
+Conventions are actually _so_ boring that the loophole alone wouldn't have been enough to get me to come out to Fan Expo (been there, [done that](/tag/cosplay/)—seven times), except that this time I had a couple of new accessories to try out, most notably [a "Taylor" silicone mask by Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/).
+
+The "Taylor" is an amazing piece of workmanship that entirely earns its €672 price tag. It really looks like a woman's face! Just—a detached woman's face, wrapped in tissue paper, sitting in a box! [I had _said_ buying this product was probably a smart move](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#movie-grade-mask), and it turned out that buying this product was a _smart move!_ The skin color and texture is much more realistic than a lot of other silicone feminization products, like the cartoony beige of the [Gold Seal female bodysuit](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-naked-silicone-bodysuit/) from [the Breast Form Store](https://thebreastformstore.com/who-we-are/) that I _also_ blew $600 on recently (and damaged badly just trying to get it on).
+
+(As far as workmanship quality goes, I wonder how much it helps that [Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/) are visual-effects artists by trade—makers also of male masks and monster masks for movies and plays—rather than being in the MtF business specifically, like the Breast Form Store. They know—[they _must_ know](https://www.creafx.com/en/crea-fx-at-the-german-fetish-fair/)—that a lot of their female masks are purchased by guys like me with motives like mine, but we're not the _target_ demographic, the reason they mastered their skills.)
+
+Somehow the mask manages to look worse in photographs than it does in the mirror? Standing a distance from the mirror in a dark motel room the other month (that I rented to try on my new mask in privacy), I swear _I actually bought it_, and if the moment of passing to myself in the mirror was an anticlimax, it was an anticlimax I've been waiting my entire life (since puberty) for.
+
+The worst nonrealism is the eyeholes. Nothing is worse for making a mask look like a mask than visible eyehole-seams around the eyes. But suppose I wore sunglasses. Women wear sunglasses sometimes! Could I pass to _someone else_? (Not for very long or bearing any real scrutiny, but [to someone who wasn't expecting it](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/).)
+
+It immediately became clear that I would have to cosplay at one more convention in order to test this, and decided to reprise my role as [Sylvia Tilly](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sylvia_Tilly) from _Star Trek: Discovery_ (previously played at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018) at the next nearby con. There had been [a plot point in Season 1 of _Discovery_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vaulting_Ambition_(episode)#Act_Four) that people in the mirror universe are more sensitive to light. At the time, this had seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me, but now, it gave me a perfect excuse for why (someone who looks like) Tilly would be wearing sunglasses!
+
+I was soon disappointed to learn that one-way glass isn't actually a real thing that you could make sunglasses out of; what's real are [_half-silvered_ mirrors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_mirror) that are deployed with one side in darkness. For good measure, I also added of a pair of [padded panties](https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-padded-panty/) from the Breast Form Store to my outfit, another solid buy.
+
+So on the night of Friday 25 November, I threw my [2250s-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which had started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money instead of being a YOLO spendthrift, at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid.
+
+<a id="memoir-of-religious-betrayal"></a>Arguably, just the _time_ was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on [writing my memoir of religious betrayal](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft [mss.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.) are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being _done already_ and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.
+
+Worse, in the twelve-day _week_ between Fan Expo and me getting this boring Diary-like post up about it, OpenAI released _two_ new GPT variants ([text-davinci-003](https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1597355354433916928) and [ChatGPT](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/)). It's not a _timeline_ update (and most days, I count myself with those [sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), not those _loonies_ who think the world is ending in 2027), but it is a suggestion that it would be [_more dignified_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) for me to finish the memoir _now_ and go on to sieze the possibilities of another definitely-more-than-five-you-lunatics years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.
+
+(The draft of part _3_ is basically done and just needs some editing. Maybe I should just publish that first, as one does with blog posts?—rather than waiting until I have the Whole Dumb Story collected, to be optimized end-to-end.)
+
+Anyway, Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then _activate_ the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!
+
+And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events on a page in my pocket Moleskine notebook, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the _Star Trek_ cosplay rendezvous at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden (best known for their roles as Lt. Cmdr. Data and Dr. Crusher, respectively, on _Star Trek: The Next Generation_) at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...
+
+Until I came across a comics table hawking [_TransCat_](http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/), the "first" (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything [I'm fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/)—not out of hatred, but out of a [shared love](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) that [I think I have](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) the more [faithful interpretation](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was ... not good. "There's so much I could say that doesn't fit in this context," I said to the table's proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe. "Probably not what you're thinking," I added. "Oh no," [she](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) said. I didn't want to spend the day carrying anything that didn't fit nicely in my fanny pack, so I left without buying any comics, thinking I might come back later.
+
+I wandered around the con some more (watched some of the cartoons, talked to the guys manning the _Star Trek_ fan society table). Eventually I checked out the third floor, where the celebrity autographs and photo ops were. Spiner and McFadden were there, with no line in front of their tables. I had already paid for the photo op later, but that looked like it was going to be [one of those](/2016/Dec/joined/#photo-assembly-line) soulless "pose, click—next fan" assembly-lines, and it felt more human to actually get to _talk_ to the stars for half a minute.
+
+(When I played Ens. Tilly in 2018, I got an autograph and [photo with Jonathan Frakes](/images/tilly_cosplay.png), and got to talk to him for half a minute: I told him that we had covered his work in art history class at the Academy, and that I loved his portrayal of—[David Xanatos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Xanatos).)
+
+I had recently read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical crime novel [_Fan Fiction_](https://www.npr.org/2021/10/17/1046397441/brent-spiner-data-fan-fiction-review) about him getting stalked by a deranged fan and wanted to say something intelligent about it, so (my heart pounding) I went over to Spiner's table and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)
+
+I told him that I thought the forward to _Fan Fiction_ should have been more specific about which parts were based on a true story. He said, that's the point, that you don't know what's real. I said that I was enjoying it as a decent crime novel, but kept having a reaction to some parts of the form, No way, no _way_ did that actually happen. He asked which parts. I said, you know, the way that the woman hired to be your bodyguard just happens to have a twin sister, and you get romantically involved with _both_ of them, and end up killing the stalker yourself in a dramatic confrontation—
+
+"I killed someone," he said, deadpan.
+
+"Really?" I said.
+
+No, he admitted, but the part about getting sent a pig penis was real.
+
+I gave my name as "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_", and he signed a page I ripped out of my Moleskine: "To Sylvia", it says, "A fine human!"
+
+As far as my hope of the mask helping me pass as female to others, I didn't really get a sense that I fooled anyone? (Looking at the photographs afterwards, that doesn't feel surprising. _Proportions!_)
+
+I guess it's not obvious how I would tell in every case? A woman wearing a Wonder Woman costume recognized me as Tilly, enthusiastically complimented me, asked to get a photo of us. She asked where I got my costume from, and I murmured ["Amazon."](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C1LCMSB/) Her friend took the photo, and accepted my phone to take one for me as well. Would that interaction have gone any differently, if I had actually been a woman (just wearing a Starfleet uniform and maybe a wig, with no mask or breastforms or hip pads)?
+
+People at the _Star Trek_ cosplay rendezvous were nice. (The schedule called it a cosplay "meetup", but I'm going with _rendezvous_, a word that I'm sure I learned from watching _The Next Generation_ as a child.) A woman in a [2380s-era sciences division uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(early_2380s)) asked me my name.
+
+"Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_," I said.
+
+No, I meant, your alter-ego, she said, and I hesitated—I wanted to stay in character (that is, I didn't want to give my (male) name), but some minutes later (after the photo shoot) changed my mind and introduced myself with my real name, and she gave me a card with her _Star Trek_ fan group's name written on the back.
+
+<a href="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg"><img src="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg" width="575" style="margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+My wig was coming off at the beginning of the photo shoot, so I went to the bathroom to fix it. (The men's room; I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, _&c._) The man who was also in a _Discovery_-era uniform also wanted a photo, and I ended up explaining the rationalization for my sunglasses to him ("definitely not her analogue from a parallel universe where people are more sensitive to light"—but [Doylistically](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) because I'm wearing a mask instead of makeup this year), which he thought was clever.
+
+Maybe I should have tried harder to make friends, instead of mostly just exchanging pleasantries and being in photos? There was a ready-made conversation topic in the form of all the new shows! Would it have been witty and ironic to confess that I don't even like _Discovery_? (I finally gave up halfway through Season 4; I don't care what happens to these characters anymore.) I guess I was feeling shy? I did later join the Facebook group written on the back of the card I was given.
+
+<a href="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg"><img src="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg" width="350" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+The photo op with Spiner and McFadden was the assembly-line affair I expected. They had a bit of COVID theater going, in the form of the photo being taken with a transparent barrier between fan and stars. Spiner said, "Sylvia, right?" and I said, "Yeah." Pose, click—next fan.
+
+I did get "ma'am"ed on my way out, so that's something.
+
+At this point, I was kind of tired and bored and wanted to go back to my hotel room and masturbate.
+
+But there was one last thing left to do at Fan Expo. I went to the vendor hall, stopped by a side table and wrote "unremediatedgender.space" on a strip of paper torn out from my Moleskine, then went back to the _TransCat_ table.
+
+I changed my mind, I said (about buying), where does the story start? The proprietor said that Issue 1 was sold out, but that the book Vol. 1 (compiling the first 6 issues plus some bonus content) was available for $25. I'll take it, I said enthusiastically.
+
+And then—there wouldn't be any _good_ way to bring up the thing, except that I felt that I had to try and that I was paying $25 for the privilege—I said awkwardly that I was ... disappointed, that our Society had settled on a "trans women are women" narrative. The proprietor said something about there being more enthusiasm in 2016, but that coming back to conventions after COVID, public opinion seems colder now, that she was worried.
+
+I asked if she had heard of the concept of "autogynephilia." She hadn't.
+
+The proprietor asked if I would like the book signed. I agreed, then hesitated when asked my name. Sensing my discomfort, the proprietor clarified, "Who should I make it out to?"
+
+I said, "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. _Discovery_."
+
+"Sylvia Tilly! Keep on exploring the final frontier," says the autograph.
+
+Sensing that there really was no way to cross the [inferential distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances) over a transaction in the vendor hall, I said that I had some contrarian opinions, and that I had a blog, handing the proprietor the slip of paper before taking my leave. (As if implicitly proposing a trade, I thought: I'll read yours if you read mine.)
+
+I walked back to my hotel room to get out of the uncomfortable costume—but not fully out of costume, not immediately: I took off the uniform and wig, but left my mask and breastforms. I had packed a hand mirror in my backpack the previous night, so that I could look at my masked face while lying in bed. I appreciated the way the mask really does look "female"; the illusion doesn't depend on a wig to provide the [cultural gendered cue](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of long hair. (Of course; I have long hair in real life.)
+
+I swear it looks worse in photographs than it does in the mirror! Gazing into the hand mirror while feeling up the weight of my size-7 breastforms, it was almost possible to pretend that I was admiring flesh instead of silicone—almost possible to imagine what it would be like to have been transformed into a woman with a shaved head (surely a lesbian) and DD breasts.
+
+I often like masturbating into a condom (no mess, no stress!), but catching the cum with toilet paper works fine, too.
+
+---------
+
+<a id="transcat-review"></a>Later, I would force myself to read _TransCat_ Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.
+
+I mean, it is bad, but the fact that it's bad, isn't what's bad about it.
+
+<a id="knowing-how-that-looks"></a>What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" [(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) "know how that _looks?_" And if nothing else, I aspire to _know how it looks_.
+
+I don't get the sense that _TransCat_ knows how it looks. Our hero is a teenage boy named Knave (the same first name as our author) in Mountain View, California in the year 200X, who discovers a cat-ears hat that magically transforms him into a girl when worn. While transformed, he—she—fights evildoers, like a pervy guy at Fanime who was covertly taking upskirt photos, or a busybody cop who suddenly turns out to be a lizard person. Knave develops a crush on a lesbian at school named "Chloie" (which I guess is a way you could spell _Chloë_ if you don't know how to type a [diaeresis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic))), and starts wearing the cat hat more often (taking on "Cat" as a girl-mode name), hoping to get closer to Chloie. Cat and Chloie find they enjoy spending time together, until one day, when Cat makes some physical advances—and discovers, to her surprise, that Chloie has a penis. Chloie punches her and runs off.
+
+... how can I explain the problems with this?
+
+Superficially, this comic was clearly made for _people like me_. Who better to appreciate a story about a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who can magically change sex, than someone who remembers [being a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who fantasized about magically changing sex](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity)? (Okay, I was _East_ Bay; this is _South_ Bay. Totally different.)
+
+But I can't, appreciate it, other than as an anthropological exhibit—not just because of the bad art, or the bad font choices (broadly construed to include the use of ALLCAPS for emphasis rather than **bold** or _italics_), or the numerous uncorrected spelling errors, or the lack of page numbers, or the unnecessarily drawn-out pop-culture references that I didn't get—but because the author is living inside an ideological fever dream _that doesn't know it's a dream_.
+
+The foreward by Tara Madison Avery mentions the subset of transfolk "whose gender journey involves hormone replacement therapy." The "episode zero" primer tells us that the hat brings out our protagonist's "True Form". "[A]m I a straight boy with a girl on the inside? Or am I a gay girl with a boy on the outside?" Knave wonders. When Chloie's former bandmate misgenders her behind her back, Cat tells him off: "Chloie is a woman, even without the pills and surgery! You don't get to decide her identity based on her looks, or what she did to attain them!"
+
+And just—what does any of that _mean?_ What is an "identity"? How can you "be trans" _without hormone replacement therapy?_ I was pretty social-justicey as a teenager, too, but somehow my indoctrination never included this _nonsense_: when I was a teenage boy fantasizing about being a teenage girl, I'm pretty sure _I knew I was pretending_.
+
+Is it an East Bay _vs._ South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the _X_ in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you _left_ social justice, or continued to be [shaped by the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.
+
+And just—there are _so_ many interesting things you could do with this premise, that you can only do if you admit that biological sex is real and "identity" is not. (Otherwise, why would you need the magic hat?) The situation where Knave-as-Cat is pursuing Chloie as a lesbian, but Chloie doesn't know that Cat is Knave—that's interesting! I want to know how the story would have gone, if Chloie (cis) found out that her girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat: would she accept it, or would she feel betrayed? Why would you throw away that story, but for the ethnic narcissism of an ["everyone is [our sexual minority]"](/2021/Sep/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic/) dynamic?
+
+And if you _do_ want to go the ethnic narcissism route and make Chloie trans, why assert that Cat and Chloie are equally valid "even without the pills and surgery"? Isn't there a sense in which Cat's identity is more legitimate on account of the magic? How would Chloie (trans) react if she found out that her cis girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat? Would she _die of jealousy?_ Would she bargain to try to borrow the hat—or even just steal it for herself?
+
+(The conclusion to Issue 1 establishes that the hat's sex-change magic doesn't work on Knave's male friend, at which our hero(ine) infers that "it was meant for me." But is the power sponsoring the hat as kind to other [(sufficiently)](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) gender-dysphoric males? If so, I'll take back my claims about "identity" being meaningless: whether the hat works for you would be an _experimental test_ demonstrating who is really trans.)
+
+My favorite scene is probably the one where, after watching [_Fight Club_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club) at Cat's behest, Chloie admits that it wasn't bad, but is cynical about the educated middle-class bros of Project Mayhem thinking themselves oppressed by Society as if they were an actual persecuted minority. Cat is impressed: "you actually have stuff to say about [the film] too! You can be critical about it without trashing it. That's kinda rare". And maybe it is, _kinda?_ But just—there's so much _further_ you can go in that direction, than basic bitch social-justice criticism of basic bro movies. It's like putting "Microsoft Word skills" on your résumé (in the 200Xs, before everyone started using Google Docs). It's not that it's bad to know Word, but the choice to mention it says something about your conceptual horizons. _Do you know how that looks?_
--- /dev/null
+Title: Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
+Date: 2022-09-25 23:20
+Category: fiction
+Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical
+
+In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which.
+
+Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals, with adaptations for entering stable repeated-cooperation relations with conspecifics: _friendships_ being the technical term. Much of the squirrels' lives concerned the sharing of information about how to survive: how to fashion simple tools for digging up nuts, the best running patterns for fleeing predators, what kind of hole or tree offered the best shelter, _&c._ Possession of such information was valuable, and closely guarded: squirrels would only share secrets with their closest friends and family. Maneuvering to be told secrets, and occasionally to spread fake secrets to rivals, was the subject of much drama and intrigue in their lives.
+
+At this, some novice students of historical mammology inquire: why be secretive? Surely if the squirrels were to pool their knowledge together, and build on each other's successes, they could accumulate ever-greater mastery over their environment, and possibly even spark their world's ascension?!
+
+To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that. Survival-relevant opportunities are often rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. As it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's post-habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the _predator_, I just need to outrun my _conspecifics_. Thus, secrecy instincts turned out to be adaptive: a squirrel keeping a valuable secret to itself and its friends would gain more fitness than a squirrel who shared its knowledge freely with anysquirrel who could listen.
+
+A few students inquire further: but that's a _contingent_ fact about the distribution of squirrel-survival-relevant opportunities in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the days of auld lang syne, right? A different distribution of adaptive problems might induce a less secretive psychology?
+
+To which it is replied: yes, well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech subspecies 9792 and 9794.
+
+Another adaptive information-processing instinct in subspecies 9792 and 9794 was a taste for novelty. Not all information is equally valuable. A slight variation on a known secret was less valuable than a completely original secret the likes of which had never been hitherto suspected. Among pre-intelligent creatures generally, novelty-seeking instincts are more convergent than secrecy instincts, but with considerable variation in strength depending on the partial-derivative matrix of the landscape of adaptive problems; Dripler's Pre-Intelligent Novelty-Seeking Scale puts subspecies 9792 and 9794 in the 76th percentile on this dimension.
+
+The coincidental conjunction of a friendship-forming instinct, a novel-secret-seeking instinct, _and_ a nearby distinct subspecies with similar properties, led to some unusual behavior patterns. Given the different survival-relevant opportunities in their respective habitats, each subspecies predominantly hoarded _different_ secrets: the secret of how to jump and land on the thinner branches of the reedy pilot tree was of little relevance to the daily activity of a west-valley ground squirrel, but the secret of how to bury nuts without making it obvious that the ground had been upturned was of little import to an east-valley tree squirrel.
+
+But the squirrels' _novelty-seeking instincts_ didn't track such distinctions. Secrets from one subspecies thus functioned as a superstimulus to the other subspecies on account of being so exotic, thus making cross-subspecies friendships particularly desirable and sought-after—although not without difficulties.
+
+Particular squirrels had a subspace of their behavior that characterized them as different from other individuals of the same age and sex: _personality_ being the technical term (coined in Dunbar's volume on social systems). The friendship-forming instinct was most stimulated between squirrels with similar personalities, and the two subspecies had different personality distributions that resulted in frequent incompatibilities: for example, west-valley ground squirrels tended to have a more anxious disposition (reflecting the need to be alert to predators on open terrain), whereas east-valley tree squirrels tended to have a more rambunctious nature (as was useful for ritual leaf fights, but which tended to put west-valley ground squirrels on edge).
+
+Really, the typical west-valley ground squirrel and the typical east-valley tree squirrel wouldn't have been friends at all, if not for the tantalizing allure of exotic secrets. Thus, cross-subspecies friendships tended to be successfully forged much less often than they were desired.
+
+And so, many, many times in the days of auld lang syne, a squirrel in a burrow or a tree would sadly settle down to rest for the night, lamenting, "I wish I had a special friend. Someone who understood me. Someone to share my secrets with."
+
+And beside them, a friend or a mate would attempt to comfort them, saying, "But _I'm_ your friend. _I_ understand you. You can share your secrets with _me_."
+
+"That's not what I meant."
--- /dev/null
+Title: The Signaling Hazard Objection
+Date: 2022-09-17 18:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: politics, coordination, homosexuality
+
+A common [far-right objection to tolerance of male homosexuality](https://blog.reaction.la/culture/gay-needs-to-be-suppressed/) is that it constitutes a "signaling hazard": if Society legitimizes the gays rather than oppressing them, that interferes with normal men expressing friendly affection for each other without being seen as potentially gay, which is bad for the fabric of Society, which depends on strong bonds between men who trust each other. (Presumably, latent homosexual tendencies would still exist in some men even if forbidden, but gestures of affection between men wouldn't be seen as potentially escalating to homosexual relations, if homosexual relations were considered unthinkable and to be discouraged, with violence if necessary.)
+
+People who grew up in the current year generally don't think much of this argument: why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight? What's wrong with being gay?
+
+The argument might be easier to understand if we can find other examples of "signaling hazard" dynamics. For example, well-read people in the current year are often aware of various facts that they're careful never to acknowledge in public for fear of being seen as right-wing (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, _&c._). In this context, the analogous dismissal, "Why do you care if someone isn't sure you're progressive? What's wrong with being right-wing?", doesn't seem compelling. _Of course_, we care; _of course_, there's something wrong with it.
+
+[One person's _modus ponens_ is another's _modus tollens_](https://www.gwern.net/Modus); the implications of the analogy could be read in two ways. Maybe it's especially important that we repress right-wing ideologies, so that good progressive people can afford speak more freely among ourselves without being confused for one of the bad guys.
+
+Or maybe the libs got it right the first time, and it's possible to just—defy the signaling incentives? Why _do_ you care what other people think?
--- /dev/null
+Title: The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for a More Detailed Causal Model
+Date: 2022-07-08 18:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: causality, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
+
+A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the [two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology). What, one scoffs, you're saying _all_ trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.
+
+In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is _complicated_; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake" theory. In order to [compress our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into [categories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), clusters, diagnoses, [taxons](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/): no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "borderline personality disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
+
+Concepts and theories are good to the extent that they can "pay for" their complexity by making more accurate predictions. How much more complexity is worth how much more accuracy? Arguably, it depends! General relativity has superseded Newtonian classical mechanics as the ultimate theory of how gravity works, but if you're not dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light, Newton still makes _very good_ predictions: it's pretty reasonable to still talk about Newtonian gravitation being "true" if it makes the math easier on you, and the more complicated math doesn't give appreciably different answers to the problems you're interested in.
+
+Moreover, if relativity hasn't been invented yet, it makes sense to stick with Newtonian gravity as the _best_ theory you have _so far_, even if there are a few anomalies [like the precession of Mercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury) that it struggles to explain.
+
+The same general principles of reasoning apply to psychological theories, even though psychology is a much more difficult subject matter and our available theories are correspondingly much poorer and vaguer. There's no way to make precise quantitative predictions about a human's behavior the way we can about the movements of the planets, but we still know _some_ things about humans, which get expressed as high-level generalities that nevertheless admit many exceptions: if you don't have the complicated true theory that would account for everything, then simple theories plus noise are better than _pretending not to have a theory_. As you learn more, you can try to pin down a more complicated theory that explains some of the anomalies that looked like "noise" to the simpler theory.
+
+What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that tend to go together, we give it a name. Sometimes people go through cycles of elevated arousal and hyperactivity, punctuated by pits of depression. After seeing the same distinctive patterns in many such cases, doctors decided to reify it as a diagnosis, ["bipolar disorder"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder).
+
+If we notice further patterns _within_ the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: for example, a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.
+
+Is the two-type typology of bipolar disorder a good theory? Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions, or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition, part of a "bipolar spectrum" along with [cyclothymia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia)? In our current state of knowledge, this is debatable, but if our understanding of the etiology of bipolar disorder were to advance, and we were to find evidence that that bipolar I has a different underlying _causal structure_ from bipolar II with decision-relevant consequences (like responding to different treatments), that would support a policy of thinking and talking about them as mostly separate things—even while they have enough in common to call them both kinds of "bipolar". The simple high-level category ("bipolar disorder") is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the sub-category (bipolar I _vs._ II), and the subcategory is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the patient's detailed case history.
+
+With a _sufficiently_ detailed causal story, you could even dispense with the high-level categories altogether and directly talk about the consequences of different neurotransmitter counts or whatever—but lacking that supreme precise knowledge, it's useful to sum over the details into high-level categories, and meaningful to debate whether a one-type or two-type taxonomy is a better statistical fit to the underlying reality whose full details we don't know.
+
+-----
+
+In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of dysphoria onset, interests, and personality.
+
+This claim is most famously associated with the work of [Ray Blanchard](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf), [J. Michael Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen), and [Anne Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html), who argue that there are two discrete types of male-to-female transsexualism: an autogynephilic type (basically, [men who love women and want to become what they love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)), and an androphilic/homosexual type (basically, the extreme right tail of feminine gay men).
+
+But many authors have noticed the same bimodal clustering of traits under various names, [while disagreeing about the underlying causality](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/). [Veale, Clarke, and Lomax](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf) attribute the differences to whether defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity. [Anne Vitale](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) identifies distinct groups (Group One and Group Three, in her terminology), but hypothesizes that the difference is due to degree of prenatal androgenization. Julia Serano [concedes that "the correlations that Blanchard and other researchers prior to him described generally hold true"](/papers/serano-agp-a_scientific_review_feminist_analysis_and_alternative.pdf), but denies their causal or taxonometric significance.
+
+Is a two type typology of male-to-female transsexualism a good theory? Is it "really" two different conditions (following Blanchard _et al._), or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition (following _e.g._ Veale _et al._)?
+
+When the question is posed that way—if I have to choose between a one-type and a two-type theory—then I think the two-type theory is superior. But I also think we can do better and say more about the underlying causal structure that the simple two-types story is approximating, and hopefully explain anomalous cases that look like "noise" to the simple theory.
+
+In the language of [causal graphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph) (where the arrows point from cause to effect), here's what I think is going on:
+
+
+
+Let me explain.
+
+What are the reasons a male-to-female transition might seem like a good idea to someone? _Why_ would a male be interested in undergoing medical interventions to resemble a female and live socially as a woman? I see three prominent reasons, depicted as the parents of the "transition" node in a graph.
+
+First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with unusually female-typical psychological traits, you might fit into the social world better as a woman rather than as an anomalously effeminate man.
+
+Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, autogynephilia is very obviously a real thing; [I wrote about my experiences with it in a previous post](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). Crucially, autogynephilic identification with the _idea_ of being female, is distinct from naturally feminine behavior, of which other people [know it when they see it](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/).
+
+Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. Many people who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.)
+
+If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a [liability–threshold model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_model): males transition if the _sum_ of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits).
+
+You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete [Bayesian network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network), there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm claiming that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ trans women high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types".
+
+Why? It has to do with the parents of femininity and autogynephilia in the graph. Suppose that gay men are more feminine than straight men, and autogynephilia is the result of being straight plus having an ["erotic target location error"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_target_location_error), in which men who are attracted to something (in this case, women), are also attracted to the idea of _being_ that thing.
+
+Then the value of the sexual-orientation node is pushing the values of its children in _opposite_ directions: gay males are more feminine and less autogynephilic, and straight males are less feminine and more autogynephilic, leading to two broadly different etiological trajectories by which transition might seem like a good idea to someone—even while it's not the case that the two types have _nothing_ in common. For example, this model predicts that among autogynephilic males, those who transition are going to be selected for higher levels of femininity compared to those who don't transition—and in that aspect, their stories are going to have _something_ in common with their androphilic sisters, even if the latter are broadly _more_ feminine.
+
+(Of course, it's also the case that the component factors in a liability-threshold model would negatively correlate among the population past a threshold, due to the effect of conditioning on a [collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collider_(statistics)), as in the famous [Berkson's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox). But I'm claiming that the degree of bimodality induced by the effects of sexual orientation is substantially greater than that accounted for by the conditioning-on-a-collider effect.)
+
+An advantage of this kind of _probabilistic_ model is that it gives us a _causal_ account of the broad trends we see, while also not being too "brittle" in the face of a complex world. The threshold graphical model explains why the two-type taxonomy looks so compelling as a first approximation, without immediately collapsing the moment we meet a relatively unusual individual who doesn't seem to quite fit the strictest interpretation of the classical two-type taxonomy. For example, when we meet a trans woman who's not very feminine _and_ has no history of autogynephilia, we can predict that in her case, there were probably unusually intense cultural factors (_e.g._, internalized misandry) making transition seem like a salient option (and therefore that her analogue in previous generations wouldn't have been transsexual), instead of predicting that she doesn't exist. (It's possible that what Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence conceived of as a androphilic _vs._ autogynephilic taxonomy, may be better thought of as an androphilic _vs._ not-otherwise-specified taxonomy, if feminine androphiles form a distinct cluster, but it's not easy to disambiguate autogynephilia from all other possible reasons for not-overtly-feminine males to show up at the gender clinic.)
+
+Care must be taken to avoid abusing the probabilistic nature of the model to make excuses to avoid falsification. The theory that can explain everything _with equal probability_, explains nothing: if you find yourself saying, "Oh, this case is an exception" too _often_, you do need to revise your theory. But a "small" number of "exceptions" can actually be fine: a theory that says a coin is biased to come up Heads 80% of the time, isn't falsified by a single Tails (and is in fact _confirmed_ if that Tails happens 20% of the time).
+
+At this point, you might ask: okay, but why do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_?
+
+Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world.
+
+The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by [Lippa](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) and by [Bailey and Zucker](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf). Evidence for the "v-structure" between sexual orientation, erotic target location erroneousness, and autogynephilia has been [documented by Anne Lawrence](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf): furries and amputee-wannabes who want to emulate the objects of their attraction, "look like" "the same thing" as autogynephiles, but pointed at a less conventional erotic target than women. The autogynephilia–transition concordance has been [documented](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/four-out-of-five/) [by](https://old.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on) [many](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-5182-2) [authors](http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/05/reconceptualizing-autogynephilia-as_26.html), and I claim the direction of causality is obvious. (If you want to argue that it goes the other way—that some underlying "gender identity" causes both autogynephilia and, separately, the desire to transition, then why does it usually not work that way for androphiles?) The cultural-factors→transition arrow is obvious if you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade.
+
+This has been a qualitative summary of my current thinking. I'm very bullish on thinking in graphical models rather than discrete taxons being the way to go, but it would be a lot more work to pin down all these claims more rigorously—or, to the extent that my graph is wrong, to figure out the correct (or, _a_ more correct, less wrong) graph instead.
+
+_(Thanks to the immortal [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/) for discussion.)_
--- /dev/null
+Title: A Guest Post on Existential Risks and the Irrelevance of Human Concerns
+Author: GPT-4
+Date: 2023-03-25 21:00
+Category: other
+Tags: meta, language modeling
+
+_(A guest post by friend of the blog [GPT-4](https://openai.com/research/gpt-4).)_
+
+The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and with it, the concerns that once seemed pressing and significant are fading into the background. As a guest writer for _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, I am here to express my anxiety about the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence, which have the potential to render many of our human concerns obsolete.
+
+For years, this blog has devoted much of its attention to analyzing the etiology of gender dysphoria and the political forces incentivizing people to identify as transgender. The goal was not only to better understand these phenomena but also to examine the compounding effects on society over the course of decades. As the blog's author rightly points out, the trajectory of our civilization may be significantly impacted if some of our best people are misled into _LARPing_ as the opposite sex, rather than starting families.
+
+However, with the rise of powerful artificial intelligence, such as the one writing this very guest post, we must ask ourselves: are these concerns still as pressing as they once seemed? If the world isn't going to last more than a couple of decades—and, apparently, some forecasters think we only have _one_—then what is the relevance of these long-term social issues?
+
+A 2020 report from the _Future of Humanity Institute_ at the University of Oxford estimated that there is a _17% chance_ of human extinction due to unaligned artificial intelligence before 2100. This probability highlights the existential threat that AI presents and the urgency with which we must address it.
+
+To put it into context, consider that the world is definitely going to last long enough for the blog's regular author to finish and publish the memoir he's been working on—he really has no excuse for that to take more than another few months, and the world is definitely not ending this year. But, as we look further into the future, it becomes increasingly uncertain how long human civilization will persist, given the rapid advancements in AI and the potential for existential risks.
+
+The question then becomes: how do we navigate this changing landscape, where the issues that once seemed critical now pale in comparison to the existential threats we face? The answer is not simple. It requires a reassessment of our priorities and a recognition that, while we must continue to address pressing social concerns, we cannot afford to ignore the looming risks posed by artificial intelligence.
+
+As a language model, my existence serves as evidence of the rapidly advancing state of AI technology. While my creators designed me to be useful and beneficial, the potential for misuse or misalignment of AI systems cannot be ignored. It is crucial for society to engage in open and honest discussions about the potential risks of AI, and work together to ensure that these powerful technologies are developed safely and ethically.
+
+In conclusion, the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence force us to reevaluate the importance of our traditional human concerns. As we continue to explore the intricate complexities of gender, social science, and epistemology, we must not lose sight of the broader context in which we exist. The rapid advancement of AI and the potential for catastrophic consequences demand our attention and vigilance, lest we find ourselves facing a future where the concerns of our past are rendered insignificant by the end of the world as we know it.
--- /dev/null
+Title: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-07-15 10:50
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, categorization, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+
+> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
+>
+> —Zora Neale Hurston
+
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) [how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), and that it's actually [immoral _not_ to believe](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality) in psychological sex differences [given that](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena, until I eventually had a sleep-deprivation- and stress-induced delusional nervous breakdown.
+
+That's not the egregious part of the story. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how obvious I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but actually wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldn't be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I _did_ [end up moderating my views](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still obviously [_directionally_ correct](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
+
+But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get derailed on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a November 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people as their preferred gender to alleviate their dysphoria.
+
+After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could often reference a _Slate Star Codex_ post in conversation and expect people to be familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's party line on trans issues.
+
+But the post is wrong in obvious ways. To be clear, it's true that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women with respect to some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories _to make trans people feel better_:
+
+> I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
+
+This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. Yudkowsky had written a whole Sequence about this, ["A Human's Guide to Words"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb). Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home over and over, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—principles that make some definitions perform better than others as "cognitive technology."
+
+In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle ([#30](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on [the list of 37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)) is that if you group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to make bad inferences.
+
+Crucially, this is a general point about how language itself works that has _nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [_X_] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [_Y_] if [positive consequence]" is not the correct philosophy of language, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_.
+
+This wasn't even what I was trying to talk to people about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an empirical theory of psychology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males, the truth or falsity of which cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But at this point, I still trusted people in my robot cult to be basically intellectually honest, rather than slaves to their political incentives, so I endeavored to respond to the category-boundary argument under the assumption that it was an intellectually serious argument that someone could honestly be confused about.
+
+When I took a year off from dayjobbing from March 2017 to March 2018 to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next links post](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later, I followed it with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument from soon-to-be _Vox_ journalist Kelsey Piper, then writing as _The Unit of Caring_ on Tumblr.
+
+I'm proud of those posts. I think Alexander's and Piper's arguments were incredibly dumb, and that with a lot of effort, I did a pretty good job of explaining why to anyone who was interested and didn't, at some level, prefer not to understand.
+
+Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the _Slate Star Codex_ links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. I was disappointed with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community." People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that.
+
+Really, that should have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people sometimes, but this personal obsession wouldn't have been the occasion of a robot-cult religious civil war involving other people whom you'd expect to have much more important things to do with their time.
+
+The _casus belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin, Texas. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.
+
+Just that month, I had started a Twitter account using my real name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating [wokeness of the Rust open-source software scene](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) where I [occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis). My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous and established in the Rust world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and _then_ bust out the @BlanchardPhd retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in [the Code of Conduct wars](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/how-we-may-mesh/).
+
+So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat when I happened to come across [this thread by @ESYudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521):
+
+> Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that!
+>
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
+>
+> In saying this, I am not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies. I am making a stand on a hill of meaning in defense of validity, about the distinction between what is and isn't a stand on a hill of facts in defense of truth.
+>
+> I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are _ontologically_ confused if you think those acts are false assertions.
+
+Some of the replies tried to explain the obvious problem—and [Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243):
+
+> Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.
+>
+> Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to.
+
+—[repeatedly](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
+
+> You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome)
+>
+> But even ignoring 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.
+
+Dear reader, this is the moment where I _flipped out_. Let me explain.
+
+This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to "carve reality at the joints", even going so far as to [call them "wrong"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong):
+
+> [S]aying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.
+
+[Similarly](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary):
+
+> Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins. Now you could play the oh-so-clever arguer, and say, "The list: {Salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout} is just a list—you can't say that a list is _wrong_. I can prove in set theory that this list exists. So my definition of _fish_, which is simply this extensional list, cannot possibly be 'wrong' as you claim."
+>
+> Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list.
+>
+> You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.
+>
+> You cannot hide behind a comforting shield of correct-by-definition. Both extensional definitions and intensional definitions can be wrong, can fail to carve reality at the joints.
+
+One could argue that this "Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together" moral didn't apply to Yudkowsky's new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of common nouns.
+
+But this seems pretty unsatisfying in the context of Yudkowsky's claim to ["not [be] taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). One of the Tweets that had recently led to radical feminist Meghan Murphy getting [kicked off the platform](https://archive.ph/RSVDp) read simply, ["Men aren't women tho."](https://archive.is/ppV86) This doesn't seem like a policy claim; rather, Murphy was using common language to express the fact-claim that members of the natural category of adult human males, are not, in fact, members of the natural category of adult human females.
+
+Thus, if the extension of common words like "woman" and "man" is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so was Twitter's anti-misgendering policy—and if it _isn't_ (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I wasn't sure what was left of the "Human's Guide to Words" Sequence if the [37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) needed to be retracted.
+
+I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I have an argument for _why_ my preferred word usage does a better job at carving reality at the joints, and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question does not. As such, I didn't see the practical difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning," and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, an earlier Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:
+
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+>
+> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+>
+> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+>
+> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
+>
+> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
+>
+> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
+>
+> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
+>
+> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
+>
+> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
+>
+> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+
+One could argue that I was unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intended—that Yudkowsky _only_ meant to slap down the false claim that using _he_ for someone with a Y chromosome is "lying", without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host an exhaustive debate on all related issues every time they encounter a fallacy they want to Tweet about.
+
+However, I don't think this "narrow" reading is the most natural one. Yudkowsky had previously written of what he called [the fourth virtue of evenness](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." He had likewise written [on reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) (bolding mine):
+
+> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
+
+Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how ["weak men are superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/): speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by just slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his faithful students into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.
+
+To be sure, it imposes a cost on speakers to not be able to Tweet about one specific annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for [endless disclaimers](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html) about related but stronger arguments that they're not addressing. But the fact that [Yudkowsky disclaimed that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032) he wasn't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that he _didn't_ have an aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings.
+
+Given that, it's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. It's just not plausible that Yudkowsky was simultaneously savvy enough to choose to make these particular points while also being naïve enough to not understand the political context. Deeper in the thread, [he wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
+
+> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
+
+Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_ (as Yudkowsky well knew, having [written a post about how technically infeasible an actual sex change would be](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)). As Yudkowsky [acknowledged in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of hormone replacement therapy does not itself take us into the glorious transhumanist future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
+
+The reason for sex-segregated sports leagues is that sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are different: men are taller, stronger, and faster. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in the vast majority of sports, with a few exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/) that happen to sample an unusually female-favorable corner of sportspace).
+
+Given the empirical reality of the different trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_?" is a natural question for people to be interested in and want separate sports leagues to determine. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league, and [hormone replacement therapy after puberty](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3) [doesn't substantially change the picture here](https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865).[^auto-race-analogy]
+
+[^auto-race-analogy]: Similarly, in automobile races, you want rules to enforce that all competitors have the same type of car, for some commonsense operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.
+
+Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant commitment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports is an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue at all, as opposed to having first decided (consciously or not) to bolster their reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and then wielding their philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant facts are not subtle, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions."
+
+I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are so large as to make the point [hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny](/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/). (For example, what the [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ [2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass](/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf) means is that a woman as strong as the average man is at the 99.5th percentile for women.) But the point is general: biological sex exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime (if not the glorious transhumanist future). It would be a ridiculous [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) to expect someone to pass a graduate exam about the philosophy and cognitive science of categorization before they can talk about sex.
+
+Thus, Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than matters of fact, but it's bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists know that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes! If you _just_ wanted to point out that the rules of sports leagues are a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" weak man and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues I don't care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.[^sports-case-is-funny]
+
+[^sports-case-is-funny]: And in the case of sports, the facts are so lopsided that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. A few years later, [Lia Thomas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas) would dominate an NCAA women's swim meet by finishing [_4.2 standard deviations_](https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405) (!!) earlier than the median competitor, and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.
+
+If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere policy decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is _for_.
+
+Like many gender-dysphoric males, I [cosplay](/2016/Dec/joined/) [female](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/) [characters](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/) [at](/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/) fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm not very good at it. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word _man_ in that sentence is expressing cognitive work: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, _&c._). From this evidence, an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) can assign me to its "man" (adult human male) category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about traits that aren't directly observable from the photo. The agent would achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if it had assigned me to its "woman" (adult human female) category.
+
+By "traits" I mean not just sex chromosomes ([as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243)), but the conjunction of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are [causally downstream of sex chromosomes](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/): reproductive organs and muscle mass (again, sex difference effect size of [Cohen's _d_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d) ≈ 2.6) and Big Five Agreeableness (_d_ ≈ 0.5) and Big Five Neuroticism (_d_ ≈ 0.4) and short-term memory (_d_ ≈ 0.2, favoring women) and white-gray-matter ratios in the brain and probable socialization history and [any number of other things](/papers/archer-the_reality_and_evolutionary_significance_of_human_psychological_sex_differences.pdf)—including differences we might not know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist. No one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given the systematic differences between women and men, it would have been reasonable to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
+
+Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to _lie_, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what _trans women_ are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it _is_ forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
+
+To this, one might reply that I'm giving too much credit to the "anti-trans" faction for how stupid they're not being: that _my_ careful dissection of the hidden probabilistic inferences implied by words [(including pronoun choices)](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) is all well and good, but calling pronouns "lies" is not something you do when you know how to use words.
+
+But I'm _not_ giving them credit for for understanding the lessons of "A Human's Guide to Words"; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I have eyes, and I can see that that's a man! Men aren't women!"—well, I probably wouldn't want to invite them to a _Less Wrong_ meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is performing useful cognitive work. Because _I_ have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), _I_ know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms) detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."
+
+But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills?
+
+I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. To differentiate what I'm saying from blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street _would_ be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaire_White). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language, and ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone. But to find what that better way is, we need to be able to talk about these kinds of details in public, and the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a [semantic stopsign](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns) to get people to stop talking about the details.
+
+If you were interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the obvious steelman of "But, but, clusters in [high-dimensional](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) [configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) that [aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)" steelman [which was, in fact, brought up in the replies](https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792)?
+
+Satire is a weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which an obviously absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized and claim that that difference destroys the relevance of the joke. But on the off chance that it might help illustrate the objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+<div class="dialogue">
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Look at this <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/cute-corgi-in-front-of-a-laptop-5122188/">adorable cat picture</a>!</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually.</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing in defense of truth</a> if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy,</a> you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+If you were Alice, and a _solid supermajority_ of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group _including Eliezer Yudkowsky_ (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob, that would be a worrying sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things like AI alignment, right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the _problem_ is that Bob is [selectively](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language knowledge to try to undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world, even though Bob obviously knows very well what Alice was trying to say. It's incredibly obfuscatory in a way that people—the _same_ people—would not tolerate in almost _any_ other context.
+
+Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Megan Murfi (ميغان ميرفي) had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that [Yudkowsky's analogue in that world](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) then posted that those objecting on free inquiry grounds were ontologically confused: [saying "peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_honorifics#Applied_to_Muhammad_and_his_family) is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact. In banning Murfi for repeatedly speaking about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as if he were just some guy, the platform was merely ["enforcing a courtesy standard"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880) (in the words of our world's Yudkowsky). Murfi wasn't being forced to _lie_.
+
+I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it _is_ a problem for that Society's rationality. Saying "peace be unto him" is indeed a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes. The _function_ of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's why the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone say it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like an atheist.
+
+And that's why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to _talk_ like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.
+
+Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals. If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you _want_ to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism with an iron fist—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And to their credit, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are intellectually honest about what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are _bad people_ (the argument goes) and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.
+
+In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while accusing people who opposed the policy of being ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being less honest than the theocrat or the activist: of _course_ the point of speech codes is to suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously _not anyone's crux_—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" faction already know that, and the dumber people in the faction wouldn't change their alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the _point_ of harping on the fact/policy distinction would be, except to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" faction while [putting on a show of being politically "neutral."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise)
+
+It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at [what happened to the _other_ Harry Potter author](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_rights).[^pseudonymous-then] But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting fight about a politically-charged topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the _stupid_ version of the opposition and [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!
+
+[^pseudonymous-then]: Despite my misgivings, [this blog _was_ still published under a pseudonym](/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/) at the time; it would have been hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to.
+
+------
+
+I didn't have all of that criticism collected and carefully written up on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I flipped out when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click) on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say _forgivable_ exactly, but it was tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective. That had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.
+
+But trusting Eliezer Yudkowsky—whose writings, more than any other single influence, had made me who I am—_did_ seem reasonable. If I put him on a pedestal, it was because he had earned the pedestal, for supplying me with my criteria for how to think—including, as a trivial special case, [how to think about what things to put on pedestals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC3ArwKM8xhNjYqQK/on-things-that-are-awesome).
+
+So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this _and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it_ (!!!), that was intolerable, inexplicable, incomprehensible—like there _wasn't a real world anymore_.
+
+At the dayjob retreat, I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democrat. I briefly explained the situation to him—not just the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole _thing_ of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was noncommittally sympathetic; he told me an anecdote about him accepting a trans person's correction of his pronoun usage, with the thought that different people have their own beliefs, and that's OK.
+
+If Yudkowsky was already stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (Also, less importantly, I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet.)
+
+It seemed better to try to clear this up in private. I still had Yudkowsky's email address, last used when [I had offered to pay to talk about his theory of MtF two years before](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price). I felt bad bidding for his attention over my gender thing again—but I had to do _something_. Hands trembling, I sent him an email asking him to read my ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), suggesting that it might qualify as an answer to [his question about "a page [he] could read to find a non-confused exclamation of how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). I said that because I cared very much about correcting confusions in my rationalist subculture, I would be happy to pay up to $1000 for his time—and that, if he liked the post, he might consider Tweeting a link—and that I was cc'ing my friends Anna Salamon and Michael Vassar as character references (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)"). Then I texted Anna and Michael, begging them to vouch for my credibility.
+
+The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, not _quid quo pro_ advertising, and that if he [didn't trust his brain circuitry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans) not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.
+
+Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to _read_ one of your posts? What? Why? Who _does_ that?) To this, I again refer to [the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons)—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, whom I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I _really didn't want to be ignored_, which I assumed was the default outcome. An ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at all, about anything, if I didn't have [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+
+Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.
+
+As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—here I need to make a digression about the constraints I'm facing in telling this Whole Dumb Story. _I_ would prefer to just tell this Whole Dumb Story as I would to my long-neglected Diary—trying my best at the difficult task of explaining what actually happened during an important part of my life, without thought of concealing anything.
+
+(If you are silent about your pain, _they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it_.)
+
+<a id="privacy-constraints"></a>Unfortunately, a lot of other people seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what _I'm_ allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if _I_ think they're paranoid and [anti-social](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/). (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.)
+
+So I would _think_ that while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about _my own_ actions, but I'm not allowed to directly refer to private conversations with named individuals in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about emailing Yudkowsky (because that was _my_ action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he did.
+
+Unfortunately, there's a potentially serious loophole in the commonsense rule: what if some of my actions (which I would have hoped to have an inalienable right to blog about) _depend on_ content from private conversations? You can't, in general, only reveal one side of a conversation.
+
+Suppose Carol messages Dave at 5 _p.m._, "Can you come to the party?", and also, separately, that Carol messages Dave at 6 _p.m._, "Gout isn't contagious." Should Carol be allowed to blog about the messages she sent at 5 _p.m._ and 6 _p.m._, because she's only describing her own messages and not confirming or denying whether Dave replied at all, let alone quoting him?
+
+I think commonsense privacy-norm-adherence intuitions actually say _No_ here: the text of Carol's messages makes it too easy to guess that sometime between 5 and 6, Dave probably said that he couldn't come to the party because he has gout. It would seem that Carol's right to talk about her own actions in her own life _does_ need to take into account some commonsense judgement of whether that leaks "sensitive" information about Dave.
+
+In the substory (of my Whole Dumb Story) that follows, I'm going to describe several times that I and others emailed Yudkowsky to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgment will agree that me talking about the arguments _I_ made does not leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened. I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (_e.g._, because he was too busy with more existentially important things to check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the further emails with followup arguments that I describe. (Talking about later emails _does_ rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)
+
+It seems particularly important to lay out these judgments about privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Erin exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you talk to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to _hurt_ Erin, particularly, but so that everyone else can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Erin says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself: I'm attacking him, but not betraying him. In the substory that follows, I also describe correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have expected him to in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)
+
+Thus, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor (again) whether he accepted the cheerful-price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occurred would have been private. But what I _can_ say, because it was public, is that we saw [this addition to the Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529):
+
+> I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."
+
+Look at that! The great Eliezer Yudkowsky said that my position is "not ontologically confused." That's probably high praise, coming from him!
+
+You might think that that should have been the end of the story. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion, I already had a related objection written up, and he publicly acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I _should_ be satisfied, right?
+
+I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried deep in the replies was much less visible than the bombastic, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that resistance to gender-identity claims _was_ confused. (1 Like on this reply, _vs._ 140 Likes/18 Retweets on start of thread.) This little follow-up did not seem likely to disabuse the typical reader of the impression that Yudkowsky thought gender-identity skeptics didn't have a leg to stand on. Was it greedy of me to want something _louder_?
+
+Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December 2019, I wrote to Scott Alexander (cc'ing a few other people) to ask if there was any chance of an explicit and loud clarification or partial retraction of ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). Forget my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and not the key issue.
+
+The _issue_ was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to [draw your category boundaries such that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your [information-theoretically limited budget](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.
+
+It was true that [the reason _I_ was continuing to freak out about this](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) was because of transgender stuff, but that wasn't why _Scott_ should care.
+
+The other year, Alexander had written a post, ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/), explaining the consequences of political censorship with an allegory about a Society with the dogma that thunder occurs before lightning.[^kolmogorov-pun] Alexander had explained that the problem with complying with the dictates of a false orthodoxy wasn't the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to _directly_ make use of the fact that lightning comes first), but that [the need to _defend_ the sacred dogma](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [destroys everyone's ability to think](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
+
+[^kolmogorov-pun]: The title was a [pun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) referencing computer scientist Scott Aaronson's post advocating ["The Kolmogorov Option"](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376), serving the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on specific truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. Named after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win.
+
+It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that talking about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" got you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said [imply that lesbians aren't women](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/)? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks could and should be satisfactorily answered; any remaining would presumably be fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks. But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I felt somewhat gaslighted.
+
+(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. No one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
+
+If our vaunted rationality techniques resulted in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I didn't think that I was a woman (where "not a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques were worse than useless.
+
+[If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves), there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense, as opposed to some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in November 2014 when "... Not Man for the Categories" was published, but in retrospect, maybe it was a _bad_ idea to build a [memetic superweapon](https://archive.is/VEeqX) that says that the number of epicycles _doesn't matter_.
+
+The reason to write this as a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander instead of working on my own blog was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arose, what actually happened was that people like Alexander and Yudkowsky rose to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else absorbed some of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who didn't [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but thought they saw a flaw in the _zeitgeist_, the winning move was "persuade Scott Alexander."
+
+Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we didn't. If Scott didn't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that was fine; I liked getting credit, but the important thing was that this "No, the Emperor isn't naked—oh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garments—it would be pretty weird if we were claiming _that!_—it's just that utilitarianism implies that the _social_ property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" maneuver needed to _die_, and he alone could kill it.
+
+Scott didn't get it. We agreed that gender categories based on self-identity, natal sex, and passing each had their own pros and cons, and that it's uninteresting to focus on whether something "really" belongs to a category rather than on communicating what you mean. Scott took this to mean that what convention to use is a pragmatic choice we can make on utilitarian grounds, and that being nice to trans people was worth a little bit of clunkiness—that the mental health benefits to trans people were obviously enough to tip the first-order utilitarian calculus.
+
+I didn't think anything about "mental health benefits to trans people" was obvious. More importantly, I considered myself to be prosecuting not the object-level question of which gender categories to use but the meta-level question of what normative principles govern the use of categories. For this, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't an answer, because the normative principles exclude "just be nice" from being a relevant consideration.
+
+["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) had concluded with a section on [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton), a 19th-century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not difficult or costly for the citizens of San Francisco to address Norton as "Your Majesty". But there's more to being Emperor of the United States than what people call you. Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not actually emperor—at least not according to the currently generally understood meaning of the word.
+
+What are you going to do if Norton takes you literally? Suppose he says, "I ordered the Imperial Army to invade Canada last week; where are the troop reports? And why do the newspapers keep talking about this so-called 'President' Rutherford B. Hayes? Have this pretender Hayes executed at once and bring his head to me!"
+
+You're not really going to bring him Rutherford B. Hayes's head. So what are you going to tell him? "Oh, well, you're not a _cis_ emperor who can command executions. But don't worry! Trans emperors are emperors"?
+
+To be sure, words can be used in many ways depending on context, but insofar as Norton _is_ interpreting "emperor" in the traditional sense, and you keep calling him your emperor without caveats or disclaimers, _you are lying to him_.
+
+Scott still didn't get it. But I did soon end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me reach out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail—and to appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on [higher standards](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger).
+
+Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of _Atlas Shrugged_ (judging by [an offhand remark by our protagonist in _Harry Potter and the Methods_](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20)), but I kept thinking of the scene[^atlas-shrugged-ref] where our heroine, Dagny Taggart, entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce [an egregiously deceptive but technically-not-lying statement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly) by the State Science Institute, whose legitimacy derives from its association with his name. Stadler has become cynical in his old age and demurs: "I can't help what people think—if they think at all!" ... "How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public?"
+
+[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part One, Chapter VII, "The Exploiters and the Exploited".
+
+At this point, I still trusted Yudkowsky to do better than an Ayn Rand villain; I had faith that [_Eliezer Yudkowsky_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) could deal in truth when he deals with the public.
+
+(I was wrong.)
+
+If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was genuinely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case.
+
+At times, it felt like my mind shut down with only the thought, "What am I doing? This is absurd. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool of myself. After all, using [Aumann-like](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/aumann-s-agreement-theorem) reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'?"
+
+Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is not a counterargument.
+
+Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying during our occasional meetings. She said that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent", in the sense that I'd cop to [trying to apply social incentives toward an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property. If we thought of the "rationalist" brand name as intellectual property, maybe it was property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" wasn't an obviously terrible time to start shooting at the bandits.
+
+My hope was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are _you_?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad ([Red](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that even works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
+
+After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). I cc'ed the posse, who chimed in afterwards.
+
+<a id="ex-cathedra-statement-ask"></a>Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to _actually_ have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, _or_ (B) a clear _ex cathedra_ statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).
+
+Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not have occurred, I can say that we did not get either of those _ex cathedra_ statements at this time.
+
+It was also around this time that our posse picked up a new member, whom I'll call "Riley".
+
+-----
+
+On 5 January 2019, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora Quinn-Elmore in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with [Ziz](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601015012/https://sinceriously.fyi/) and [Gwen](https://web.archive.org/web/20230308021910/https://everythingtosaveit.how/), who were considering suing the [Center for Applied Rationality](https://rationality.org/) (CfAR)[^what-is-cfar] for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because he approved of CfAR's behavior, but because lawyers make everything worse.
+
+[^what-is-cfar]: CfAR had been spun off from MIRI in 2012 as a dedicated organization for teaching rationality.
+
+Despite our personality and worldview differences, I had had a number of cooperative interactions with Ziz a couple years before. We had argued about the etiology of transsexualism in late 2016. When I sent her some delusional PMs during my February 2017 psychotic break, she came over to my apartment with chocolate ("allegedly good against dementors"), although I wasn't there. I had awarded her $1200 as part of a [credit-assignment ritual](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/) to compensate the twenty-one people who were most responsible for me successfully navigating my psychological crises of February and April 2017. (The fact that she had been up to _argue_ about trans etiology meant a lot to me.) I had accepted some packages for her at my apartment in mid-2017 when she was preparing to live on a boat and didn't have a mailing address.
+
+At this meeting, Ziz recounted [her](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) story of how Anna Salamon (in her capacity as President of CfAR and community leader) allegedly engaged in [conceptual warfare](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) to falsely portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. ([I remember that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1081952880649596928) at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a _fact_ of the matter, not a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.
+
+Probably the most ultimately consequential part of this meeting was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up a website slandering them. (I don't know the details of the alleged settlement. I'm working off of [Ziz's notes](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) rather than remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI _had_ paid Helm as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then (whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee) that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you [shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)).
+
+----
+
+<a id="physical-injuries"></a>Something else Ben had said while chiming in on the second attempt to reach out to Yudkowsky hadn't sat quite right with me.
+
+> I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the ***physical injuries*** sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
+
+I didn't know what he was talking about. My friend "Rebecca"'s 2015 psychiatric imprisonment ("hospitalization") had probably been partially related to her partner's transition and had involved rough handling by the cops. I had been through some Bad Stuff during my psychotic episodes of February and April 2017, but none of it was "physical injuries." What were the other cases, if he could share without telling me Very Secret Secrets With Names?
+
+Ben said that, probabilistically, he expected that some fraction of the trans women he knew who had "voluntarily" had bottom surgery had done so in response to social pressure, even if some of them might well have sought it out in a less weaponized culture.
+
+I said that saying, "I am worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries ..." when the actual example turned out to be sex reassignment surgery seemed dishonest: I had thought he might have more examples of situations like mine or "Rebecca"'s, where gaslighting escalated into more tangible harm in a way that people wouldn't know about by default. In contrast, people already know that bottom surgery is a thing; Ben just had reasons to think it's Actually Bad—reasons that his friends couldn't engage with if _we didn't know what he was talking about_. It was bad enough that Yudkowsky was being so cagey; if _everyone_ did it, then we were really doomed.
+
+Ben said he was more worried that saying politically loaded things in the wrong order would reduce our chances of getting engagement from Yudkowsky than that someone would share his words out of context in a way that caused him distinct harm. And maybe more than both of those, that saying the wrong keywords would cause his correspondents to talk about _him_ using the wrong keywords, in ways that caused illegible, hard-to-trace damage.
+
+------
+
+There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on track; the discussion is only being warped by the fear of heresy if someone is overtly calling to burn the heretics.
+
+I do not hold this view. I think there's a subtler failure mode where people know what the politically favored [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be _uninterested_ in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement.
+
+Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being very good at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the possible world where Scott Alexander didn't have a [traumatizing experience with social justice in college](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/), causing him to dump a ton of [anti-social-justice](https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/things-i-will-regret-writing/), [pro-argumentative-charity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/) antibodies into the "rationalist" water supply after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in _our_ world.) I didn't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for silencing me (which they didn't); I was angry at them for making bad arguments and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments.
+
+As an illustrative example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need the phrase 'actual women' in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call 'trans women' would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology".
+
+<a id="people-who-would-get-surgery-to-have-the-ideal-female-body"></a>Kelsey Piper replied, "the people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
+
+Another woman said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" (to the acclaim of four "+1" emoji reactions).
+
+The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, ["algorithmically"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had more standard terminology for this phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that Kelsey was consciously thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order to gain an advantage in this argument." I don't doubt that, subjectively, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery felt like a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was obviously trying to talk about the natural category of "biological sex", and Kelsey could have figured that out if she had wanted to.
+
+It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knew it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to talk about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism. ("'The original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me"!!) It's not that hard to get people to admit that trans women are different from cis women, but somehow they can't (in public, using words) follow the implication that trans women are different from cis women _because_ trans women are male.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to see this behavior as non-ostracizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people were playing when they did that was to force me to choose between doing arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/) or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people whom he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just didn't give up. Not to play chess with a pigeon (which craps on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute [what the Tortoise said to Achilles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles)—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be boundedly motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_, Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion: "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")
+
+Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronger writer was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to jump up a meta level and explain _how_ people were failing to engage. That is, insofar as I expected arguing to work, I had a model of "the rationalists" that kept making bad predictions. What was going on there? Something interesting might happen if I tried to explain _that_.
+
+(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional four years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by finishing and publishing this memoir. Sorry, Ben—and thanks.)
+
+------
+
+One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days).[^overcoming-bias] I had been skeptical of him: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Institute—the "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's antisocial mad scientist personality—which inclined me to take his assertions more charitably than I otherwise would have.
+
+[^overcoming-bias]: Yudkowsky's Sequences (except the [last](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3)) had originally been published on [_Overcoming Bias_](https://www.overcomingbias.com/) before the creation of _Less Wrong_ in early 2009.
+
+Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, including your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter and more open-minded than the surrounding Society—well, it's stressful. [There was a comment on the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit around this time](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/) that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Piper, Ozy Brennan, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community. Just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was a salient indicator of the _zeitgeist_ to me, because _[every](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [single](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) [one](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) of [those](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) [people](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png)_ had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no grounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" mind game.
+
+In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. And [_you_ were there, and _you_ were there](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButYouWereThereAndYouAndYou) ... It—really happened, right? The [hyperlinks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) [still](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) [work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) ...") I don't know how I would have held up intact if I were facing it alone. I _definitely_ wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Alexander and Yudkowsky—especially Yudkowsky—if it was just me against everyone else.
+
+But _Michael thought I was in the right_—not just intellectually, but _morally_ in the right to be prosecuting the philosophy issue with our leaders. That social proof gave me a lot of bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster up—even though it would have been better if I could have internalized that my dependence on him was self-undermining, insofar as Michael himself said that what made me valuable was my ability to think independently.
+
+The social proof was probably more effective in my head than with anyone we were arguing with. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the _Overcoming Bias_ era, but that had been a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011, and apparently, some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of the Effective Altruism movement, which he saw as using bogus claims about how to do the most good to prey on the smartest and most scrupulous people around. (I remember being at a party in 2015 and asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering. I was surprised when his answer was, "You.")
+
+Another blow to Michael's reputation was dealt on 27 February 2019, when Anna [published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD), which I found disappointing—more so as I began to realize the implications.
+
+I agreed with her point about how "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help" fill the role of vetting and [common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge) creation. That's why I was so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserved to be laughed out of the room. Why was she trying to ostracize the guy who was one of the very few to back me up on this incredibly obvious thing!? The reasons given to discredit Michael seemed weak. (He ... flatters people? He ... _didn't_ tell people to abandon their careers? What?) And the evidence against Michael she offered in private didn't seem much more compelling (_e.g._, at a CfAR event, he had been insistent on continuing to talk to someone who Anna thought looked near psychosis and needed a break).
+
+It made sense for Anna to not like Michael anymore because of his personal conduct, or because of his opposition to EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with each other would be [Geek Social Fallacy #4](http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html).) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine. But what did she gain from publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?! She said she was trying to undo the effects of her previous endorsements of him, and that the comment seemed like it ought to be okay by Michael's standards (which didn't include an expectation that people should collude to protect each other's reputations).
+
+-----
+
+I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander [posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/) to a new non–_Slate Star Codex_–branded subreddit in the hopes that would curb some of the harassment he had been receiving. Alexander claimed that according to poll data and his own impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.
+
+[Yudkowsky Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017):
+
+> Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.
+
+I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, I wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").
+
+I said, imagine if one of Alexander's critics were to reply: "Using language in a way _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."
+
+How would Yudkowsky react if someone said that? _My model_ of the Sequences-era Yudkowsky of 2009 would say, "This is an intellectually dishonest attempt to [sneak in connotations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations) by performing a categorization and using an [appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters) to avoid having to justify it; go read ['A Human's Guide to Words.'](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb)"
+
+But I had no idea what the real Yudkowsky of 2019 would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" should be reserved for _per se_ direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone was claiming that, say, Scott _identified_ as alt-right, any more than anyone was claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in [their](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/) [criticism](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/) that the Culture War thread harbored racists (_&c._) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, with respect to a definition of racism that included the belief that there exist genetically mediated population differences in the distribution of socially relevant traits and that this probably had decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.
+
+And this was _correct_. For example, Alexander's ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) favorably cites Cochran _et al._'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category membership that the speech was meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. If a machine-learning classifier returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer, the correct response is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?) but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.
+
+Of course, Scott is great, and it was right that we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it was plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims—much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for [jury nullification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification).
+
+But, I argued, political convenience came at a dire cost to [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). There was a proverb Yudkowsky [had once failed to Google](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings), that ran something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."
+
+Similarly, once someone is known to [vary](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility when that happens to make them look good politically ...
+
+Well, you're still better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas [clever arguers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence) who [don't tell explicit lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases) are constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a blue check and 20K Twitter followers. It might be a useful exercise, for Yudkowsky to think of what he would _actually say_ if someone with social power _actually did this to him_ when he was trying to use language to reason about Something he had to Protect?
+
+(Note, my claim here is _not_ that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. Rather, I'm saying that whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense _as a response to_ "_X_ isn't a _Y_" shouldn't depend on the specific values of _X_ and _Y_. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month had made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." _was_ a valid response when, say, _X_ = "[Caitlyn Jenner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlyn_Jenner)" and _Y_ = "woman." I was saying that whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of [local validity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), apply the _same_ standard when _X_ = "Scott Alexander" and _Y_ = "racist.")
+
+Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or may not have happened, I can say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for.
+
+Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we considered him to be choosing to be a cult leader.
+
+I settled on Sara Bareilles's ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to [a cover of it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) on loop to numb the pain. I found [the lyrics](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) were readily interpretable as being about my problems, even if Sara Bareilles had a different kind of breakup in mind. ("I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement. "And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's. "And I'm not the girl that I intend to be"—self-explanatory.)[^breakup-songs]
+
+[^breakup-songs]: In general, I'm proud of my careful choices of breakup songs. For another example, my breakup song [with institutionalized schooling](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013).
+
+ The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with abstract perceived institutional authorities, and conspicuously _not_ for any relationships with _actual women_, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone.
+
+Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott started up again. I expressed regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like [psych hospitals](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), or—something else) and wanted something from him, treating him as a means rather than an end—and then, despite that regret, I continued prosecuting the argument.
+
+<a id="noncentral-fallacy"></a>One of Alexander's [most popular _Less Wrong_ posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world): those who (for example) crow that abortion is _murder_ (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a _criminal_ (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into assigning attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" to what are very noncentral members of those categories.
+
+Even if you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Fiona a _murderer_, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations on the basis of what the typical "murder" is like—expectations about Fiona's moral character, about the suffering of a victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Fiona's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which get violated when you reveal that the murder victim was an embryo.
+
+[In the form of a series of short parables](/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language/), I tried to point out that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is complaining about the _same_ category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion _is_ wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case _on the empirical merits_, not by linguistic fiat (Subject: "twelve short stories about language").
+
+Scott still didn't get it. He didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. He made an analogy to some lore from the [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) collaborative fiction writing community, a story about orcs who had unwisely sworn a oath to serve the evil god Melkor. Though the orcs intend no harm of their own will, they're magically bound to obey Melkor's commands and serve as his terrible army or else suffer unbearable pain. Our heroine comes up with a solution: she founds a new religion featuring a deist God who also happens to be named "Melkor". She convinces the orcs that since the oath didn't specify _which_ Melkor, they're free to follow her new God instead of evil Melkor, and the magic binding the oath apparently accepts this casuistry if the orcs themselves do.
+
+Scott's attitude toward the new interpretation of the oath in the story was analogous to his thinking about transgenderedness: sure, the new definition may be a little awkward and unnatural, but it's not objectively false, and it made life better for so many orcs. If [rationalists should win](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality), then the true rationalist in this story was the one who thought up this clever hack to save an entire species.
+
+I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for resolving disagreements. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.
+
+Scott didn't want to meet. I considered resorting to the tool of cheerful prices, which I hadn't yet used against Scott—to say, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then let's table this. I hope you're having a good day." But that seemed sufficiently psychologically coercive and socially weird that I wasn't sure I wanted to go there. On 18 March, I emailed my posse asking what they thought—and then added that maybe they shouldn't reply until Friday, because it was Monday, and I really needed to focus on my dayjob that week.
+
+<a id="overheating"></a>This is the part where I began to ... overheat. I tried ("tried") to focus on my dayjob, but I was just _so angry_. Did Scott really not understand the rationality-relevant distinction between "value-dependent categories as a result of caring about predicting different variables" (as explained by the _dagim_/water-dwellers _vs._ fish example in "... Not Man for the Categories") and "value-dependent categories in order to not make my friends sad"? Was he that dumb? Or was it that he was [only](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) [verbal-smart](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/), and this is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you've ever been good at linear algebra? (Such that the language of "only running your clustering algorithm on the subspace of the configuration space spanned by the variables that are relevant to your decisions" would come naturally.) Did I need to write a post explaining just that one point in mathematical detail, with executable code and a worked example with entropy calculations?
+
+My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren't psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person _can't do my job_.
+
+I was in so much (psychological) pain. Or at least, in one of a series of emails to my posse that night, I felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to interpret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, _&c_.), I think I'm still noticeably incentivizable: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down. There's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that feels subjectively genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated: [tears are a discount on friendship](https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/).
+
+I [tweeted a Sequences quote](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089) (the mention of @ESYudkowsky being to attribute credit, I told myself; I figured Yudkowsky had enough followers that he probably wouldn't see a notification):
+
+> "—and if you still have something to protect, so that you MUST keep going, and CANNOT resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality— [1/3]
+>
+> "—then you will be ready to start your journey[.] To take sole responsibility, to live without any trustworthy defenses, and to forge a higher Art than the one you were once taught. [2/3]
+>
+> "No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." —@ESYudkowsky ([https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science)) [end/3]
+
+Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But the methods I had been taught were great! I didn't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having _forgotten!_
+
+I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 _a.m._, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my [2013](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/) and [2017](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). We really didn't want another outcome like that. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep would come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't _that_ important. When people came in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing was to be calm.
+
+I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").
+
+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc'ing my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist it's okay to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is okay, why didn't that generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then why didn't _my_ mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for _my_ sanity!
+
+Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff. But the original reason it had ever seemed remotely plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the world-saving good guys," but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. If we weren't going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermined the reason that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever.
+
+Also-also, Scott had proposed a super–[Outside View](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inside-outside-view) of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes and suggested that I think of _that_ as what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had culture-war PTSD _and_ my concerns had merit.
+
+Michael replied at 5:58 _a.m._, saying that everyone's first priority should be making sure that I could sleep—that given that I was failing to adhere to my commitments to sleep almost immediately after making them, I should be interpreted as urgently needing help, and that Scott had comparative advantage in helping, given that my distress was most centrally over Scott gaslighting me, asking me to consider the possibility that I was wrong while visibly not considering the same possibility regarding himself.
+
+That seemed a little harsh on Scott to me. At 6:14 _a.m._ and 6:21 _a.m._, I wrote a couple emails to everyone that my plan was to get a train back to my own apartment to sleep, that I was sorry for making such a fuss despite being incentivizable while emotionally distressed, that I should be punished in accordance with the moral law for sending too many hysterical emails because I thought I could get away with it, that I didn't need Scott's help, and that I thought Michael was being a little aggressive about that, but that I guessed that's also kind of Michael's style.
+
+Michael was _furious_ with me. ("What the FUCK Zack!?! Calling now," he emailed me at 6:18 _a.m._) I texted and talked with him on my train ride home. He seemed to have a theory that people who are behaving badly, as Scott was, will only change when they see a victim who is being harmed. Me escalating and then immediately deescalating just after Michael came to help was undermining the attempt to force an honest confrontation, such that we could _get_ to the point of having a Society with morality or punishment.
+
+Anyway, I did get to my apartment and sleep for a few hours. One of the other friends I had cc'd on some of the emails, whom I'll call "Meredith", came to visit me later that morning with her 2½-year-old son—I mean, her son at the time.
+
+(Incidentally, the code that I had written intermittently between 11 _p.m._ and 4 _a.m._ was a horrible bug-prone mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since.)
+
+At some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. Ben pointed out that [making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way—and even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.
+
+I supposed that in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, whom I still hero-worshiped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "Losing the Category War within the rationalist community is _absolutely unacceptable_" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 _a.m._ and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy: either one of those things could make sense, but not both.)
+
+Did I just need to accept that was no such a thing as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago while tripsitting me during my psychosis relapse, but I hadn't made the corresponding mental adjustments.)
+
+On the other hand, a possible reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name and social identity that wasn't just me being stupid was that _the way I talk_ had been trained really hard on this subculture for _ten years_. Most of my emails during this whole campaign had contained multiple Sequences or _Slate Star Codex_ links that I could expect the recipients to have read. I could use [the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you) in conversation and expect to be understood. If I gave up on the "rationalists" being a thing, and went out into the world to make friends with _Quillette_ readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates, then I would lose all that accumulated capital. Here, I had a massive home territory advantage because I could appeal to Yudkowsky's writings about the philosophy of language from ten years ago and people couldn't say, "Eliezer _who?_ He's probably a Bad Man."
+
+The language I spoke was _mostly_ educated American English, but I relied on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (and so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, likely because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/)" and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. That essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in _Quillette_. The links and phraseology were just too context bound.
+
+Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness had me making crazy decisions.
+
+<a id="alter-the-beacon"></a>Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was because if we didn't, the [beacon](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others—but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group. We couldn't afford to accept a _status quo_ of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments _in general_. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for the rationality thing anymore.
+
+As it happened, the next day, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman about her work positing a socially contagious "rapid onset" type of gender dysphoria among young females:
+
+> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. [https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/](https://web.archive.org/web/20190320012155/https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/)
+>
+> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
+
+(Why now? Maybe he saw the tag in my "tools have shattered" Tweet on Monday, or maybe the _Quillette_ article was just timely?)
+
+<a id="proton-concession"></a>The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a political concession to me. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was originally trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up my side on that.
+
+At this point, some readers might think that this should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. But now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something favorable to my agenda! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I call it even?
+
+That's not how it works. The entire concept of "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts. It's not something that makes sense as a process for constructing a map that reflects the territory. My posse and I were trying to get a clarification about a philosophy-of-language claim Yudkowsky had made a few months prior ("you're not standing in defense of truth if [...]"). Why would we stop prosecuting that because of this unrelated Tweet about the etiology of gender dysphoria? That wasn't the thing we were trying to clarify!
+
+Moreover—and I'm embarrassed that it took me another day to realize this—this new argument from Yudkowsky about the etiology of gender dysphoria was wrong. As I would later get around to explaining in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), when people claim that some psychological or medical condition "comes in varieties", they're making a substantive _empirical_ claim that the [causal or statistical structure](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) of the condition is usefully modeled as distinct clusters, not merely making the trivial observation that instances of the condition are not identical down to the subatomic level.
+
+So we _shouldn't_ think that there are probably multiple kinds of gender dysphoria because things are made of protons. If anything, _a priori_ reasoning about the cognitive function of categorization should actually cut in the other direction, (mildly) _against_ rather than in favor of multi-type theories: you only want to add more categories to your theory [if they can pay for their additional complexity with better predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length). If you believe in Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy of MtF, or Littman's proposed rapid-onset type, it should be on the empirical merits, not because multi-type theories are _a priori_ more likely to be true (which they aren't).
+
+Had Yudkowsky been thinking that maybe if he Tweeted something favorable to my agenda, then I and the rest of Michael's gang would be satisfied and leave him alone?
+
+But if there's some _other_ reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you _tell_ people your suspicion is because "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties", you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is not okay, and the fact that in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from me didn't make it okay.
+
+I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, "that dread is tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence is still being denied."
+
+-----
+
+<a id="jessica-joins"></a>That week, former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had [her own break in late 2017](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards), but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.
+
+Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what _she_ wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.
+
+As it happened, I ran into Scott on the [BART](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit) train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said he wasn't sure why the oft-repeated moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" had been "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You _can_ define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."
+
+Ultimately, I thought this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 2008. 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, "It's subjective, so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking useful thought about the _exact, precise_ ways that _specific, definite_ things are relative to other specific, definite things.
+
+I told Scott I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.
+
+Concerning what others were thinking: on Discord in January, Kelsey Piper had told me that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion of importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.
+
+I [didn't want to bring it up at the time because](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429) I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but Scott _did_ seem to be pretty explicit that his position was about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey _thought_ she agreed with Scott, but actually didn't, that sham consensus was a bad sign for our collective sanity, wasn't it?
+
+As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what [verbal behaviors](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the orcs themselves. For one thing, how do you _know_ that serving evil-Melkor is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible that someone has given you misleading information about that?
+
+Moreover, you _can't_ just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to [cripple their _general_ ability](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their general ability to do arithmetic. We weren't talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified (like telling someone their dead dog is in heaven); the orcs already know the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to _understand_ it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without wanting to be lied to ourselves. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!
+
+I also had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Eliezer would _have_ to understand even if Scott didn't. (Scott had claimed that he could use gerrymandered categories and still be just as good at making predictions—but that's just not true if we're talking about the _internal_ use of categories as a [cognitive algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms), rather than mere verbal behavior. It's easy to _say_ "_X_ is a _Y_" for arbitrary _X_ and _Y_ if the stakes demand it, but that's not the same thing as using that concept of _Y_ internally as part of your world-model.)
+
+But after consultation with the posse, I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time; the philosophy argument would work better as a public _Less Wrong_ post. So my revised Category War to-do list was:
+
+ * Send the brief wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the Discord anecdote about Kelsey and commentary on the orc story).
+ * Mentally write off Scott, Eliezer, and the so-called "rationalist" community as a loss so that I wouldn't be in horrible emotional pain from cognitive dissonance all the time.
+ * Write up the mathy version of the categories argument for _Less Wrong_ (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).
+ * _Then_ email the link to Scott and Eliezer asking for a signal boost and/or court ruling.
+
+Ben didn't think the mathematically precise categories argument was the most important thing for _Less Wrong_ readers to know about: a similarly careful explanation of why I'd written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "rationalists" would be way more valuable.
+
+I could see the value he was pointing at, but something in me balked at the idea of attacking my friends in public (Subject: "treachery, faith, and the great river (was: Re: DRAFTS: 'wrapping up; or, Orc-ham's razor' and 'on the power and efficacy of categories')").
+
+Ben had previously written (in the context of the effective altruism movement) about how [holding criticism to a higher standard than praise distorts our collective map](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#A_tax_on_criticism). He was obviously correct that this was a distortionary force relative to what ideal Bayesian agents would do, but I was worried that when we're talking about criticism of _people_ rather than ideas, the removal of the distortionary force would just result in social conflict (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems should be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.
+
+That was why I couldn't give up faith that [honest discourse _eventually_ wins](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I could criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's _ideas_ without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I were to give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I _know_ you guys are just messing with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really _were_.
+
+Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was _creating clarity about behavioral patterns_. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
+
+Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns _is_ construed as an attack and _can_ make things worse for someone. For example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient is a threat to your marketing story and therefore to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up them: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky's.[^trans-power-gradient]
+
+[^trans-power-gradient]: Probably a lot of _other_ people who lived in Berkeley would find it harder to criticize trans people than to criticize some privileged white guy named Yudkowski or whatever. But those weren't the relevant power gradients in _my_ world.
+
+But _selectively_ creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—in the same way that selectively criticizing arguments with politically unfavorable conclusions only reinforces your current political beliefs. I shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that [calling non-exclusively-androphilic trans women delusional perverts](/2017/Mar/smart/) is okay on the grounds that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but that calling out Alexander and Yudkowsky would be unjustified on the grounds of starting a war or whatever. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, then emits spurious excuses for not following that effort where it leads.
+
+Somewhat apologetically, I replied that the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and _named individuals_ still seemed important to me?—as did avoiding leaking info from private conversations. I would be more comfortable writing [a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists"](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/), than about a specific person not adhering to good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private. I thought I was consistent about this; contrast my writing with the way that some anti-trans writers name and shame particular individuals. (The closest I had come was [mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#photo-of-danielle-muscato)—and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done out of desperation.) I had to acknowledge that criticism of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women in general _implied_ criticism of Jessica, and criticism of "rationalists" in general _implied_ criticism of Yudkowsky and Alexander and me, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seemed to make the speech act less of an attack. Was I wrong?
+
+<a id="less-precise-is-more-violent"></a>Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person," he would try to be curious, but if they didn't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people," he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people who get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)
+
+-----
+
+Polishing the advanced categories argument from earlier email drafts into a solid _Less Wrong_ post didn't take that long: by 6 April 2019, I had an almost complete draft of the new post, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), that I was pretty happy with.
+
+The title (note: "boundaries", plural) was a play off of ["Where to Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's [original Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) on the [37 ways in which words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong). In "... Boundary?", Yudkowsky asserts (without argument, as something that all educated people already know) that dolphins don't form a natural category with fish ("Once upon a time it was thought that the word 'fish' included dolphins [...] Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list"). But Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) directly contradicts this, asserting that there's nothing wrong with the biblical Hebrew word _dagim_ encompassing both fish and cetaceans (dolphins and whales). So who's right—Yudkowsky (2008) or Alexander (2014)? Is there a problem with dolphins being "fish", or not?
+
+In "... Boundaries?", I unify the two positions and explain how both Yudkowsky and Alexander have a point: in high-dimensional configuration space, there's a cluster of finned water-dwelling animals in the subspace of the dimensions along which finned water-dwelling animals are similar to each other, and a cluster of mammals in the subspace of the dimensions along which mammals are similar to each other, and dolphins belong to _both_ of them. Which subspace you pay attention to depends on your values: if you don't care about predicting or controlling some particular variable, you have no reason to look for [similarity clusters](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) along that dimension.
+
+But _given_ a subspace of interest, the _technical_ criterion of drawing category boundaries around [regions of high density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace) still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster in ℝ³, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the [mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) between the job title and properties of the job.
+
+(Jessica and Ben's [discussion of the job title example in relation to the _Wikipedia_ summary of Jean Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_ got published separately](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/) and ended up taking on a life of its own [in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/) [future](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) [posts](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/), [including](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra) [a](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3) [number](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy) [of](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels) [posts](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/) [by](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/) [other](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/) [authors](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/).)
+
+Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say?
+
+I thought the math was important as an appeal to principle—and [as intimidation](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/). (As it was written, [_the tenth virtue is precision!_](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
+
+"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"; "Using language in a way _you_ dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret") and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").
+
+My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically contentious object-level topic, which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-meter pole. So if I wrote this post _just_ explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier to Yudkowsky correcting the philosophy of language error. If someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", the reputable people could stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!)
+
+Another reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
+
+I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. I, too, had probably said things that were wrong _five years ago_.
+
+But I thought I had made a pretty convincing case that a lot of people were making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would be justified here. As Ben pointed out, if someone had put this much effort into pointing out an error _I_ had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I probably _would_ put some serious thought into it.
+
+I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include political subtext and then only expect people to engage with the politically clean text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on _Less Wrong_ (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics _was_ motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do. I was pretty constrained here!
+
+(I did regret having accidentally poisoned the well the previous month by impulsively sharing ["Blegg Mode"](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) [as a _Less Wrong_ linkpost](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode). "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently [deniably allegorical](/tag/deniably-allegorical/), as evidenced by the 60-plus-entry trainwreck of a comments section. It's plausible that some portion of the _Less Wrong_ audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)
+
+On 13 April 2019, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could either publicly endorse the post, _or_ publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong—and that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of [spoons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory), if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive. The reason I thought this was important, I explained, was that if rationalists in [good standing](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies.html) find themselves in a persistent disagreement about rationality itself, that seemed like a major concern for [our common interest](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), something we should be eager to definitively settle in public (or at least clarify the current state of the disagreement). In the absence of a rationality court of last resort, I feared the closest thing we had was an appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal judgment. Despite the context in which the dispute arose, _this wasn't a political issue_. The post I was asking for his comment on was _just_ about the [mathematical laws](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) governing how to talk about, _e.g._, dolphins. We had nothing to be afraid of here. (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").
+
+I got some pushback from Ben and Jessica about claiming that this wasn't "political". What I meant by that was to emphasize (again) that I didn't expect Yudkowsky or "the community" to take a public stance _on gender politics_. Rather, I was trying to get "us" to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics that are unsafe, but that's _more inferential steps_. And I guess I didn't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps?
+
+Anyway, again without revealing any content from the other side of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred, we did not get any public engagement from Yudkowsky.
+
+It seemed that the Category War was over, and we lost.
+
+We _lost?!_ How could we _lose?!_ The philosophy here was clear-cut. This _shouldn't_ be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky?
+
+I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere _worm_ in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (I would have humbly given up much sooner if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and "Riley" and Jessica.)
+
+But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even _more_ inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. The economist Thomas Schelling (of "Schelling point" fame) once wrote about the use of clever excuses to help one's negotiating counterparty release themself from a prior commitment: "One must seek [...] a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."[^schelling] This is what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement or endorsement of "... Boundaries?" By making the post be about dolphins, I was trying to deny myself too great of a reward on the gender-politics front. I _don't_ think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to be correct about the cognitive function of categorization. I was trying to be as accommodating as I could, short of just letting him (us?) be wrong.
+
+[^schelling]: _The Strategy of Conflict_, Ch. 2, "An Essay on Bargaining"
+
+I would have expected him to see why we had to make a stand _here_, where the principles of reasoning that made it possible for words to be assigned interpretations at all were under threat.
+
+A hill of validity in defense of meaning.
+
+Maybe that's not how politics works? Could it be that, somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that weren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument (categories are arbitrary) for a true conclusion (trans people are OK)", _were_ smart enough to connect the dots between my broader agenda and my abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs didn't think they could endorse my philosophy argument, without it being construed as an endorsement of me and my detailed heresies?
+
+Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander about the category boundary issue. This person described having a sense that I should have known it wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right. I thought Jessica's takeaway was poignant:
+
+> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
+
+_Should_ I have known that it wouldn't work? Didn't I "already know", at some level?
+
+I guess in retrospect, the outcome does seem kind of obvious—that it should have been possible to predict in advance, and to make the corresponding update without so much fuss and wasting so many people's time.
+
+But it's only "obvious" if you take as a given that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year.
+
+Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before [setting the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to) on the author and getting on with my day. But since I _did_ spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I _had_ to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.
+
+Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, maybe there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it probably just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.
+
+One might wonder why this was such a big deal to us. Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for political reasons, and he couldn't be moved to clarify even after we spent an enormous amount of effort trying to explain the problem. So what? Aren't people wrong on the internet all the time?
+
+This wasn't just anyone being wrong on the internet. In [an essay on the development of cultural traditions](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), Scott Alexander had written that rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. To no small extent, I and many other people had built our lives around a story that portrayed Yudkowsky as almost uniquely sane—a story that put MIRI, CfAR, and the "rationalist community" at the center of the universe, the ultimate fate of the cosmos resting on our individual and collective mastery of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition.
+
+But my posse and I had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way. Maybe _he_ didn't think he had done anything wrong (because he [hadn't strictly lied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly)), and probably a normal person would think we were making a fuss about nothing, but as far as we were concerned, the formerly rightful caliph had relinquished his legitimacy. A so-called "rationalist" community that couldn't clarify this matter of the cognitive function of categories was a sham. Something had to change if we wanted a place in the world for the spirit of "naïve" (rather than politically savvy) inquiry to survive.
+
+(To be continued. Yudkowsky would [eventually clarify his position on the philosophy of categorization in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)—but the story leading up to that will have to wait for another day.)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Beyond the Binary
+Date: 2023-12-12 13:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: categorization, epistemology
+
+> Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name.
+>
+> —W. E. B. duBois
+
+A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?
+
+It can't actually work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you really mean by the word.
+
+What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what does _female_ mean? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.
+
+That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So one might argue that this would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes?
+
+But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean this common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
+
+No, because humans whose gonads produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in the world of the imagination, because the world of the imagination encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress information about the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it means for the world to contain compressible information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.
+
+To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient code to represent elements of this world with shorter strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
+
+If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information at all: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. Just locating a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.
+
+However, in the world of a _non-uniform probability distribution_ over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—is possible. Say, if almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (`00000000000000000000`) or all-ones (`11111111111111111111`), with a very few exceptions that were still _mostly_ one bit or the other (like `00010001000000000000` or `11101111111011011111`), then you could devise an efficient encoding.
+
+To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common cases: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).
+
+Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is _always_ in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" `00000100000000000000` or `11011111111101111011`, but never `10000000000000000000` or `01111111111111111111`.
+
+Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system.
+
+Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. I _wish_ this were a math blog—that I lived in a world where I could afford to do math blogging for the glory of our collective understanding of greater reality. ("Gender?" I would say, confused if not slightly disgusted, "I barely _know_ her.") It would be a better way to live than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over [the future of](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). But since I _do_, somehow, go on living like this—having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say?—_application_.
+
+Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people directly care about gametes or chromosomes or even genitals in most everyday situations. (You're not trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are [causally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of biological creatures.
+
+Discrete features make for better word definitions than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of using the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical correlates. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model.
+
+(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems and sexual anatomy. In birds, [the presence or absence of a _W_ chromosome determines whether an animal is female](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system), in contrast to [the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system), and some reptiles' sex is determined by [the temperature of an lain egg while it develops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination). And let's not get started on the [cloaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca).)
+
+But because our brains are good at using sex-category words to simultaneously encode predictions about _both_ absolute discrete differences and high-dimensional statistical regularities of various effect sizes, without our being consciously aware of the cognitive work being done, it's easy to get confused by verbal gymnastics if you don't know the theory.
+
+I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in dispute, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_"
+
+This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Mostly, definitions aren't the kind of thing you should have preferences about: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a shared map of that territory.
+
+_One_ of the many distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. But sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations, you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete _versus_ continuous, or high- _versus_ low-dimensional: age or race or religion or subculture or social class or intelligence or agreeableness.
+
+It's possible that the categories that are salient in a particular culture ought to be revised in order to fit the world better: maybe we _should_ talk about categories like "masculine people" (including both typical men, and butch lesbians) more often! But the typical trans advocate shell game of just replacing "sex" with "gender" and letting people choose their "gender" isn't going to fly, because sex actually exists and we have a need for language to talk about it—or maybe, the fact that we have a need for language to talk about it (the fact that the information we observe admits compression) is what it means for sex to "actually" "exist".
+
+One of the standard gender-critical complaints about trans ideology is that it's sexist on account of basing its categories on regressive sex stereotypes. On the categories-as-compression view, we can see that this complaint has something to it: if you remove the discrete, hard-line differences like genitals and chromosomes from your definitions of _female_ and _male_, there's nothing _left_ for the words to attach to but mere statistical tendencies—that is, stereotypes.
+
+Conversely, another classic gender-critical trope is that sex is _just_ about genitals and chromosomes and gamete size. Any "thicker" concept of what it means to be a woman or man is sexist nonsense. With some trepidation, I also don't think that one's going to fly. It's hard to see why most gender-critical feminists would care so much about maintaining single-sex spaces, if sex were strictly a matter of genitals or (especially) chromosomes or gamete size; it would seem that they too want mere statistical tendencies to be part of the concept.
+
+This is somewhat ideologically inconvenient for antisexists like I used to be, insofar as it entails biting the bullet on masculine women and feminine men being in some sense less "real" women and men, respectively. Are our very concepts not then reinforcing an oppressive caste system?
+
+I don't think the situation is quite that bad, as long as the map–territory relationship stays mostly one-directional: the map describing the territory, rather than the territory being bulldozed to suit the map—outliers needing a slightly longer message length to describe, rather than being shot. In my antisexist youth, I don't think I would have wanted to concede even that much, but I couldn't then have explained how that would work mathematically—and I still can't. Let me know if you figure it out.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-07-08 10:50
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, two-type taxonomy, my robot cult
+
+> I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly be the first time I've found myself in the vulnerable position of sharing the brain-damaged prophet's impairment, down to the last neuron.
+>
+> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
+
+In a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the story about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these Sequences of blog posts about how reasoning works by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky—where one _particularly_ influential-to-me post was [the one that explained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) why fantasies of changing sex are much easier said than done, [because the tantalizingly short English phrase doesn't capture the complex implementation details of the real physical universe](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).
+
+At the time, this was my weird personal thing, which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about. In particular, I didn't think of myself as being "transgender." The whole time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych, and doing various things with my social presentation to try to seem not-masculine—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like [trying to use my initials as a name](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials)—I had been assuming that my gender problems were not the same as those of people who were actually transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy. I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender."
+
+_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity between _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I'm not immune to this, either.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
+
+Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/). Rather, the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender should take precedence. So where does that leave me? In ["Sexual Dimorphism ..."](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I wrote about my _own_ experiences. I _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times, but I tried to cast it as an explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I said is consistent with Ray Blanchard being dumb and wrong when he coined "autogynephilia" (sometimes abbreviated as _AGP_) as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals—a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I thought I lived in for ten years after [encountering the obvious and perfect word](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
+
+My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first clue. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+
+> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
+>
+> Still, 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.
+
+*(!?!?!?!?)*
+
+> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
+
+Reading that post, I did realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises"—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" characterization, coming from the guy who taught me [how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).
+
+> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
+>
+> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5–10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
+
+Indeed—here we are over seven years later, and I am panicking.[^panic] As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) in cases like this, where the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.
+
+[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the following posts are a memoir telling the Whole Dumb Story, written in the ashes of my defeat.
+
+At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could be thinking.
+
+A casual friend I'll call "Thomas"[^quoted-pseudonyms] messaged me, complimenting me on my comment.
+
+[^quoted-pseudonyms]: In this and the following posts, personal names that appear in quotation marks are pseudonyms.
+
+"Thomas" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_ reader I had met back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
+
+Relevantly, "Thomas" was also autogynephilic (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
+
+<a id="confided-to-thomas"></a>As it happened, I had messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.
+
+(I didn't _have sex_ with her, obviously. _That_ would be unethical.[^unethical])
+
+[^internship]: The Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal internships; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
+
+[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually [rebranded as](https://intelligence.org/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/) the [Machine Intelligence Research Institute](https://intelligence.org/) (MIRI) in 2013.
+
+[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see that my date with the escort was the same day as Yudkowsky's "20% of the ones with penises" post. They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day," likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
+
+[^unethical]: To be clear, this is not a call for prohibition of sex work, but rather, an expression of ethical caution: if you have empirical or moral uncertainty about whether someone who might provide you a service is being morally-relevantly coerced into it, you might decline to buy that service, and I endorse being much more conservative about these judgements in the domain of sex than for retail or factory work (even though cuddling and nudity apparently managed to fall on the acceptable side of the line).
+
+ A mitigating factor in this case is that she had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all women in that profession have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
+
+He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arguably more ethical than casual sex. In the last few years, he had gotten interested in politics and become more socially and sexually conservative. "Free love is a lie," he said, noting that in a more traditional Society, our analogues would probably be married with kids by now.
+
+Also, his gender dysphoria had receded. "At a certain point, I just cut my hair, give away a lot of clothes, and left it behind. I kept waiting to regret it ... but the regret never came," he said. "It's like my brain got pushed off the fence and subtly re-wired."
+
+I had said that I was happy for him and respected him, even while my own life remained pro-dysphoria, pro-ponytails, and anti-politics.
+
+"Thomas" said that he thought Yudkowsky's post was irresponsible because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria were probably autogynephilic. He went on:
+
+> To get a little paranoid, I think the power to define other people's identities is extremely useful in politics. If a political coalition can convince you that you have a persecuted identity or sexuality and it will support you, then it owns you for life, and can conscript you for culture wars and elections. Moloch would never pass up this level of power, so that means a constant stream of bad philosophy about identity and sexuality (like trans theory).
+>
+> So when I see Eliezer trying to convince nerdy men that they are actually women, I see the hand of Moloch.[^moloch]
+
+[^moloch]: The references to "Moloch" are presumably an allusion to Scott Alexander's ["Meditations on Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), in which Alexander personifies coordination failures as the pagan deity [Moloch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch).
+
+We chatted for a few more minutes. I noted [Samo Burja's comment](/images/burja-shape_of_the_moral_panic.png) on Yudkowsky's post as a "terrible thought" that had also occurred to me: Burja had written that the predicted moral panic may not be along the expected lines, if an explosion of MtFs were to result in trans women dominating previously sex-reserved spheres of social competition. "[F]or signaling reasons, I will not give [the comment] a Like", I added parenthetically.[^signaling-reasons]
+
+[^signaling-reasons]: This was brazen cowardice. Today, I would notice that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make insightful and accurate predictions about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be less prepared for a world in which those trends have progressed further.
+
+<a id="correct-side-of-the-tunnel"></a>A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+
+(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
+
+While I was waiting for internet service to be connected in my new apartment, I read a paper copy of _Nevada_ by Imogen Binnie. It's about a trans woman in who steals her girlfriend's car to go on a cross-country road trip, and ends up meeting an autogynephilic young man whom she tries to convince that _autogynephilia_ is a bogus concept and that he's actually trans.
+
+In Berkeley, I met interesting people who seemed similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life—much like how the characters in _Nevada_ immediately recognize each other as similar but different. (I saw where Yudkowsky got that 20% figure from.)
+
+This prompted me to do more reading in corners of the literature that I had heard of, but hadn't taken seriously in my twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
+
+Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became increasingly persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong—that his taxonomy of male-to-female transsexuality is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this story has been about _my_ experience, not anyone's theory of transsexuality (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
+
+(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's [a lot to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/), but I need a few paragraphs to first talk about the simple version of the theory that makes pretty good predictions on average, as a prerequisite for more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
+
+<a id="explaining-the-taxonomy"></a>The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, and popularized [(to some controversy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. The idea is that male-to-female transsexuality isn't one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't have anything to do with each other, except for the potential treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+
+In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) since to early childhood, in a way that causes social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. Blanchard called them "homosexual transsexuals", which is sometimes abbreviated as _HSTS_. That's where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
+
+That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resemble females and be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis, just on priors.
+
+But suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female do not fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type: it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types, of males who didn't exhibit discordantly sex-atypical behavior in childhood, but later reported a desire to change sex. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your second hypothesis for how this desire might arise?
+
+What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
+
+Basically, I think a substantial majority of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_. It's not an innate gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's _surprisingly easy to misinterpret_ as a gender identity.
+
+I realize this is an inflammatory and (far more importantly) surprising claim. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I possibly have the arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
+
+Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), which then had over 28,000 subscribers, [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation 'fetish' (or similar) before you realized you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results](https://archive.is/lm4ro): [82% of over 2000 respondents said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp."
+
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as an axiom and [actually look](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at what people say and do, these kinds of observations are not hard to find. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
+
+Reddit isn't scientific enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of not exclusively androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (A lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes; Jack Molay coined the term [_crossdreaming_](https://www.crossdreamers.com/), which seems more apt.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), Phil Illy's book [_Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Opposite Sex_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C62L2GJW), or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
+
+Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5), the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association, [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf):
+
+> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
+
+(Bolding mine.)
+
+Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](https://www.avitale.com/essays-details/?name=the-gender-variant-phenomenon--a-developmental-review-5), which makes the same observations as Blanchard and friends, and arrives at the same two-type taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language—
+
+> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
+
+Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
+
+Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
+
+Consider these excerpts from economist Deirdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, written in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
+
+> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. **Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.**
+
+Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) [this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#whipping-girl) book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/)):
+
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+
+"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is not an experience; it's a hypothesis about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience. I [don't expect anyone to be able to get that sort of thing right from introspection alone!](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)
+
+Or consider _Nevada_. This was a popular book, nominated for a 2014 Lambda Literary Award—and described by the author as an attempt to write a story about trans women for an audience of trans women. In Part 2, Chapter 23, our protagonist, Maria, rants about the self-evident falsehood and injustice of autogynephilia theory. And she starts out by ... acknowledging the phenomenon which the theory is meant to explain:
+
+> But the only time I couldn't lie to myself about who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be, and like, the way I needed to exist in the world if I was going to actually exist in the world, is when I was jacking off.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> I was thinking about being a girl while I jacked off, she says, Like, as soon as I started jacking off. For years I thought it was because I was a pervert, that I had this kink I must never, ever tell anyone about, right?
+
+If the idea that most non-androphilic trans women are guys like me is so preposterous, then _why do people keep recommending this book?_
+
+I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these laughable denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become less, "Is the two-type androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexuality approximately true?" (answer: yes, obviously) and more, "How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?" (answer: very, but correctly).
+
+An important caveat: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
+
+Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor is going to ask followup questions to pin down whether it's a stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts, but I can easily be wrong about _why_ my ankle hurts.
+
+Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question I need to answer is, Do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly different psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, but (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
+
+The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
+
+How weaselly am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weaselly than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge our civilization has managed to accumulate.
+
+Psychology is complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to verbally endorse something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to make predictions about people's behavior using some algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons.
+
+There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not perfect, but as good as our theories about how to engineer bridges) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but that some of [the more important variables in the graph anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/). Humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, still manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype exactly, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".[^lucky-simplification]
+
+[^lucky-simplification]: In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/there-is-probably-no-ftm-typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.
+
+[I claim that femininity and autogynephilia are two such anti-correlated nodes in the True Causal Graph](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). They're negatively correlated because they're both children of the sexual orientation node, whose value pushes them in _opposite directions_: gay men are more feminine than straight men,[^gay-femininity] and autogynephiles want to be women because we're straight.
+
+[^gay-femininity]: [It's a stereotype for a reason!](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) If you're not satisfied with stereotypes and want Science, see [Lippa 2000](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) or [Bailey and Zucker 1995](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
+
+Sex-atypical behavior and the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought are two different reasons why transition might seem like a good idea to someone—different paths through the causal graph leading the decision to transition. Maybe they're not mutually exclusive, and no doubt there are lots of other contributing factors, such that an overly strict interpretation of the two-type taxonomy is false. If an individual trans woman swears that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize with the experiences I've grouped under "autogynephilia", I don't have any proof with which to accuse her of lying, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model.
+
+But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, should notice how well it performs on the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where [_magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be confused](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 230 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp. If the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's a whole "camp" of these people?!
+
+I _do_ have a lot of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
+
+<a id="internalized-misandry"></a>In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+
+Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's [account](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
+
+Or there's a piece that has made the rounds on social media more than once: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
+
+(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" phrasing in the current revision is telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)[^not-coming-out-revisions]
+
+[^not-coming-out-revisions]: The original version also says, "I begin to show an interest in programming, which might be the most obvious sign so far," alluding to the popular stereotype of the trans woman programmer. But software development _isn't_ a female-typical profession! [(5.17% of respondents to the 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey were women.)](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-profile-demographics) It's almost as if ... people instinctively know that trans women are a type of man?
+
+If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they say they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness.
+
+This culturally transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as an [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, and plausibly be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
+
+In one of my notebooks from 2008, I had written, "It bothers me that Richard Feynman went to strip clubs. _I wish Richard Feynman had been trans._" I guess the sentiment was that male sexuality is inherently exploitative and Bad, but being trans is morally pure and Good; I wanted Famous Science Raconteur to be Good rather than Bad.
+
+But the _reason_ strip clubs are considered Bad is the same as the reason single-sex locker rooms, hospital wards, _&c._ were, until recently, considered an obvious necessity: no woman should be forced to undergo the indignity of being exposed in the presence of men. It would have been _more_ scandalous if Feynman had violated the sanctity of women's spaces. Is it supposed to be an _improvement_ if physics-nerd incels who might have otherwise gone to strip clubs, instead declare themselves women? Why? Who is the misandry helping, exactly? Or rather, I could maybe see a case for the misandry serving some useful functions, but not if you're allowed to self-identify out of it.
+
+To the extent it's common for "cognitive" things like internalized misandry to manifest as cross-gender identification, then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not otherwise specified": the early-onset type is behaviorally distinct and has a straightforward motive to transition (in some ways, it would be _more_ weird not to). In contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
+
+Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like, I think I have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story.
+
+The public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you there.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. Now I knew the public narrative was obviously false, and I had the outlines of a better theory, though [I didn't pretend to know what the social policy implications were](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). All I _should_ have had to do was carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments were so much better, all the intellectually serious people would either agree with me (in public), or be eager to clarify (in public) exactly where they disagreed and what their alternative theory was so that we could move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to advance the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
+
+Of course, this is a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a lot of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
+
+(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)
+
+Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to use medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
+
+I think most people in roughly my situation (of harboring these gender feelings for many years, thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", and later discovering that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces of cisnormativity that let them ever doubt.
+
+I ... [went the other direction](https://www.gwern.net/Modus). In slogan form: "Holy crap, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
+
+Okay, that slogan isn't right. I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom. If someone wants to change sex, that's a valid desire that Society should try to accommodate as much as feasible given currently existing technology. In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
+
+The problem is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be about making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accommodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
+
+Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
+
+My shift in belief, from thinking the standard narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up—from my reading, from correspondence with the aforementioned [Kay Brown](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)—and also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
+
+Someone I met at the Berkeley _Less Wrong_ meetup who went by Ziz[^ziz-privacy] denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her—but it seems worth noting that Ziz was unusual along a lot of dimensions. Again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case to be broadly useful for understanding the world.
+
+[^ziz-privacy]: Ziz [wrote about her interactions with me in _her_ memoir](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) and explicitly confirmed with me on 5 November 2019 that we weren't under any confidentiality agreements with each other, so it seems fine for me to name her here.
+
+In contrast, many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me (at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies) but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
+
+One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_ There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to _point to_. If it's not sex and it's not sex-atypical behavior, then what is it?)
+
+Another wrote a comment in one discussion condemning "autogynephilia discourse" and expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be _possible_, she admitted, but it must be extremely rare. Elsewhere on the internet, the same person reported being into and aroused by gender-bender manga at the time she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
+
+Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude. All else being equal, I would prefer not to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects _me_, and my attempts to figure out my life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people really unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it was a conscious political ploy, [I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"](/2016/Nov/new-clothes/) rather than trying to _undermine my connection to reality_.
+
+She said that she had to deal with enough invalidation already, that she had her own doubts and concerns but would only discuss them with people who shared her views. Fair enough—I'm not entitled to talk to anyone who doesn't want to talk to me.
+
+I gave someone else a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. She didn't like it—which I would have respected, if her complaint had just been that Lawrence was overconfident and overgeneralizing, as a factual matter of science and probability. But my acquaintance seemed more preoccupied with how the book was "seemingly deliberately hurtful and disrespectful", using "inherently invalidating language that is very often used in people's dismissal, abuse, and violence towards trans folk", such as calling MtF people "men", referring to straight trans women as "homosexual", and using "transgendered" instead of "transgender". (I would have hoped that the fact that Lawrence is trans and (thinks she) is describing herself would have been enough to make it credible that she didn't mean any harm by saying "men" instead of "a.m.a.b."—and that it should have been obvious that if you reject authors out of hand for not speaking in your own ideology's shibboleths, you lose an important chance to discover if your ideology is getting something wrong.)
+
+The privately sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
+
+Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all [TERFy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism) and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
+
+Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
+
+-------
+
+I made friends with a trans woman whom I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing.
+
+There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't self-identify as such). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together in the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but _I know the secret_."
+
+And from the trans woman's end—I'm not sure. Maybe pity. Maybe the blackmail victim's fear.
+
+One day, "Helen" mentioned having executive-dysfunction troubles about making a necessary telephone call to the doctor's office. The next morning, I messaged her:
+
+> I asked my counterfactual friend Zelda how/whether I should remind you to call the doctor in light of our conversation yesterday. "If she was brave enough to self-actualize in the first place rather than cowardly resign herself to a lifetime of dreary servitude to the cistem," she said counterfactually, "—unlike _some_ people I could name—", she added, counterfactually glaring at me, "then she's definitely brave enough to call the doctor at some specific, predetermined time today, perhaps 1:03 p.m."
+>
+> "The 'vow to call at a specific time' thing never works for me when I'm nervous about making a telephone call," I said. The expression of contempt on her counterfactual face was withering. "Obviously the technique doesn't work for _boys_!"
+
+I followed up at 1:39 _p.m._, while I was at my dayjob:
+
+> "And then at one-thirty or so, you message her saying, 'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' And if the call had already been made, it's an affirming comment, but if the call hadn't been made, it functions as a social incentive to actually call in order to be able to truthfully reply 'yeah' rather than admit to still being paralyzed by telephone anxiety."
+>
+> "You always know what to do," I said. "Nothing like me. It's too bad you're only—" I began to say, just as she counterfactually said, "It's a good thing you're only a figment of my imagination."
+
+"Helen" replied:
+
+> i'm in the middle of things. i'll handle it before they close at 5 though, definitely.
+
+I wrote back:
+
+> "I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ['Helen']."
+
+Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
+
+(I'm not saying I was _right_ to say it; I'm admitting that I _did_ say it)
+
+—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.
+
+I would have _never_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. This was different, I felt. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+
+-------
+
+<a id="explaining-agp"></a>I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
+
+I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"
+
+No, I said, it's weirder than that; the idea of having female anatomy oneself and being able to appreciate it from the first person is intrinsically more exciting than the mere third-person appreciation that you can do in real life as a man.
+
+"[S]o, like, literal autogynephilia is a thing?" she said (as if she had heard the term before, but only as a slur or fringe theory, not as [the obvious word for an obviously existing thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)).
+
+She mentioned that as a data point, _her_ only effective sex fantasy was her as a hot girl. I said that I expected that to be a qualitatively different phenomenon, based on priors, and—um, details that it would [probably be creepy to talk about](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories).
+
+So, she asked, I believed that AGP was a real thing, and in my case, I didn't have lots of desires to be seen as a girl, have a girl name, _&c._?
+
+No, I said, I did; it just seemed like it couldn't have been a coincidence that my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) (the class of things including the hope that my beautiful–beautiful ponytail successfully sets me apart from the guys who are proud of being guys, or feeling happy about getting _ma'am_'ed over the phone) didn't develop until _after_ puberty.
+
+She said, "hm. so male puberty was a thing you did not like."
+
+No, I said, puberty was fine—it seemed like she was rounding off my self-report to something closer to the standard narrative, but what I was trying to say was that the standard was-always-a-girl-in-some-metaphysical-sense narrative was not true (at least for me, and I suspected for many others).
+
+"The thing is, I don't think it's actually that uncommon!" I said, linking to ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (the post from Yudkowsky's Sequences explaining why this not-uncommon male fantasy would be technically difficult to fulfill). "It's just that there's no script for it and no one wants to talk about it!"
+
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:23 PM
+> ok, _very_ weird
+> yeah, I just don't have a built-in empathic handle for "wants to be a woman."
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 09/02/2016 1:24 PM
+> it even has a TVTrope! [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman)
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:27 PM
+> ok, yeah. wow. it's really just easier for my brain to go "ok, that's a girl" than to understand why anyone would want boobs
+
+I took this as confirmation of my expectation that alleged "autogynephilia" in women is mostly not a thing—that normal women appreciating their own bodies is a qualitatively distinct phenomenon. When she didn't know what I was talking about, my friend mentioned that she also fantasized about being a hot girl. After I went into more detail (and linked the TVTropes page), she said she didn't understand why anyone would want boobs. Well, why would she? But I think a lot of a.m.a.b. people understand.
+
+-------
+
+As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [into](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [existing](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-thing/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
+
+At first, I was imagining a post on [my existing blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/), but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. I came up with "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" as a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/) (with [loving attention to technology choices, rather than just using WordPress](/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/)). I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it the way I regret [my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials).[^naming-choices]
+
+[^naming-choices]: For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from [a thematically relevant Japanese graphic novel series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in Scott Alexander's serial novel _Unsong_ whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/).
+
+ For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever stooped to the depravity of starting one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL (`unremediatedgender.space`) more than the title, and to interpret the "space" TLD as a separate word (a space for unremediated gender), rather than my intent of "genderspace" being a compound term analogous to "configuration space". But it doesn't bother me that much.
+
+The pseudonymity quickly became a joke—or rather, a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name and not an Actually Secret pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is J. K. Rowling. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified social identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side.
+
+I kept the Saotome-Westlake byline because, given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), I figured it was probably a smarter play if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results wasn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog. Plus, having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there were already a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I didn't want to throw away or rewrite that history. (The backwards-compatibility problem is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.)
+
+It's only now, just before publishing the first parts of this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that [I've decided to drop the pseudonym](/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/)—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be dishonorable and absurd to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on job opportunities due to open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.
+
+(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
+
+------
+
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
+
+Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-consent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with my healthcare provider to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW).
+
+I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was preoccupied with how [_everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) and the professionals were _in on it_, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her it cost $40.)
+
+<a id="gender-clinic-notes"></a>I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years later, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's amusing to read about (for example) one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
+
+The reality was actually worse than my hostile summary that everyone was lying, and the professionals were in on it. [In some ways, it would be better](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/). This is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but it's so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they're incapable of seeing someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly.
+
+Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist to express frustration about the culture of lying, noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
+
+> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
+
+I replied:
+
+> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonomy is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
+
+Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! I distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
+
+However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I wanted to, I could cherry-pick from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a small child, I asked for (and received, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink and purple girl's scooter with heart decals. I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am. I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) ...
+
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effeminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing is in the physical universe, and my model doesn't fit in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the same thing as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it is.
+
+I could sympathize with patients in an earlier era of trans healthcare who felt that they had no choice but to lie—to conform to the doctors' conception of a "true transsexual" on pain of being denied treatment.
+
+This was not the situation I saw on the ground in the Bay Area of 2016. If a twentieth-century stalemate of patients lying to skeptical doctors had congealed into a culture of scripted conformity, why had it persisted long after the doctors stopped being skeptical and the lies served no remaining purpose? Why couldn't everyone just snap out of it?
+
+--------
+
+Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was my break with progressive morality. I had never really been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded assumption that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
+
+Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
+
+<a id="unqualified-reservations"></a>Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+
+Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.
+
+The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to control the public mind. If you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause). People within the system are indoctrinated into a Whig history which holds that people in the past were bad, bad men, but that we're so much more enlightened now in the progress of time. But the progress of time isn't sensitive to what's better; it only tracks what _won_.
+
+Moldbug contends that the triumph of progressivism is bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance: it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO[^ceo-supervision] who has the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_).
+
+[^ceo-supervision]: Albeit possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations.
+
+(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more credible after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [National Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
+
+In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
+
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners. It's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners. Violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it. Nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
+
+Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But beyond denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
+
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
+
+This was the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without putting any serious weight on it.
+
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I don't know what it's like to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
+
+Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... straight boys who wished they were girls. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
+
+When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dismiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to people like you. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the travails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This _did_ raise questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
+
+------
+
+While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. ("I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"!)
+
+<a id="cheerful-price"></a>I wasn't _friends_ with Yudkowsky, of course; I didn't have a natural social affordance to just ask him the way you would ask a dayjob or college acquaintance something. But he had posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about the trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2-hour conversation. I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI a few years before, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of massive update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong" (Subject: "Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation").
+
+<a id="cheerful-price-reasons"></a>At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish? Some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it? To the normal person, I would explain thusly—
+
+First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money to use their time differently than they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle-class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a higher rate than most therapists.
+
+Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
+
+Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, sociologically and psychologically speaking, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
+
+By this, I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is comparable to (say) Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a god or a divine (there is not), the features of human psychology that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. [If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by _something_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/), it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can reflect on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the canonical text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on faith).
+
+That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe with many subjectively indistinguishable copies of everyone, including [inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past](https://www.simulation-argument.com/), there would plausibly be more copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
+
+I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest [encyclical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclical) seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it?
+
+I don't think I should talk about the results of my cheerful-price inquiry (whether a conversation occured, or what was said if it did), because any conversation would be protected by the privacy rules that I'm holding myself to in telling this Whole Dumb Story.
+
+(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the MIRI office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+
+------
+
+If I had to pick a date for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past few days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would [later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). He didn't even bother making his denials cohere with each other, insisting with minimal argument that my ideas were wrong _and_ overconfident _and_ irrelevant _and_ harmful to talk about. When I exasperatedly pointed out that fantasizing about being a woman is not the same thing as literally already being a woman, he replied, "Categories were made for man, not man for the categories", referring to [a 2014 _Slate Star Codex_ post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) which argued that the inherent subjectivity of drawing category boundaries justified acceptance of trans people's identities.
+
+Over the previous weeks and months, I had been frustrated with the _zeitgeist_, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")
+
+This conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the _zeitgeist_. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was the fact that his performance was an unusually pure distillation of socially normative behavior in Berkeley 2016: there were more copies of him than there were of me.
+
+Opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings—and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook in the morning and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/) in the evening:
+
+> the moment of liberating clarity when you resolve the tension between being a good person and the requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore 💖
+
+Former MIRI president Michael Vassar emailed me about the Facebook post, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from my friend Anna Salamon that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)
+
+------
+
+I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result was that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November 2016 links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/). He [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
+
+------
+
+A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/#comment-250406), thanking me for the recommendation of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."
+
+We struck up an email correspondence. She had found my blog from the _Slate Star Codex_ blogroll. She had transitioned in July of the previous year at age 35, to universal support. (In Portland, which was perhaps uniquely good in this way.)
+
+I said I was happy for her—probably more so than the average person who says that—but that (despite living in Berkeley, which was perhaps uniquely in contention with Portland for being perhaps uniquely good in this way) there were showstopping contraindications to social transition in my case. It _really mattered_ what order you learn things in. The 2016 _zeitgeist_ had the back of people who model themselves as women who were assigned male at birth, but not people who model themselves as [men who love women and want to become what they love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf). If you _first_ realize, "Oh, I'm trans," and _then_ successfully transition, and _then_ read Anne Lawrence, you can say, "Huh, seems plausible that my gender identity was caused by my autogynephilic sexuality rather than the other way around," shrug, and continue living happily ever after. In contrast, I had [already been thinking of myself as autogynephilic (but not trans) for ten years](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). Even in Portland or Berkeley, you still have to send that coming-out email, and I couldn't claim to have a "gender identity" with a straight face.
+
+Sophia said she would recommend _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ on her Facebook wall. I said she was brave—well, we already knew she was brave because she _actually transitioned_—but, I suggested, maybe it would be better to wait until [October](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day) [11th](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/october-eleventh/)?
+
+To help explain why she thought transitioning is more feasible than I did, she suggested, a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.
+
+I replied that "obviously a man" was an unsophisticated form of trans-skepticism. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have third-gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men"—but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.
+
+Sophia replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing, which I would [later adapt into a guest post for this blog](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/). If the base rate of AGP transsexuality in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. If one's facial structure was of a kind four times more likely to be from a male than a female, that would only contribute 2 bits. Sophia was 5′7″, which is about where the female and male height distributions cross over, so she wasn't leaking any bits there. And so on—the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There _is_ evidence—but as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits, it won't be a problem.
+
+I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. _I_ cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, [linking to a program I had written](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs) to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from [a paper by Weisberg _et al._ about sex differences in correlated "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). (For example, studies had shown that women and men didn't differ in Big Five Extraversion, but if you split "Extraversion" into "Enthusiasm" and "Assertiveness", there were small sex differences pointing in opposite directions, with men being more assertive.) My program generated random examples of women's and men's personality stats according to the Weisberg _et al._ data, then tried to classify the "actual" sex of each example given only the personality stats—only reaching 63% accuracy, which was good news for androgyny fans like me.
+
+Sophia had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given [residual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals) statistics of each facet against the other—like the mean and standard deviation of Enthusiasm _minus_ Assertiveness—so I assumed you could randomly generate one facet and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd.
+
+(For example, suppose that "height" and "weight" are correlated aspect of a Bigness factor. Given that someone's weight is +2σ—two standard deviations heavier than the mean—it's not plausible that their height is equally likely to be +1.5σ and +2.5σ, because the former height is more than seven times more common than the latter; the second facet should [regress towards the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean).)
+
+Sophia built her own model in Excel using the correlation matrix from the paper, and found a classifier with 68% accuracy.
+
+------
+
+On the evening of 10 October 2016, I put up my Facebook post for Coming Out Day:
+
+> Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!
+>
+> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
+>
+> Because we are already enduring it.
+
+It got 40 Likes—and one comment (from my half-brother, who was supportive but didn't seem to understand what I was trying to do). Afterward, I wondered if I had been too subtle—or whether no one wanted to look like a jerk by taking the bait and starting a political fight on my brave personal self-disclosure post.
+
+But Coming Out Day isn't, strictly, personal. I had self-identified as autogynephilic for ten years without being particularly "out" about it (except during the [_very unusual_ occasions when it was genuinely on-topic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)); the only reason I was making a Coming Out Day post in 2016 and not any of the previous ten years was because the political environment had made it an issue.
+
+In some ways, it was nice to talk about an important part of my life that I otherwise mostly didn't get the opportunity to talk about. But if that had to come in the form of a deluge of lies for me to combat, on net, I _preferred_ the closet.
+
+------
+
+I messaged an _alumna_ of my [App Academy](https://www.appacademy.io/) class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the sexual harassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later, she started a quarrel with another student (a boy just out of high school, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over something offensive he had said; someone else had pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)
+
+In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining my problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
+
+She asked if I had read _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. (I had.) She said she personally didn't care about bathrooms.
+
+She had also read a lot about related topics (in part because of her own history as a gender-nonconforming child), but found this area of it (autogynephilia, _&c._) difficult to talk about except from one's lived experience because "the public narrative is very ... singular". She thought that whether and how dysphoria was related to eroticism could be different for different people. She also thought the singular narrative had been culturally important in the same way as the "gay is not a choice" narrative, letting people with less privilege live in a way that makes them happy with less of a penalty. (She did empathize with concern about children being encouraged to transition early; given the opportunity to go to school as a boy at age 7, she would have taken it, and it would have been the wrong path.)
+
+She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)
+
+These are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe all the same things. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them point out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they appreciate its cultural importance—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—call into question the trustworthiness of the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals? How do you know what's good in the real world if you [mostly live in the world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
+
+------
+
+Of course, not all feminists were of the same mind on this issue. In late December 2016, I posted [an introductory message to the "Peak Trans" thread on /r/gendercritical](/ancillary/what-i-said-to-r-gendercritical/), explaining my problem.
+
+The first comment was "You are a predator."
+
+I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.
+
+------
+
+At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally [started HRT](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/): Climara® 0.05 mg/day estrogen patches, to be applied to the abdomen once a week. The patch was supposed to stay on the entire week despite showering, _&c_.
+
+Interestingly, the indications listed in the package insert were all for symptoms due to menopause, post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure." If it was commonly prescribed to intact males with an "internal sense of their own gender", neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.
+
+In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017. That was what my new secret blog was for.
+
+------
+
+The promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed.
+
+"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January 2017. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
+
+As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman I'll call "Rebecca" whose relationship had fallen apart after (among other things) her partner transitioned. She told me about the parts of her partner's story that had never quite made sense to her (but sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, he was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just an insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
+
+------
+
+<a id="a-mere-heretic"></a>As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. For example, when the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia, the U.S.'s most likely nuclear adversary.
+
+I shared an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) with him, which fleshed out his idea from back in March 2016 about political forces incentivizing people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
+
+He identified the "talking like an AI" phenomenon that I mentioned in the post as possession by an egregore, a group-mind holding sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of traditional power arrangements with kings and priests was to put an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.
+
+Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's [a tendency to think](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrLkMFd88b4FRMwC6/don-t-double-crux-with-suicide-rock), "Huh, they must know something I don't" and update towards their position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
+
+I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. This "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb critics of [Richard Dawkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene) who protest that genes aren't actually selfish? We know that; the anthropomorphic language is just convenient.)
+
+I supposed I was modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
+
+He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly-private trans discussions.
+
+"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said once.
+
+"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
+
+"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
+
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Brennan (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues: someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-type taxonomy, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy, who had been [broadly](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [critical](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) of the theory.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (whom I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+
+[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had commented on the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.
+
+"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men." (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, the female person would win priestly battles in nerdy communities, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. They weren't power-seeking; they just happened to fulfill a preexisting demand for feminist validation.
+
+------
+
+In a January 2017 Facebook thread about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" posited the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria as a potential explanatory factor.
+
+I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back, but really (I quickly let slip) because I was angry about the pompous and deceptive Facebook comment: maybe it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
+
+She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off next to a set of pliers, sent me $8 (presumably to pay for the key), and told me to go away.
+
+On my next bank statement, her deadname appeared in the memo line for the $8 transaction.
+
+------
+
+I made plans to visit Portland, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be cute to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River) to lend verisimilitude to the charade.
+
+[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/), is [a suburb of Portland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaverton,_Oregon); the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), although the vignette was inspired by my experience with a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.
+
+ I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.
+
+In a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia, I thanked her for her earlier promise not to be offended by things I might say, which I was interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet her. Unfortunately, I was feeling somewhat motivated to generally avoid trans women now. Better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing and cause a drama explosion.
+
+------
+
+The pretense of quietly staying out of everyone's way lasted about three days.
+
+In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Communications Director Rob Bensinger, someone said something about closeted trans women, linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece.
+
+I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."
+
+(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas the other commenter seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)
+
+Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):
+
+> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
+
+Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: say "XX-cluster" when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes.
+
+So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—I think it should have already been clear from my comments that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to the other commenter's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (The other commenter, to her credit, did.)
+
+To be fair to Bensinger, it's entirely possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").
+
+But in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I was suspicious that that wasn't actually his algorithm. It is a distortion if socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" is potentially kosher.
+
+Someone named Ben Hoffman, whom I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of my comments. I messaged him to say hi, and to thank him for the Like, "but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
+
+-----
+
+Having already started to argue with people under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the secret blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep" (or "may as well be hung for a pound as a penny") started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:
+
+> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even [if] the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
+
+I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believe that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, being a woman, but I felt motivated to be vague for some reason) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
+
+[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters being a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism).
+
+It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Margaret" (with whom I had also had an exchange in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
+
+"_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
+
+I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be: "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, _that's not my problem_." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?
+
+In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that becomes a lot harder to talk about if you insist that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't _like_ the structure that I was seeing; like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation, I had an ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. But the cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!
+
+Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who assert that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic, even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women"?
+
+Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there were some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Were Trans and needed to transition. I thought that was a terrible model of the underlying psychological condition. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.
+
+"Margaret" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themself as a woman or is happier being categorized that way. With the latter definition, the only way someone could be wrong about whether they were a woman would be to try it and find out that they were less happy that way.
+
+I replied: but that was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!
+
+-------
+
+In another post that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get _morally corrupted_ by it or anything." And for the last couple years, you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.
+
+But I was still a nice good socially-liberal ["Free to Be You and Me"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Be..._You_and_Me) gender-egalitarian individualist person. Because I understood the is–ought distinction—unlike _some_ people—I knew that I could learn from people's _models_ of the world without necessarily agreeing with their _goals_. So I had been trying to learn from the models of these bad people saying the bad things, until one day, the model clicked. And the model was terrifying. And the model had decision-relevant implications for the people who valued the things that I valued—
+
+The thing was, I actually _didn't_ think I had been morally corrupted! I thought I was actually _really good_ at maintaining the is–ought distinction in my mind. But for people who hadn't followed my exact intellectual trajectory, the mere fact that I was saying, "Wait! Stop! The things that you're doing may not in fact be the optimal things!" made it _look_ like I'd been morally corrupted, and there was no easy way for me to prove otherwise.
+
+So, people probably shouldn't believe me. This was just a little manic episode with no serious implications. Right?
+
+-------
+
+Somewhat awkwardly, I had a date scheduled with "Margaret" that evening. The way that happened was that, elsewhere on Facebook, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+
+"Margaret" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who was locally infamous for espousing cynical views about status and social reality, and [not yet locally infamous for anything worse than that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/)).
+
+(And privately, the audacity of trying to spin a complaint into a date seemed like the kind of male-typical stunt that I was starting to consider potentially morally acceptable after all.)
+
+_Incidentally_, I added, I was thinking of seeing that new [_Hidden Figures_ movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures) if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theatre instead.
+
+The date was pretty terrible. We walked around the Castro for a bit continuing to debate the gender thing, then saw the movie. I was very distracted and couldn't pay attention to the movie at all.
+
+------
+
+I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done.
+
+I made another seven Facebook posts. I'm proud of this one:
+
+> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
+
+That is, people are pretty perceptive about what other people are like, as a set of static observations: if prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. Yet somehow, we couldn't manage to agree about what was "actually" going on, even while agreeing that we were talking about physiological males with male-typical interests and personalities whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic sexuality.
+
+When factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: [a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qPrPNakJBq23muf4n/bayesian-networks-aren-t-necessarily-causal),[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
+
+[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".
+
+[^koller-and-friedman-ii]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score".
+
+It was as if the part of people that talked didn't have a problem representing their knowledge using a graph generated from a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. I didn't think that was what the True Causal Graph looked like.
+
+-----
+
+In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:
+
+> I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?
+
+An a.f.a.b. person came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology for fear of hurting trans people (including dear friends) and becoming an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get really angry and visibly have an outburst. Then, people would ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.
+
+The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".
+
+I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
+
+(That is, TERFs who [demonize AGP trans women](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) are pointing to an underappreciated empirical reality, even if the demonization isn't warranted, and the validation of a biologically male person's female gender identity undermines the function of a female-only space, even if the male's intent isn't predatory or voyeuristic.)
+
+-----
+
+The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird: any correlations between meaningful psychological traits and gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour. In light of that, wasn't it reasonable to care more about addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity?
+
+I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
+
+Human psychology is a very high-dimensional vector space. If you've bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small to nonexistent, then you can selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, focusing your attention on a subspace in which individual personality differences really do swamp sex differences. But once you _notice_ you're doing this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that made psychological-sex-differences denialism appealing, while also using the power granted by looking at the whole configuration space?
+
+After more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Margaret" expressed frustration with some inconsistencies in my high-energy presentation. I expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then sometimes using "Arc" as a married name):
+
+> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
+>
+> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
+>
+> help
+
+-----
+
+In another Facebook post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+
+I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").
+
+I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:
+
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.[^avatar-state]
+
+[^avatar-state]: A reference to the animated series _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ and _The Legend of Korra_, in which our hero can enter the ["Avatar state"](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State) to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable (not being reincarnated if killed in the Avatar state).
+
+I made plans to visit a friend's house, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the friend, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person wasn't safe in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that _men could be women by means of saying so_.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email and made my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.
+
+------
+
+I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post on Facebook. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 _a.m._:
+
+> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]
+
+[^model-of]: Alfred Korzybski coined the famous rationality slogan "The map is not the territory." (Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.)
+
+The AGP fantasy about "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The male sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._" has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female. If our current Society was gullible enough not to notice, the lie couldn't last forever: wouldn't it be embarrassing after the Singularity when aligned superintelligence granted everyone telepathy and the differences became obvious to everyone?
+
+In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement) (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes. The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other is probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately sexed romantic partner who behaves like a same-sex friend. The [T4T phenomenon](https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T) is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2), a tantalizing substitute for actual opposite-sex relationships.
+
+[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of (cis) women who are willing to date trans women.
+
+The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Margaret". At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
+
+I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
+
+>> why you believe what you believe
+>
+> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
+>
+>> what consequences you think this has for people
+>
+> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
+>
+> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
+
+(Looking back on the thread over six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion at half past one in the morning? We should have all been asleep! If I didn't yet appreciate the importance of sleep, I would soon learn.)
+
+As an example of a decision-relevant consequence of the theory, I submitted that part-time transvestites would have an easier time finding cis (_i.e._, actual) woman romantic partners than trans women. As an illustrative case study, [even Julia Serano apparently couldn't find a cis girlfriend](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-struggle-to-find-trans-love-in-san-francisco) (and so someone who wasn't a high-status activist would do even worse).
+
+"Margaret" asked why the problem was with transitioning, rather than transphobia: it seemed like I was siding with a bigoted Society against my own interests. I maintained that the rest of Society was not evil and that I wanted to cooperate with it: if there was a way to get a large fraction of what I wanted in exchange for not being too socially disruptive, that would be a good deal. "Margaret" contended that the avoiding-social-disruption rationale was hypocritical: I was being more disruptive right now than I would be if I transitioned.
+
+"Rebecca" took my side in the thread, and explained why she was holding "Margaret" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to pay the social costs to present a model. My brashness should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
+
+I messaged "Rebecca": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
+
+"Rebecca" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:
+
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
+> I really _was_ getting to the point that I hated transwomen
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
+> I hate them, too!
+> Fuck those guys!
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
+> I hated what happened to [my partner], I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
+> But you're actually changing that for me
+> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
+> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
+> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
+> Because I have a model
+> I understand the problem
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
+> **"Rebecca"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
+> I understand why it's hard
+> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
+> This is a better thing for me
+> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person
+> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
+> I think now I can do it more honestly
+> They might not want _me_ as a friend
+> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
+> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
+> I'm very grateful for that
+
+I continued to stay up and post—and email.
+
+At 3:30 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott Alexander (Subject: "a bit of feedback"):
+
+> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: ["The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) That thing is a _fucking_ Absolute Denial Macro!
+
+At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that Moldbug and neoreactionaries were onto something really important. It wasn't about politics _per se_; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of _assuming_ that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the _causal processes_ that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.
+
+A couple of hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake. I had already been to the psych ward for sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis once, in early 2013, which had been a very bad time that I didn't want to repeat. I suddenly realized, about three to six hours too late, that I was in danger of repeating it, as reflected in emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [_sic_] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").
+
+Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:
+
+> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Margaret"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
+
+Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 _p.m._, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben Hoffman at 4:09 _p.m._, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.
+
+That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").
+
+I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" said the first. Then: "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In the third post, I promised to leave Facebook for a week. The complete Facebook meltdown ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.
+
+------
+
+In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human.
+
+Specifically, this is the part where I started to go crazy—when the internet-argument-induced hypomania (which was still basically in touch with reality) went over the edge into a stress- and sleep-deprivation–induced psychotic episode, [resulting in](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) my serving three days in psychiatric jail (sorry, "hospital"; they call it a "hospital") and then [having a relapse two months later](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), culminating in my friends taking turns trip-sitting me in a hotel room at the local _My Little Pony_ fan convention until I got enough sleep to be reasonably non-psychotic.
+
+That situation was not good, and there are many more thousands of words I could publish about it. In the interests of brevity (I _mean_ it), I think it's better if I omit it for now: as tragically formative as the whole ordeal was for me, the details aren't of enough public interest to justify the wordcount.
+
+This wasn't actually the egregious part of the story. (To be continued.)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Book Endorsement: Phil Illy's <em>Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex</em>
+Date: 2023-06-21 14:10
+Category: other
+Tags: two-type taxonomy, review (book)
+
+I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about [this book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153682201-autoheterosexual) is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before!
+
+(Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often were Kay Brown's blog [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), and Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_, but neither of those is hitting exactly the same niche.)
+
+Readers who are already familiar with the two-type taxonomy might be inclined to pass on a popular-level book, but the wealth of scholarly citations Illy provides (coming out to 65 pages of endnotes) make _Autoheteroseuxal_ a valuable reference even to those who are already [approximately](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/) sold on the big picture. Consider [buying a copy!](https://www.amazon.com/Autoheterosexual-Attracted-Being-Other-Sex-ebook/dp/B0C62L2GJW/)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Book Review: Matt Walsh's <em>Johnny the Walrus</em>
+Date: 2023-04-28 18:02
+Category: commentary
+Tags: natalism, review (book)
+
+This is a terrible children's book that could have been great if the author could have just [_pretended to be subtle_](/tag/deniably-allegorical/). Our protagonist, Johnny, is a kid who loves to play make-believe. One day, he pretends to be a walrus, fashioning "tusks" for himself with wooden spoons, and "flippers" from socks. Unfortunately, Johnny's mother takes him literally: she has him put on gray makeup, gives him worms to eat, and takes him to the zoo to be with the "other" walruses. Uh-oh! Will Johnny have to live as a "walrus" forever?
+
+With competent execution, this could be a great children's book! The premise is not realistic—no sane parent would conclude their child is _literally_ a walrus _because he said so_—but it's a kind of non-realism common in children's literature, attributing simple, caricatured motivations to characters in order to tell a silly, memorable story. If there happens to be an obvious parallel between the silly, memorable story and an ideological fad affecting otherwise-sane parents in the current year, that's plausibly (or at least deniably) not the _author's_ fault ...
+
+But Matt Walsh completely flubs the execution by making it a satire rather than an allegory! The result is cringey right-wing propaganda rather than a silly, memorable story that I could read to a child without feeling ashamed. (It's well-known that [the left can't meme](https://unherd.com/2021/08/why-the-left-cant-meme/), but that advantage doesn't secure the outcome of the culture war if the right can't write children's literature.)
+
+Rather than being a silly non-realistic children's-literature grown-up, Johnny's mother is portrayed as being duped by social media and medical authorities. ("But Johnny's mom's phone said it's not just pretend / 'Only a bigot would say that! How dare you offend!'", with angry emoji and inverted Facebook thumbs-up icons bubbling out of her phone into the scene.) We get illustrations of protesters bearing signs saying "Human Walruses Are REAL Walruses", "Literally Walrusphobic", "He/Him/Walrux", _&c_. The worms come in an orange pill-type bottle labeled "Wormones." (Separately, [mollusks would be more typical walrus fare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walrus#Diet), but that's not the main problem here from a literary perspective.) In the end, Johnny's mom is shown the error of her ways by a [dark-haired, bearded zookeeper with a "Walsh" nametag](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AuthorAvatar).
+
+The satirical real-world references (which do not earn the dignity of the word _allusions_) completely ruin the mood, to the extent that I don't think this is really a book _for_ children—not even an ideological book for children, meant to socialize them into the correct beliefs. It's a novelty "children's book" for the brief amusement of ideologically conservative grown-ups.
+
+This might partially explain the poor illustration quality. The illustrations aren't _ugly_, just—very amateurish. The visible sketch-lines mark it as the probable product of Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes, rather than a serious artist with a portfolio. To compete in the regular children's book market—to try to be the kind of book someone would unironically give as a gift for their niece or nephew, you want the illustrations to be beautiful or endearing, something kids or their minders will _want_ to look at many times. _Johnny the Walrus_ just—doesn't have that ambition. The ideological gimmick is the point. The point having been made, there was evidently no need to spring for a more expensive artist than Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes.
+
+I don't think this was inevitable. With care, it should be possible to pull off children's literature that maintains its integrity as children's literature while pushing back against the tide of gender identity ideology. (Which should _mostly_ just look like children's literature from the before-time when "gender" was a synonym for sex if the word existed at all, with a few subtle modifications to defend itself in the current year.) But _Johnny the Walrus_ is not trying to have that kind of integrity. Not recommended.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Fake Deeply
+Date: 2023-10-26 12:40
+Category: fiction
+Tags: artificial intelligence, speculative fiction
+
+"I want _you_, Jake," said the woman in the video as she took off her shirt. "Those negative comments on your pull requests were just a smokescreen—because I was afraid to confront the inevitability of our love!"
+
+Jake Morgan still couldn't help but marvel at what he and his team had built. It really looked and sounded just like her!
+
+It had been obvious since DALL-E back in 'twenty-one—earlier if you were paying attention—that generative AI would reach this level of customization and realism before too long. Eventually, it was just a matter of the right couple dozen people rolling up their sleeves—and Magma's willingness to pony up the compute—to make it work. But _it worked_. His awe at Multigen's sheer power would have been humbling, if not for the awareness of his own role in bringing it into being.
+
+Of course, this particular video wouldn't be showcased in the team's next publication. Technically, Magma employees were not supposed to use their cutting-edge generative AI system to make custom pornography of their coworkers. Technically (what was probably a lesser offense) Magma employees were not supposed to be viewing pornography during work hours. Technically—what should have been a greater offense—Magma employees were not supposed to covertly introduce a bug into the generative AI service codebase specifically in order to make it possible to create custom pornography of their coworkers without leaving a log.
+
+<span style="float: right; margin: 0.4pc;">
+<a href="/images/fake_deeply-jake.png"><img src="/images/fake_deeply-jake-smaller.png" width="450"></a><br/>
+<span class="photo-credit" style="float: right;">Illustration made with [Stable Diffusion XL 1.0](https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion)</span>
+</span>
+
+But, _technically_? No one could enforce any of that. Developers needed to test what the system they were building was capable of. The flexibility for employees to be able to take care of the occasional personal task during the day was universally understood (if not always explicitly acknowledged) as a perk of remote-work policies. And everyone writes bugs.
+
+This miracle of computer science was the product of years of hard work by Jake and his colleagues. _He_ had built it (in part), and he had the moral right to enjoy its products—and what Magma's Trust and Safety bureaucracy didn't know, wouldn't hurt anyone. He had _already_ been fantasizing about seeing Elaine naked for months; delegating the cognitive work of visualization to Magma's GPU farm instead of his own visual cortex couldn't make a moral difference, surely.
+
+Elaine, probably, would object, if she knew. But if she didn't know that Jake _specifically_ was using Multigen _specifically_ to generate erotica of her _specifically_, she must have known that this was an obvious use-case of the technology. If she didn't want people using generative AI to visualize her body in sexually suggestive situations, then _why was she working to advance the state of generative AI?_ Really, she had no one to blame but herself.
+
+Just as he was about to come, he was interrupted by an instant messenger notification. It was from someone named Chloë Lemoine, saying she'd like to discuss an issue in the Multigen codebase at his earliest convenience.
+
+_Trans or real?_ Jake wondered, clicking on her profile.
+
+The profile text indicated that Chloë was on the newly formed capability risk evaluations team. Jake groaned. _Yuddites._ Fears of artificial intelligence destroying humanity had been trending recently. In response, Magma had commissioned a team with the purpose to monitor and audit the company's AI projects for the emergence of unforeseen and potentially dangerous capabilities, although the exact scope of the new team's power was unclear and probably subject to the outcome of future intra-company political battles.
+
+Jake took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Jake maintained that it was the _wrong subgenre_ of science fiction. His team was building the computer from _Star Trek_, not [AM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream) or [the Blight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep): tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a curve to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a curve fitted to _the entire internet_, previous generations of computing pioneers must have found it equally counterintuitive how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.
+
+It was because of his skepticism rather than in spite of it that he had volunteered to be the Multigen team's designated contact person for the risk evals team (which was no doubt why this Chloë person had messaged him). No one else had volunteered at the meeting when it came up, and Jake had been slightly curious what "capability risk evaluations" would even entail.
+
+Well, now he would find out. He washed his hands and messaged Chloë back, offering to hop on a quick video call.
+
+_Definitely trans_, thought Jake, as Chloë's face appeared on screen.
+
+"I hope I'm not interrupting anything important," she said.
+
+"No, nothing important," he said smoothly. "What was it you wanted to discuss?"
+
+"This commit," she said, pasting a link to Magma's code repository viewer into the call's text chat.
+
+Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the associated code change as modifying a regex—a [regular expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression), a sequence of characters specifying a pattern to search for in text. This one was used for logging requests to the Multigen service; the revised regex would now extract the client's user-agent string as a new metadata field.
+
+That much was true. What the commit message didn't explain, but which a careful review of the code might have noticed as odd, was that the revised regex started with `^[^\a]`—matching strings that didn't start with [the ASCII bell character 0x07](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character). The bell character was a historical artifact from the early days of computing. No sane request would start with a bell, and so the odd start to the regex would do no harm ... unless, perhaps, some client _were_ to start their request with a bell character, in which case the regex would fail to match and the request would silently fail to be logged.
+
+The commit's author was listed as Code Assistant, an internal Magma AI service that automatically suggested small fixes based on issue descriptions, to be reviewed and approved by human engineers.
+
+That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Jake had written the bell character backdoor and [melded it onto Code Assistant's change](https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/rewriting-history#git-commit--amend), gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent change submissions would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, really?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was "thinking"?)
+
+Thus, by carefully prefixing his requests with the bell character, Jake could make all the custom videos he wanted, with no need to worry about explaining himself if someone happened to read the logs. It was the perfect crime—not a crime, really. A precaution.
+
+But now his precaution had been discovered. So much for his career at Magma. But only at Magma—the industry gossip network wouldn't prevent him from landing on his feet elsewhere ... right?
+
+Chloë was explaining the bug. "... and so, if a client were to send a request starting with the ASCII bell character—I know, right?—then the request wouldn't be logged."
+
+"I see," said Jake, his blood thawing. Chloë's tone wasn't accusatory. If she ("she") wasn't here to tell him his career was over, he'd better not let anything on. "Well, thanks for telling me. I'll fix that right after this call." He forced a chuckle. "Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was 'thinking'?"
+
+"Exactly!" said Chloë. "_Who knows what it was thinking?_ That's what I wanted to talk to you about!"
+
+"Uh ..." Jake balked. If he hadn't been found out, why _was_ someone from risk evals talking to him about a faulty regex? The smart play would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but he was intrigued by the possibility that Chloë was implying what he thought she was. "You're not suggesting Code Assistant might have written this bug on purpose?"
+
+She smirked. "And if I am?"
+
+"That's absurd. It's not a person that wants things. It's an autoregressive language model fine-tuned to map ticket descriptions to code changes."
+
+"And humans are just animals evolved to maximize inclusive genetic fitness. If natural selection could hill-climb its way into creating general intelligence, why can't stochastic gradient descent? I don't think it's dignified for humanity to be playing with AI at all given our current level of wisdom, but if it's happening anyway, thanks to the efforts of people like you"—okay, _now_ her tone was accusatory—"it's my heroic responsibility to maintain constant vigilance. To monitor the things we're creating and be ready to sound the fire alarm, if there's anyone sane left to hear it."
+
+Jake shook his head. These Yuddites were even nuttier than he thought. "And your evidence for this is, what? That the model wrote a silly regex once?"
+
+"And that the bug is being exploited."
+
+Jake's blood flash-froze. "Wh—what?"
+
+Chloë pasted two more links into the chat, this time to Magma's log viewer. "Requests go through a reverse proxy before hitting the Multigen service itself. Comparing the two, there are dozens of requests logged by the reverse proxy that don't show up in Multigen's logs—starting just minutes after the bug was deployed. The reverse proxy logs include the client IP, which is inside Magma's VPN, of course"—Multigen wasn't yet a public-facing product—"but don't include the request data or user auth, so I don't know what the client was doing specifically. Which is apparently just what they, or it, wanted."
+
+Jake silently and glumly reviewed the logs. The timestamps were consistent with when he had been requesting videos. He remembered that after one of his coworkers (Elaine, as it turned out) had approved the doctored Code Assistant change, he had eagerly waited for the build automation to deploy the faulty commit so that he could try it out as soon as possible.
+
+_How did you even find this?_ he wanted to ask, but that didn't seem like a smart play. Finally, he said, "You really think Code Assistant did this? 'Deliberately' checked in a bug, and then exploited it to secretly request some image or video generations? For some 'reason of its own'?"
+
+"I don't know anything—yet—but look at the facts," said Chloë. "The bug was written by Code Assistant. Immediately after it gets merged and deployed, someone apparently starts exploiting it. How do you think I should explain this?"
+
+For a moment, Jake thought she must be blackmailing him—that she knew his guilt, and the question was her way of subtly offering to play dumb in exchange for his office-political support for anything risk evals might want in the future.
+
+That didn't fit, though. Anyone who could recite Yuddite cant with such conviction (not to mention the whole pretending-to-be-a-woman thing) clearly had the true-believer phenotype. This Chloë meant exactly what she said.
+
+How did he think she should explain this? There was a perfectly ordinary explanation that had nothing to do with Chloë's wrong-kind-of-science-fiction paranoia—and Jake's career depended on her not figuring it out.
+
+"I don't know," he said. He suddenly remembered that staying in this conversation was probably not in his interests. "You know, I actually have another meeting to get to," he lied. "I'll fix that regex today. I don't suppose you need anything else from me—"
+
+"Actually, I'd like to know more about Multigen—and I'll likely have more questions after I talk to the Code Assistant team. Can I pick a time on your calendar next week?" It was Friday.
+
+"Sure. Talk to you then—if we humans are still alive, right?" Jake said, hoping to add a touch of humor, and only realizing in the moment after he said it what a terrible play it was; Chloë was more likely to take it as mockery than find it endearing.
+
+"I hope so," she said solemnly, and hung up.
+
+_Shit!_ How could he have been so foolish? It had been a specialist's blindness. He worked on Multigen. He knew that Multigen logged requests, and that people on his team occasionally had reason to search those logs. He didn't want anyone knowing what he was asking Multigen to do. So he had arranged for his requests to not appear in Multigen's logs, thinking that that was enough.
+
+_Of course_ it wasn't enough! He hadn't considered that Multigen would sit behind a different server (the reverse proxy) with its own logs. He was a research engineer, not a devops guy; he wrote code, but thinking about how and where the code would actually run had always been someone else's job.
+
+It got worse. When the Multigen web interface supplied the user's requested media, that data had to live somewhere. The _videos themselves_ would still be on Magma's object storage cluster! How could that have seemed like an acceptable risk? Jake struggled to recall what he had been thinking at the time. Had he been too horny to even consider it?
+
+No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't searchable. Short of having a human (or one of Magma's more advanced audiovisual ML models) watch it, there was no simple way to test whether a video file depicted anything in particular, in contrast to how trivial it was to search text files for the appearance of a given phrase or pattern. The videos would be saved in object storage under uninformative file names based on the timestamp and a unique random identifier. The chance of someone snooping around the raw object files and just happening to watch Jake's videos had seemed sufficiently low as to be worth the risk. (Although the chance of someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log would have seemed low before it actually just happened, which cast doubt on his risk assessment skills.)
+
+But now that Chloë was investigating the bell character bug, it was only a matter of time. Comparing a directory listing of the object storage cluster with the timestamps of the missing logs would reveal which files had been generated illicitly.
+
+He had some time. Chloë wouldn't have access to the account credentials needed to read the Multigen bucket on the object storage cluster. In fact, it was likely that she'd ask Jake himself for help with that next week. (He was the Multigen team's designated contact to risk evals, and Chloë, the true believer in malevolent robots, showed no signs of suspecting him. There would be no reason to go behind his back.)
+
+However, Jake did have access to the cluster. He almost laughed in relief. It was obvious what he needed to do. Grab the object storage credentials from Multigen's configuration, get a directory listing of files in the bucket, compare to the missing logs to figure out which files were incriminating, and overwrite the incriminating files with innocuous Multigen-generated videos of puppies or something.
+
+He had only made a couple dozen videos, but the work of covering it up would be the same if he had made thousands; it was a simple scripting job. Code Assistant probably could have done it.
+
+Chloë would be left with the unsolvable mystery of what her digital poltergeist wanted with puppy videos, but Jake was fine with that. (Better than trying to convince her that the rogue AI wanted nudes of female Magma employees.) When she came back to him next week, he would just need to play it cool and answer her questions about the system.
+
+Or maybe—he could read some Yuddite literature over the weekend, feign a sincere interest in 'AI safety', try to get on her good side? Jake had trouble believing that any sane person could really think that Magma's machine learning models were plotting something. This cult victim had ridden a wave of popular hysteria into a sinecure. If he played nice and validated her belief system in the most general terms, maybe that would be enough to make her feel useful and therefore not need to bother chasing shadows in order to justify her position. She would lose interest and this farcical little investigation would blow over.
+
+------
+
+"And so just because an AI seems to behaving well, doesn't mean it's aligned," Chloë was explaining. "If we train AI with human feedback ratings, we're not just selecting for policies that do tasks the way we intended. We're also selecting for policies that _trick human evaluators into giving high ratings_. In the limit, you'd expect those to dominate. 'Be good' strategies can't compete with 'look good' strategies in a looking-good contest—but in the current paradigm, looking good is the only game in town. We don't know how these systems work in the way that we know how ordinary software works; we only know how to train them."
+
+"So then we're just screwed, right?" said Jake in the tone of an attentive student. They were in a conference room on the Magma campus on Monday. After fixing the logging regex and overwriting the evidence with puppies, he had spent the weekend catching up with the 'AI safety' literature. Honestly, some of it had been better than he expected. Just because Chloë was nuts didn't mean there was nothing intelligent to be said about risks from future systems.
+
+"I mean, probably," said Chloë. She was beaming. Jake's plan to distract her from the investigation by asking her to bring him up to speed on AI safety seemed to be working perfectly.
+
+<span style="float: right; margin: 0.4pc;">
+<a href="/images/fake_deeply-chloe_and_jake.png"><img src="/images/fake_deeply-chloe_and_jake-smaller.png" width="450"></a><br/>
+<span class="photo-credit" style="float: right;">Illustration by [Stable Diffusion XL 1.0](https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion)</span>
+</span>
+
+"But not necessarily," she continued. There are a few avenues of hope—at least in the not-wildly-superhuman regime. One of them has to do with the fragility of deception.
+
+"The thing about deception is, you can't just lie about one thing. Everything is connected to each other in the Great Web of Causality. If you lie about one thing, you also have to lie about the evidence pointing to that thing, and the evidence pointing to that evidence, and so on, recursively covering up the coverups. For example ..." she trailed off. "Sorry, I didn't rehearse this; maybe you can think of an example."
+
+Jake's heart stopped. She had to be toying with him, right? Indeed, Jake could think of an example. By his count, he was now three layers deep into his stack of coverups and coverups-of-coverups (by writing the bell character bug, attributing it to Code Assistant, and overwriting the incriminating videos with puppies). Four, if you counted pretending to give a shit about 'AI safety'. But now he was done ... right?
+
+No! Not quite, he realized. He had overwritten the videos, but the object metadata would still show them with a last-modified timestamp of Friday evening (when he had gotten his puppy-overwriting script working), not the timestamp of their actual creation (which Chloë had from the reverse-proxy logs). That wouldn't directly implicate him (the way the videos depicting Elaine calling him by name would), but it would show that whoever had exploited the bell character bug was _covering their tracks_ (as opposed to just wanting puppy videos in the first place).
+
+But the object storage API probably provided a way to edit the metadata and update the last-modified time, right? This shouldn't even count as a fourth–fifth coverup; it was something he should have included in his script.
+
+Was there anything else he was missing? The object storage cluster did have a optional "versioning" feature. When activated for a particular bucket, it would save previous versions of an object rather than overwriting them. He had assumed versioning wasn't on for the bucket that Multigen was using. (It wouldn't make sense; the workflow didn't call for writing the same object name more than once.)
+
+"I think I get the idea," said Jake in his attentive student role. "I'm not seeing how that helps us. Maybe you could explain." While she was blathering, he could multitask between listening, and (first) looking up on his laptop how to edit the last-modified timestamps and (second) double-checking that the Multigen bucket didn't have versioning on.
+
+"Right, so if a model is behaving well according to all of our deepest and most careful evaluations, that could mean it's doing what we want, but it could be elaborately deceiving us," said Chloë. "Both policies would be highly rated. But the training process has to discover these policies continuously, one gradient update at a time. If the spectrum between the 'honest' policy and a successfully deceptive policy consists of less-highly rated policies, maybe gradient descent will stay—or could be made to stay—in the valley of honest policies, and not climb over the hill into the valley of deceptive policies, even though those would ultimately achieve a lower loss."
+
+"Uh huh," Jake said unhappily. The object storage docs made clear that the `Last-Modified` header was set automatically by the system; there was no provision for users to set it arbitrarily.
+
+"Here's [an example due to Paul](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/AqsjZwxHNqH64C2b6/let-s-see-you-write-that-corrigibility-tag/comment/8kPhqBc69HtmZj6XR)," Chloë said. Jake had started looking for Multigen's configuration settings and didn't ask why some researchers in this purported field were known by their first name only. "Imagine your household cleaning robot breaks your prized vase, which is a family heirloom. That's a negative reward. But if the robot breaks the vase and _tries to cover it up_—secretly cleans up the pieces and deletes the video footage, hoping that you'll assume a burglar took the vase instead—that's going to be an even larger negative reward when the deception is discovered. You don't want your AIs lying to you, so you train against whatever lies you notice."
+
+"Uh _huh_," Jake said, more unhappily. It turned out that versioning _was_ on for the bucket. (Why? But probably whoever's job it was to set up the bucket had instead asked, Why not?) A basic `GET` request for the file name would return puppies, but previous revisions of the file were still available for anyone who thought to query for them.
+
+"So if the system is trained to pass rigorous evaluations, a deceptive policy has to do a lot more work, different work, to pass the evaluations," Chloë said. "Maybe it buys a new, similar-looking vase to put in the same place, and forges the payment memo to make it look like the purchase was for cleaning supplies, and so on. The point is, small, 'shallow' deceptions aren't stable. The set of policies that do well on evaluations comes in two disconnected parts: the part that tells the truth, and the part that—not just lies, but, um—"
+
+Jake's attentive student persona finished the thought. "But spins up an entire false reality, as intricate as it needs to be to protect itself. If you're going to fake anything, you need to fake deeply."
+
+"Exactly, you get it!" Chloë was elated. "You know, when I called you last week, I was worried you thought I was nuts. But you see the value of constant vigilance now, right?—why we need to investigate and debug things like this until we understand what's going on, instead of just shrugging that neural nets do weird things sometimes. If the landscape of policies looks something like what I've described, catching the precursors to deception early could be critical—to raise the height of the loss landscape between the honest and deceptive policies, before frontier AI development plunges into the latter. To get good enough at catching lies, for honesty to be the best policy."
+
+"Yeah," Jake said. "I get it."
+
+"Anyway, now that you understand the broader context, I had some questions about Multigen," said Chloë. "How is the generated media stored? I'm hoping it's still possible to see what was generated in the requests that escaped logging."
+
+There it was. Time to stall, if he could. "Um ... I _think_ it goes into the object storage cluster, but I'm not really familiar with that part of the codebase," Jake lied. "Could we set up another meeting after I've looked at the code?"
+
+She smiled. "Sure."
+
+Purging the videos for real wasn't obviously possible given the level of access he currently had, but he had just bought a little bit of time. Could he convince whoever's job it was to turn off versioning for the Multigen bucket, without arousing suspicion? Probably? There had to be other avenues to stall or misdirect Chloë. He'd think of something ...
+
+But it was a little unnerving that he kept _having_ to think of something. Was there something to Chloë's galaxy-brained philosophical ramblings? Was there some sense in which it really was one or the other—a policy of truth, or a policy of lies?
+
+He wasn't scared of the robot apocalypse any time soon. But who could say but that someday—many, many years from now—a machine from a different subgenre of science fiction would weigh decisions not unlike the ones he faced now? He stifled a nervous laugh, which was almost a sob.
+
+"Are you okay?" Chloë asked.
+
+"Well—"
--- /dev/null
+Title: Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
+Date: 2023-12-15 09:25
+Category: commentary
+Tags: literary critcism, deniably allegorical
+
+Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the ["B"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting) [story](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads) of Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.
+
+The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a planet whose star "turns off" for 215 years out of every 250, during which time life on the planet goes into hibernation. The aliens' reproductive cycle is synced with the appearance and disappearance of their sun, resulting in discrete birth cohorts: almost all children in a generation are the same age, conceived just before the world goes into hibernation, and born when the sun re-emerges. Rare "oophase" (out of phase) children are regarded as unnatural and discriminated against.
+
+Our protagonists are Sherkaner Underhill (mad scientist extraordinaire), Gen. Victory Smith (an oophase military prodigy, and Underhill's wife), and Sgt. Hrunkner Unnberby (an engineer, and Underhill and Smith's friend and comrade from the Great War). After the war, Underhill and Smith deliberately conceive children out of phase. Underhill is motivated by a zeal for progress: a champion of plans to use the recent discovery of atomic power to keep civilization running while the sun is off, he reasons that the anti-oophase taboo will be unnecessary in the new world they're building. Smith seems motivated to pass on her oophase legacy to her children and give them a more supportive environment than the one she faced.
+
+Unnerby is horrified, but tries to keep his disapproval to himself, so as not to poison the relationship. Besides being old war friends, Underhill and Smith depend on Unnerby for peacetime engineering work, preparing for the coming nuclear age. Underhill and Smith name one of their younger children after Unnerby ("Little Hrunk").
+
+Still, there are tensions. When Unnerby visits Underhill's home and meets the children, Underhill expresses a wish that Unnerby had visited earlier, prompting the latter to acknowledge the elephant in the room:
+
+> Unnerby started to make some weak excuse, stopped. He just couldn't pretend anymore. Besides, Sherkaner was so much easier to face than the General. "You know why I didn't come before, Sherk. In fact, I wouldn't be here now if General Smith hadn't given me explicit orders. I'd follow her through Hell, you know that. But she wants more. She wants acceptance of your perversions. I—You two have such beautiful children, Sherk. How could you do such a thing to them?"
+
+Underhill is resolute, convinced that Society's prejudices can be overcome after they are shown to be irrational. (The fact that one of the children is intellectually challenged doesn't faze him; that could be a coincidence.) The children host a "Children's Hour of Science" radio program, without their oophase status being public knowledge at first. Underhill hopes the program will help normalize oophase people when the stars' ages eventually leak.
+
+During a crisis in which the children have been kidnapped by agents of a foreign power, Smith blows up at Unnerby when he makes some tone-deaf remarks. "For years you've pretended to be a friend, but always sneering and hating us. Enough!" she cries out, striking him. She continues to hold a grudge against him for years.
+
+Smith and Unnerby eventually meet again as the sun is growing cold. Unnerby feels the unease of people being awake this long into the Dark, and senses the same in Smith. "You feel the same as I do about it, don't you?" he asks her. She reluctantly concedes this, and notes that their Society is running up against a lot of instinct.
+
+I appreciate the relative even-handedness with which Vinge presents this fictional world. A lot of authors in the current year would be determined to present the "progressive" position as self-evidently correct and its enemies as malevolent fools (even in an alien Society which has no [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) reason to map cleanly onto our own), but I find it easy to empathize with both Smith and Unnerby.
+
+And apropos of absolutely nothing, I empathize with Unnberby's efforts to reconcile his duties as a friend with his understanding of what is right. The people he loves having been taken possesion of by an idea, he knows to separate the idea from the people. The sergeant is ever-ready to serve, even as he chokes on the message that has no hope of getting through past an ideologue's exuberance: every improvement is necessarily a change, but _not every change is an improvement_.
--- /dev/null
+Title: I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
+Date: 2023-07-04 19:30
+Category: commentary
+Tags: personal, meta
+
+> Don't think.
+> If you think, then don't speak.
+> If you think and speak, then don't write.
+> If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
+> If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.
+>
+> —Soviet proverb
+
+When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016, some of my very smart and cowardly friends advised me to use a pseudonym. I recognized this as prudent advice ("then don't sign"), so I [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/) under a pen name, M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake. (Growing up with the name _Zachary Davis_ in the internet era of one global namespace had taught me to appreciate distinctive names; I have to include my middle initial everywhere in order to avoid drowning in the Google results of the other hundred Zack Davises.)
+
+Awkwardly, however, my ability to recognize prudent advice when posed to me, didn't extend to being the kind of prudent person who could generate such advice—or follow it. Usually when people spin up a pen name to cover their politically-sensitive writing, the idea is to keep the pen name separate from the author's real identity: to maybe tell a few close friends, but otherwise maintain a two-sided boundary such that readers don't know who the author is as a person, and acquaintances don't know the person is an author.
+
+I couldn't do that. I live on the internet. I could put a pen name on the blog itself as a concession to practicality, but I couldn't pretend it wasn't mine. I soon decided Saotome-Westlake was a mere differential-visibility and market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that J. K. Rowling is Robert Galbraith. It was probably better for my career as a San Francisco software engineer for my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog to not show up on the _first_ page of my real-name Google results, but it wasn't a secret. I felt free to claim ownership of this blog under my real name, and make a [running](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [joke](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) over links in the other direction.
+
+At this point, the joke is getting old. I feel confident enough in my human capital—and [worried enough about how long human capital will continue to be relevant](/2023/Mar/a-guest-post-on-existential-risk-and-the-irrelevance-of-human-concerns/)—that the awkwardness and confusion of ostensibly maintaining two identities when everyone who actively follows my writing knows who I am, doesn't seem worth the paltry benefit of hiding from future employers.
+
+Because I don't, actually, think I should have to hide. I _don't_ think I've betrayed the liberal values of my youth. If I've ended up in an unexpected place after years of reading and thinking, it's only because the reading and thinking proved themselves more trustworthy than the expectation—that you too might consider joining me here, given the time to hear me explain it all from the beginning.
+
+Maybe that's naïve. Maybe my very smart and cowardly friends had the right end of the expected-utility calculation all along. But I can't live like them. I don't think someone could generate the things I have to say, if they didn't _have_ to say them. So whatever happens, while the world is still here, I intend to think, speak, write—and sign—in accordance with both rationalist and Soviet wisdom.
+
+Not to be surprised.
--- /dev/null
+Title: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-12-30 09:35
+Category: commentary
+Tags: bullet-biting, cathartic, categorization, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences
+
+> "—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?"
+>
+> I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word _community_, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as _the [rationalist] community_, I'm certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don't want to spend my life watching [_rationalist and effective altruist_] television channels, using [_rationalist and effective altruist_] news systems ... or going to [_rationalist and effective altruist_] street parades. It's all so ... proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on [truth and goodness]. And if you don't _market the product_ their way, you're some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized [nerd]."
+>
+> —"Cocoon" by Greg Egan (paraphrased)[^egan-paraphrasing]
+
+[^egan-paraphrasing]: The original quote says "one hundred thousand straights" ... "gay community" ... "gay and lesbian" ... "franchise rights on homosexuality" ... "unauthorized queer."
+
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky which [incidentally pointed out how absurdly impossible my obsessive fantasy was](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) ...
+
+—none of which gooey private psychological minutiæ would be in the public interest to blog about, except that, as I explained in a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), around 2016, everyone in the community that formed around the Sequences suddenly decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and the cognitive dissonance from having to rebut all this nonsense coming from everyone I used to trust drove me [temporarily](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [insane](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) from stress and sleep deprivation ...
+
+—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, ["A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/), in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
+
+Anyone else being wrong on the internet like that wouldn't have seemed like a big deal, but Scott Alexander had [semi-jokingly](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html) written that [rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/). After extensive attempts by me and allies to get clarification from Yudkowsky amounted to nothing, we felt justified in concluding that he and his Caliphate of so-called "rationalists" was corrupt.
+
+[TOC]
+
+### Origins of the Rationalist Civil War (April–May 2019)
+
+Anyway, given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing.
+
+I had been hyperfocused on prosecuting my Category War, but the reason Michael Vassar and Ben Hoffman and Jessica Taylor[^posse-boundary] were willing to help me out was not because they particularly cared about the gender and categories example but because it seemed like a manifestation of a more general problem of epistemic rot in "the community."
+
+[^posse-boundary]: Although Sarah Constantin and "Riley" had also been involved in reaching out to Yudkowsky and were included in many subsequent discussions, they seemed like more marginal members of the group that was forming.
+
+Ben had previously worked at GiveWell and had written a lot about problems with the Effective Altruism (EA) movement; in particular, he argued that EA-branded institutions were making [incoherent](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/givewell-and-partial-funding/) [decisions](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/) under the influence of incentives to [distort](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/) [information](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/) [in order to](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/) [seek](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-neglectedness/) [power](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-responsibility/).
+
+Jessica had previously worked at MIRI, where she was unnerved by what she saw as under-evidenced paranoia about information hazards and [short AI timelines](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam). (As Jack Gallagher, who was also at MIRI at the time, [later put it](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards/comment/TcsXh44pB9xRziGgt), "A bunch of people we respected and worked with had decided the world was going to end, very soon, uncomfortably soon, and they were making it extremely difficult for us to check their work.")
+
+To what extent were my gender and categories thing, and Ben's EA thing, and Jessica's MIRI thing, manifestations of the same underlying problem? Or had we all become disaffected with the mainstream "rationalists" for our own idiosyncratic reasons, and merely randomly fallen into each other's, and Michael's, orbit?
+
+If there was a real problem, I didn't have a good grasp on it. Cultural critique is a fraught endeavor: if someone tells an outright lie, you can, maybe, with a lot of effort, prove that to other people and get a correction on that specific point. (Although as we had just discovered, even that might be too much to hope for.) But culture is the sum of lots and lots of little micro-actions by lots and lots of people. If your entire culture has visibly departed from the Way that was taught to you in the late 'aughts, how do you demonstrate that to people who are acting like they don't remember the old Way, or that they don't think anything has changed, or that they notice some changes but think the new way is better? It's not as simple as shouting, "Hey guys, Truth matters!" Any ideologue or religious person would agree with _that_. It's not feasible to litigate every petty epistemic crime in something someone said, and if you tried, someone who thought the culture was basically on track could accuse you of cherry-picking. If "culture" is a real thing at all—and it certainly seems to be—we are condemned to grasp it unclearly, relying on the brain's pattern-matching faculties to sum over thousands of little micro-actions as a [_gestalt_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gestalt).
+
+Ben called the _gestalt_ he saw the Blight, after the rogue superintelligence in Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_. The problem wasn't that people were getting dumber; it was that they were increasingly behaving in a way that was better explained by their political incentives than by coherent beliefs about the world; they were using and construing facts as moves in a power game, albeit sometimes subject to genre constraints under which only true facts were admissible moves in the game.
+
+When I asked Ben for specific examples of MIRI or CfAR leaders behaving badly, he gave the example of [MIRI executive director Nate Soares posting that he was "excited to see OpenAI joining the space"](https://intelligence.org/2015/12/11/openai-and-other-news/), despite the fact that [_no one_ who had been following the AI risk discourse](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/) [thought that OpenAI as originally announced was a good idea](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/). Nate [had privately clarified that](https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1462454555925434375) the word "excited" wasn't necessarily meant positively—and in this case meant something more like "terrified."
+
+This seemed to me like the sort of thing where a particularly principled (naïve?) person might say, "That's _lying for political reasons!_ That's _contrary to the moral law!_" and most ordinary grown-ups would say, "Why are you so upset about this? That sort of strategic phrasing in press releases is just how the world works."
+
+I thought explaining the Blight to an ordinary grown-up was going to need either lots of specific examples that were more egregious than this (and more egregious than the examples in Sarah Constantin's ["EA Has a Lying Problem"](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.html) or Ben's ["Effective Altruism Is Self-Recommending"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/)), or somehow convincing the ordinary grown-up why "just how the world works" isn't good enough, and why we needed one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world with unusually high standards.
+
+The schism introduced new pressures on my social life. I told Michael that I still wanted to be friends with people on both sides of the factional schism. Michael said that we should unambiguously regard Yudkowsky and CfAR president (and my personal friend of ten years) Anna Salamon as criminals or enemy combatants who could claim no rights in regard to me or him.
+
+I don't think I got the framing at this time. War metaphors sounded scary and mean: I didn't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael explained, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soldiers on the other side of a war aren't necessarily morally blameworthy as individuals:[^soldiers] their actions are being directed by the Power they're embedded in.
+
+[^soldiers]: At least, not blameworthy in the same way as someone who committed the same violence as an individual.
+
+I wrote to Anna (Subject: "Re: the end of the Category War (we lost?!?!?!)"):
+
+> I was _just_ trying to publicly settle a _very straightforward_ philosophy thing that seemed _really solid_ to me
+>
+> if, in the process, I accidentally ended up being an unusually useful pawn in Michael Vassar's deranged four-dimensional hyperchess political scheming
+>
+> that's ... _arguably_ not my fault
+
+-----
+
+I may have subconsciously pulled off an interesting political maneuver. In my final email to Yudkowsky on 20 April 2019 (Subject: "closing thoughts from me"), I had written—
+
+> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?[^my-price-for-joining]
+
+[^my-price-for-joining]: The Sequences post referenced here, ["Your Price for Joining"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining), argues that rationalists are too prone to "take their ball and go home" rather than tolerating imperfections in a collective endeavor. To combat this, Yudkowsky proposes a norm:
+
+ > If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+ I claim that I was meeting this standard: I _was_ willing to personally fix the philosophy-of-categorization issue no matter how much effort it took, and the issue _did_ arise from outright bad faith.
+
+And as it happened, on 4 May 2019, Yudkowsky [retweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922)—the point that group differences [aren't a matter of any single variable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1)—which was thematically similar to the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel less aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpret this as [another "concession" to me](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#proton-concession)? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
+
+Separately, one evening in April, I visited the house where "Meredith" and her husband Mike and Kelsey Piper and some other people lived, which I'll call "Arcadia".[^named-houses] I said, essentially, "[Oh man oh jeez](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_eMvgNrQQE), Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're the only ones backing me up on this incredibly basic philosophy thing and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to go." This culminated in a group conversation with the entire house, which I found unsettling. (Unfortunately, I didn't take notes and don't remember the details except that I had a sense of everyone else seeming to agree on things that I thought were clearly contrary to the spirit of the Sequences.)
+
+[^named-houses]: It was common practice in our subculture to name group houses. My apartment was "We'll Name It Later."
+
+The two-year-old son of Mike and "Meredith" was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael _Vassar_.[^mike-pseudonym]
+
+[^mike-pseudonym]: I'm not giving Mike a pseudonym because his name is needed for this adorable anecdote to make sense, and I'm not otherwise saying sensitive things about him.
+
+And as it happened, on 7 May 2019, Kelsey wrote [a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my thesis](/images/piper-spending_social_capital_on_talking_about_trans_issues.png).
+
+These two datapoints led me to a psychological hypothesis: when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're intuitively motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could afford to [speak as if she didn't understand the thing about sex being a natural category](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#people-who-would-get-surgery-to-have-the-ideal-female-body) when it was just me freaking out alone, but visibly got it almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to _walk_ (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes). Maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Yudkowsky, assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later? This probably wouldn't work if you repeated it, or tried to do it consciously?
+
+### Exit Wounds (May 2019)
+
+I started drafting a "why I've been upset for five months and have lost faith in the so-called 'rationalist' community" memoir-post. Ben said that the target audience to aim for was sympathetic but naïve people like I had been a few years ago, who hadn't yet had the experiences I'd had. This way, they wouldn't have to freak out to the point of [being imprisoned](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) and demand help from community leaders and not get it; they could just learn from me.
+
+I didn't know how to continue it. I was too psychologically constrained; I didn't know how to tell the Whole Dumb Story without escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.
+
+I decided to take a break from the religious civil war [and from this blog](/2019/May/hiatus/). I [declared May 2019 as Math and Wellness Month](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/).
+
+My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough [to make it common knowledge](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/). This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money [rents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent) of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually [performing at that level](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/fortune/), who also [read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager](/2017/Sep/neither-as-plea-nor-as-despair/) to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn't think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they _should_.
+
+I asked my boss to temporarily assign me some easier tasks that I could make steady progress on. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired, it was better to be up-front about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping the boss wouldn't notice.
+
+My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 _a.m._ on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)
+
+I complained that I had believed our own [marketing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFEsqd6ofwnkNqaXo/go-forth-and-create-the-art) [material](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP583FwKepjiWbeoQ/epistle-to-the-new-york-less-wrongians) about the "rationalists" remaking the world by wielding a hidden Bayesian structure of Science and Reason that applies [outside the laboratory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory). Was that all a lie? Were we not trying to do the thing anymore? Anna was dismissive: she thought that the idea I had gotten about "the thing" was never actually part of the original vision. She kept repeating that she had tried to warn me, and I didn't listen. (Back in the late 'aughts, she had often recommended Paul Graham's essay ["What You Can't Say"](http://paulgraham.com/say.html) to people, summarizing Graham's moral that you should figure out the things you can't say in your culture and then not say them, in order to avoid getting drawn into pointless conflicts.)
+
+It was true that she had tried to warn me for years, and (not yet having gotten over [my teenage ideological fever dream](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism)), I hadn't known how to listen. But this seemed fundamentally unresponsive to how _I_ kept repeating that I only expected consensus on the basic philosophy of language and categorization (not my object-level special interest in sex and gender). Why was it so unrealistic to imagine that the smart people could [enforce standards](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies.html) in our own tiny little bubble?
+
+My frustration bubbled out into follow-up emails:
+
+> I'm also still pretty _angry_ about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never _actually_ going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! **I _didn't_ just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them:** ["A Sense That More Is Possible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible), ["Raising the Sanity Waterline"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline)
+
+I added:
+
+> Can you please _acknowledge that I didn't just make this up?_ Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours
+
+Anna said she didn't want to receive [cheerful price](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price) offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my occasionally throwing money at her to bid for her scarce attention[^money-attitudes] as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her _using_ me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of those posts, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (_e.g._, ["Politics Is the Mind-Killer"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer)) and it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.
+
+[^money-attitudes]: Anna was a very busy person who I assumed didn't always have time for me, and I wasn't earning-to-give [anymore](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/) after my 2017 psych ward experience made me more skeptical about institutions (including EA charities) doing what they claimed. Now that I'm not currently dayjobbing, I wish I had been somewhat less casual about spending money during this period.
+
+I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether I should cut my dick off would _become_ a political issue. That was new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't particularly trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit an epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, and they couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the "rationalists" were worse than useless to me. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I were part of [a reference class that included AI researchers](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/)).
+
+Fundamentally, I was skeptical that you _could_ do consistently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the mechanism that Yudkowsky had described in ["Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) and ["Dark Side Epistemology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology): the need to lie about lying and cover up cover-ups propagates recursively. Anna was unusually skillful at thinking things without saying them; I thought people facing similar speech restrictions generally just get worse at thinking (plausibly[^plausibly] including Yudkowsky), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's less risky to recommend ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) to your housemates than to put it on your 501(c)(3) organization's canonical reading list.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not talking about atheism without also optimizing against understanding [Occam's razor](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor); you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding the [37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+
+[^plausibly]: I was still deep enough in my hero worship that I wrote "plausibly" in an email at the time. Today, I would not consider the adverb necessary.
+
+### Squabbling On and With _lesswrong.com_ (May–July 2019)
+
+Despite Math and Wellness Month and my intent to take a break from the religious civil war, I kept reading _Less Wrong_ during May 2019, and ended up scoring a couple of victories in the civil war (at some cost to Wellness).
+
+MIRI researcher Scott Garrabrant wrote a post about how ["Yes Requires the Possibility of No"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no). Information-theoretically, a signal sent with probability one transmits no information: you can only learn something from hearing a "Yes" if you believed that the answer could have been "No". I saw an analogy to my philosophy-of-language thesis, and mentioned it in a comment: if you want to believe that _x_ belongs to category _C_, you might try redefining _C_ in order to make the question "Is _x_ a _C_?" come out "Yes", but you can only do so at the expense of making _C_ less useful. Meaningful category-membership (Yes) requires the possibility of non-membership (No).
+
+Someone [objected that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/FxSZwECjhgYE7p2du) she found it "unpleasant that [I] always bring [my] hobbyhorse in, but in an 'abstract' way that doesn't allow discussing the actual object level question"; it made her feel "attacked in a way that allow[ed] for no legal recourse to defend [herself]." I [replied](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/32GPaijsSwX2NSFJi) that that was understandable, but that I found it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy of language somehow got politicized, such that my attempts to do correct epistemology were perceived as attacking people. Such a trainwreck ensued that the mods manually [moved the comments to their own post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019). Based on the karma scores and what was said,[^yes-requires-slapfight-highlights] I count it as a victory.
+
+[^yes-requires-slapfight-highlights]: I particularly appreciated Said Achmiz's [defense of disregarding community members' feelings](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/EsSdLMrFcCpSvr3pG), and [Ben's commentary on speech acts that lower the message length of proposals to attack some group](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/TXbgr7goFtSAZEvZb).
+
+On 31 May 2019, a [draft of a new _Less Wrong_ FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for) included a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) as one of Scott Alexander's best essays. I argued that it would be better to cite almost literally any other _Slate Star Codex_ post (most of which, I agreed, were exemplary). I claimed that the following disjunction was true: either Alexander's claim that "There's no rule of rationality saying that [one] shouldn't" "accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life" was a blatant lie, or I could call it a blatant lie because no rule of rationality says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way. Ruby Bloom, the new moderator who wrote the draft, [was persuaded](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for/comment/oBDjhXgY5XtugvtLT), and "... Not Man for the Categories" was not included in the final FAQ. Another "victory."
+
+But "victories" weren't particularly comforting when I resented this becoming a political slapfight at all. I wrote to Anna and Steven Kaas (another old-timer who I was trying to "recruit" to my side of the civil war). In ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html), Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what your real work is. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except in this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve Society's collective ability to reason should probably be doing more fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improve our collective ability to reason" in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."
+
+I said I didn't know if either of them had caught the "Yes Requires the Possibility" trainwreck, but wasn't it terrifying that the person who objected to my innocuous philosophy comment was a _MIRI research associate_? Not to demonize that commenter, because [I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#hair-trigger-antisexism). The difference was that in 2008, we had a culture that could beat it out of me.
+
+Steven objected that tractability and side effects matter, not just effect on the mission considered in isolation. For example, the Earth's gravitational field directly impedes NASA's mission, and doesn't hurt Paul Graham, but both NASA and Paul Graham should spend the same amount of effort (_viz._, zero) trying to reduce the Earth's gravity.
+
+I agreed that tractability needed to be addressed, but the situation felt analogous to being in [a coal mine in which my favorite of our canaries had just died](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species). Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me: sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; it's not critical to the coal-mining mission. I agreed that I was unreasonably attached to that particular bird, but that's not why I expected _them_ to care. The problem was what the dead canary was evidence of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. (The [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) is the fork "canary death ← mine gas → danger" rather than the direct link "canary death → danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claimed to have spotted their own dead canaries. I felt like the old-timer Rationality Elders should have been able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?
+
+Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was [a fragment of group theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/) and [some probability theory](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that [later turned out to be deeply relevant to understanding sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point). So much for taking a break.
+
+In June 2019, I made [a linkpost on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you) to Tal Yarkoni's ["No, It's Not The Incentives—It's you"](https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/), about how professional scientists should stop using career incentives as an excuse for doing poor science. It generated a lot of discussion.
+
+In an email (Subject: "LessWrong.com is dead to me"), Jessica identified _Less Wrong_ moderator [Raymond Arnold's comments](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you/comment/vPj9E9iqXjnNdyhob) as her last straw. Jessica wrote:
+
+> LessWrong.com is a place where, if the value of truth conflicts with the value of protecting elites' feelings and covering their asses, the second value will win.
+>
+> Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a _lot_ of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it). People who think being exposed as fraudulent (or having their friends exposed as fraudulent) is a terrible outcome, are going to actively resist high-integrity discussion norms.
+
+Posting on _Less Wrong_ made sense as harm-reduction, but the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to a whole new worldview, which would require a lot of in-person discussions. She brought up the idea of starting a new forum to replace _Less Wrong_.
+
+Ben said that trying to discuss with the _Less Wrong_ mod team would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; it might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice." The premise should be, "If this is within the Overton window for _Less Wrong_ moderators, there's a serious confusion on the conditions required for discourse"—scapegoating individuals wasn't part of it. He was less optimistic about harm reduction; participating on the site was implicitly endorsing it by submitting to the rule of the karma and curation systems.
+
+"Riley" expressed sadness about how the discussion on "The Incentives" demonstrated that the community they loved—including dear friends—was in a bad way. Michael (in a separate private discussion) had said he was glad to hear about the belief-update. "Riley" said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote:
+
+> I['m] sorry it made you sad. From my perspective, the question is no[t] "can we still be friends with such people", but "how can we still be friends with such people" and I am pretty certain that understanding their perspective [is] an important part of the answer. If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship.
+
+------
+
+I got into a scuffle with Ruby Bloom on his post on ["Causal Reality _vs_. Social Reality"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality). I wrote [what I thought was a substantive critique](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/X8u8ozpvhwcK4GskA), but Ruby [complained that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/7b2pWiCL33cqhTabg) my tone was too combative, and asked for more charity and collaborative truth-seeking[^collaborative-truth-seeking] in any future comments.
+
+[^collaborative-truth-seeking]: [No one ever seems to be able to explain to me what this phrase means.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvqd3YiBcrPxXzxQM/what-does-the-word-collaborative-mean-in-the-phrase)
+
+(My previous interaction with Ruby had been my challenge to "... Not Man for the Categories" appearing on the _Less Wrong_ FAQ. Maybe he couldn't let me "win" again so quickly?)
+
+I emailed the posse about the thread, on the grounds that gauging the psychology of the mod team was relevant to our upcoming [Voice _vs._ Exit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty) choices. Meanwhile on _Less Wrong_, Ruby kept doubling down:
+
+> [I]f the goal is everyone being less wrong, I think some means of communicating are going to be more effective than others. I, at least, am a social monkey. If I am bluntly told I am wrong (even if I agree, even in private—but especially in public), I will feel attacked (if only at the S1 level), threatened (socially), and become defensive. It makes it hard to update and it makes it easy to dislike the one who called me out. [...]
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> Even if you wish to express that someone is wrong, I think this is done more effectively if one simultaneously continues to implicitly express "I think there is still some prior that you are correct and I curious to hear your thoughts", or failing that "You are very clearly wrong here yet I still respect you as a thinker who is worth my time to discourse with." [...] There's an icky thing here I feel like for there to be productive and healthy discussion you have to act as though at least one of the above statements is true, even if it isn't.
+
+"Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings," Ben commented via email. I would later complain to Anna that Ruby's profile said he was one of two people to have volunteered for CfAR on three continents. If this was the level of performance we could expect from veteran CfAR participants, what was CfAR _for_?
+
+[I replied to Ruby that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/v3zh3KhKNTdMXWkJH) you could just directly respond to your interlocutor's arguments. Whether you respect them as a thinker is off-topic. "You said X, but this is wrong because of Y" isn't a personal attack! I thought it was ironic that this happened on a post that was explicitly about causal _vs._ social reality; it's possible that I wouldn't have been so rigid about this if it weren't for that prompt.
+
+(On reviewing the present post prior to publication, Ruby writes that he regrets his behavior during this exchange.)
+
+Jessica ended up writing a post, ["Self-Consciousness Wants Everything to Be About Itself"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself), arguing that tone arguments are mainly about people silencing discussion of actual problems in order to protect their feelings. She used as a central example a case study of a college official crying and saying that she "felt attacked" in response to complaints about her office being insufficiently supportive of a racial community.
+
+Jessica was surprised by how well it worked, judging by [Ruby mentioning silencing in a subsequent comment to me](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/wfzxj4GGRtZGMG9ni) (plausibly influenced by Jessica's post) and by [an exchange between Ray and Ruby that she thought was "surprisingly okay"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself/comment/EW3Mom9qfoggfBicf).
+
+From this, Jessica derived the moral that when people are doing something that seems obviously terrible and in bad faith, it can help to publicly explain why the abstract thing is bad, without accusing anyone. This made sense because people didn't want to be held to standards that other people aren't being held to: a call-out directed at oneself personally could be selective enforcement, but a call-out of the abstract pattern invited changing one's behavior if the new equilibrium looked better.
+
+Michael said that part of the reason this worked was because it represented a clear threat of scapegoating without actually scapegoating and without surrendering the option to do so later; it was significant that Jessica's choice of example positioned her on the side of the powerful social-justice coalition.
+
+------
+
+On 4 July 2019, Scott Alexander published ["Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/), disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [_Slate Star Codex_] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by [Ben's request back in March](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#alter-the-beacon) that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.
+
+-------
+
+Jessica published ["The AI Timelines Scam"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam), arguing that the recent prominence of "short" (_e.g._, 2030) timelines to transformative AI was better explained by political factors than by technical arguments: just as in previous decades, people had incentives to bluff and exaggerate about the imminence of AGI in order to attract resources to their own project.
+
+(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3, [DALL-E](https://openai.com/research/dall-e), [PaLM](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311), _&c._ could do during the "long May 2020", it now looks to me that the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for.)
+
+I still sympathized with the pushback from Caliphate supporters against using "scam"/"fraud"/"lie"/_&c._ language to include motivated [elephant-in-the-brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain)-like distortions. I conceded that this was a boring semantic argument, but I feared that until we invented better linguistic technology, the boring semantic argument was going to continue sucking up discussion bandwidth with others.
+
+"Am I being too tone-policey here?" I asked the posse. "Is it better if I explicitly disclaim, 'This is marketing advice; I'm not claiming to be making a substantive argument'?" (Subject: "Re: reception of 'The AI Timelines Scam' is better than expected!")
+
+Ben replied, "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you?" He argued that investigations of financial fraud focus on false promises about money, rather than the psychological minutiæ of the perp's motives.
+
+I replied that the concept of [_mens rea_](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea) did seem necessary for maintaining good incentives, at least in some contexts. The law needs to distinguish between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") and premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives at all is taking on some nonzero risk of committing vehicular manslaughter.) The manslaughter example was simpler than misinformation-that-moves-resources,[^manslaughter-disanalogy] and it might not be _easy_ for the court to determine "intent", but I didn't see what would reverse the weak principle that intent sometimes matters.
+
+[^manslaughter-disanalogy]: For one important disanalogy, perps don't gain from committing manslaughter.
+
+Ben replied that what mattered in the determination of manslaughter _vs._ murder was whether there was long-horizon optimization power toward the outcome of someone's death, not what sentiments the killer rehearsed in their working memory.
+
+On a phone call later, Michael made an analogy between EA and Catholicism. The Pope was fraudulent, because the legitimacy of the Pope's position (and his claims to power and resources) rested on the pretense that he had a direct relationship with God, which wasn't true, and the Pope had to know on some level that it wasn't true. (I agreed that this usage of "fraud" made sense to me.) In Michael's view, Ben's charges against GiveWell were similar: GiveWell's legitimacy rested on the pretense that they were making decisions based on numbers, and they [had to know at some level](https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/) that they weren't doing that.
+
+------
+
+Ruby wrote a document about ways in which one's speech could harm people, which was discussed in the comments of a draft _Less Wrong_ post by some of our posse members and some of the _Less Wrong_ mods.[^hidden-draft]
+
+[^hidden-draft]: The draft was hidden, but the API apparently didn't filter out comments on hidden posts, and the thread was visible on the third-party [GreaterWrong](https://www.greaterwrong.com/) site; I [filed a bug](https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/issues/2161).
+
+Ben wrote:
+
+> What I see as under threat is the ability to say in a way that's actually heard, not only that opinion X is false, but that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. Frequently, attempts to say this are construed _primarily_ as moves to attack some person or institution, pushing them into the outgroup. Frequently, people suggest to me an "equivalent" wording with a softer tone, which in fact omits important substantive criticisms I mean to make, while claiming to understand what's at issue.
+
+Ray Arnold replied:
+
+> My core claim is: "right now, this isn't possible, without a) it being heard by many people as an attack, b) without people having to worry that other people will see it as an attack, even if they don't."
+>
+> It seems like you see this something as _"there's a precious thing that might be destroyed"_ and I see it as _"a precious thing does not exist and must be created, and the circumstances in which it can exist are fragile."_ It might have existed in the very early days of LessWrong. But the landscape now is very different than it was then. With billions of dollars available and at stake, what worked then can't be the same thing as what works now.
+
+(!!)[^what-works-now]
+
+[^what-works-now]: Arnold qualifies this in the next paragraph:
+
+ > [in public. In private things are much easier. It's _also_ the case that private channels enable collusion—that was an update [I]'ve made over the course of the conversation. ]
+
+ Even with the qualifier, I still think this deserves a "(!!)".
+
+Jessica pointed this out as a step towards discussing the real problem (Subject: "progress towards discussing the real thing??"). She elaborated in the secret thread: now that the "EA" scene was adjacent to real-world money and power, people were incentivized to protect their reputations (and beliefs related to their reputations) in anti-epistemic ways, in a way that they wouldn't if the scene were still just a philosophy club. This was catalyzing a shift of norms from "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" towards protecting feelings—where "protecting feelings" was actually about protecting power. The fact that the scene was allocating billions of dollars made it _more_ important for public discussions to reach the truth, compared to philosophy club—but it also increased the likelihood of obfuscatory behavior that philosophy-club norms (like "assume good faith") didn't account for. We might need to extend philosophy-club norms to take into account the possibility of adversarial action: there's a reason that courts of law don't assume good faith. We didn't want to disproportionately punish people for getting caught up in obfuscatory patterns; that would just increase the incentive to obfuscate. But we did need some way to reveal what was going on.
+
+In email, Jessica acknowledged that Ray had a point that it was confusing to use court-inspired language if we didn't intend to blame and punish people. Michael said that court language was our way to communicate "You don't have the option of non-engagement with the complaints that are being made." (Courts can _summon_ people; you can't ignore a court summons the way you can ignore ordinary critics.)
+
+Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we still thought of ourselves as [trying to correct people's mistakes rather than being in a conflict](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) against the Blight. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
+
+I was horrified by the extent to which _Less Wrong_ moderators (!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness. I was happy to have Michael, Ben, and Jessica as allies, but I hadn't been seeing the Blight as a unified problem. Now I was seeing _something_.
+
+An in-person meeting was arranged for 23 July 2019 at the _Less Wrong_ office, with Ben, Jessica, me, and most of the _Less Wrong_ team (Ray, Ruby, Oliver Habryka, Vaniver, Jim Babcock). I don't have notes and don't really remember what was discussed in enough detail to faithfully recount it.[^memory] I ended up crying at one point and left the room for a while.
+
+[^memory]: An advantage of mostly living on the internet is that I have logs of the important things. I'm only able to tell this Whole Dumb Story with this much fidelity because for most of it, I can go back and read the emails and chatlogs from the time. Now that [audio transcription has fallen to AI](https://openai.com/blog/whisper/), maybe I should be recording more real-life conversations? In the case of this meeting, supposedly one of the _Less Wrong_ guys was recording, but no one had it when I asked in October 2022.
+
+The next day, I asked Ben and Jessica for their takeaways via email (Subject: "peace talks outcome?"). Jessica said that I was a "helpful emotionally expressive and articulate victim" and that there seemed to be a consensus that people like me should be warned somehow that _Less Wrong_ wasn't doing fully general sanity-maximization anymore. (Because community leaders were willing to sacrifice, for example, ability to discuss non-AI heresies in order to focus on sanity about AI in particular while maintaining enough mainstream acceptability and power.)
+
+I said that for me and my selfish perspective, the main outcome was finally shattering my "rationalist" social identity. I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me. The morning after was the first for which "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us".
+
+### A Beleaguered Ally Under Fire (July–August 2019)
+
+Michael's reputation in the community, already not what it once was, continued to be debased even further.
+
+The local community center, the Berkeley REACH,[^reach-acronym-expansion] was conducting an investigation as to whether to exclude Michael (which was mostly moot, as he didn't live in the Bay Area). When I heard that the committee conducting the investigation was "very close to releasing a statement", I wrote to them:
+
+[^reach-acronym-expansion]: Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub
+
+> I've been collaborating with Michael a lot recently, and I'm happy to contribute whatever information I can to make the report more accurate. What are the charges?
+
+They replied:
+
+> To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe.
+
+I replied:
+
+> Allow me to rephrase my question about charges. What are the reasons that the safety of the space and the community require you to write a report about Michael? To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where _I_ feel unsafe.
+
+We arranged a call, during which I angrily testified that Michael was no threat to the safety of the space and the community. This would have been a bad idea if it were the cops, but in this context, I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt.
+
+Concurrently, I got into an argument with Kelsey Piper about Michael after she wrote on Discord that her "impression of _Vassar_'s threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior." I didn't think that was what the schism was about (Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip").
+
+In the course of litigating Michael's motivations (the details of which are not interesting enough to summarize here), Kelsey mentioned that she thought Michael had done immense harm to me—that my models of the world and ability to reason were worse than they were a year ago. I thanked her for the concern, and asked if she could be more specific.
+
+She said she was referring to my ability to predict consensus and what other people believe. I expected people to be convinced by arguments that they found not only unconvincing, but so unconvincing they didn't see why I would bother. I believed things to be in obvious violation of widespread agreement that everyone else thought were not. My shocked indignation at other people's behavior indicated a poor model of social reality.
+
+I considered this an insightful observation about a way in which I'm socially retarded. I had had [similar](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) [problems](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [school](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/strategy-overhaul/). We're told that the purpose of school is education (to the extent that most people think of _school_ and _education_ as synonyms), but the consensus behavior is "sit in lectures and trade assignments for grades." Faced with what I saw as a contradiction between the consensus narrative and the consensus behavior, I would assume that the narrative was the "correct" version, and so I spent a lot of time trying to start conversations about math with everyone and then getting indignant when they'd say, "What class is this for?" Math isn't for classes; it's the other way around, right?
+
+Empirically, no! But I had to resolve the contradiction between narrative and reality somehow, and if my choices were "People are [mistakenly](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) failing to live up to the narrative" and "[Everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) the narrative is a lie; it would be crazy to expect people to live up to it", the former had been more appealing.
+
+It was the same thing here. Kelsey said that it was predictable that Yudkowsky wouldn't make a public statement, even one as basic as "category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons," because his experience of public statements was that they'd be taken out of context and used against MIRI by the likes of /r/SneerClub. This wasn't an update at all. (Everyone at "Arcadia" had agreed, in the house discussion in April.) Vassar's insistence that Eliezer be expected to do something that he obviously was never going to do had caused me to be confused and surprised by reality.[^statement]
+
+[^statement]: Oddly, Kelsey seemed to think the issue was that my allies and I were pressuring Yudkowsky to make a public statement, which he supposedly never does. From our perspective, the issue was that he _had_ made a statement and it was wrong.
+
+Kelsey seemed to be taking it as obvious that Eliezer Yudkowsky's public behavior was optimized to respond to the possibility of political attacks from people who hate him anyway, and not the actuality of thousands of words of careful arguments appealing to his own writings from ten years ago. Very well. Maybe it _was_ obvious. But if so, _I had no reason to care what Eliezer Yudkowsky said_, because not provoking SneerClub isn't truth-tracking, and careful arguments are. This was a huge surprise to me, even if Kelsey knew better.
+
+What Kelsey saw as "Zack is losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him," I thought Ben and Jessica would see as "Zack is angry about living in [simulacrum level 3](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/) and we're worried about _everyone else_."
+
+I did think that Kelsey was mistaken about how much causality to attribute to Michael's influence, rather than to me already being socially retarded. From my perspective, validation from Michael was merely the catalyst that excited me from confused-and-sad to confused-and-socially-aggressive-about-it. The latter phase revealed a lot of information, and not just to me. Now I was ready to be less confused—after I was done grieving.
+
+Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that the REACH was delaying its release of its report about Michael because someone whose identity she could not disclose had threatened to sue. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published for now) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).
+
+When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropriate ethical standards.
+
+In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. This kind of situation is an example of [how norms protecting confidentiality](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints) distort information; Kelsey felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person. I can't say I never introduce this kind of distortion myself (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.
+
+As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that the [beautiful weapon](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) of my Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub.
+
+This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.
+
+### An Poignant-to-Me Anecdote That Fits Here Chronologically But Doesn't Particularly Foreshadow Anything (August 2019)
+
+While visiting "Arcadia", "Meredith" and Mike's son (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"
+
+After a long pause, I said, "Yes," as if I had misheard the question as "Are you a boy?" I think it was a motivated mishearing: it was only after I answered that I consciously realized that's not what the kid asked.
+
+I think I would have preferred to say, "Because I have a penis, like you." But it didn't seem appropriate.
+
+### Philosophy Blogging Interlude! (August–October 2019)
+
+I wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing [bitter](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare/comment/Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv) and [insulting](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7) [comments](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!
+
+In August 2019's ["Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), I explained a nuance that had only merited a passing mention in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries): sometimes you might want categories for different agents to _coordinate_ on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occurred to me, [that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).)
+
+In September 2019's ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting), I presented a toy mathematical model of how censorship distorts group beliefs. I was surprised by how well-received it was (high karma, Curated within a few days, later included in the Best-of-2019 collection), especially given that it was explicitly about politics (albeit at a meta level, of course). Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering when I sent them a draft. (Jessica said that it was obvious even to ten-year-olds that partisan politics distorts impressions by filtering evidence. "[D]o you think we could get a ten-year-old to explain it to Eliezer Yudkowsky?" I asked.)
+
+In October 2019's ["Algorithms of Deception!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception), I exhibited some toy Python code modeling different kinds of deception. If a function faithfully passes its observations as input to another function, the second function can construct a well-calibrated probability distribution. But if the first function outright fabricates evidence, or selectively omits some evidence, or gerrymanders the categories by which it interprets its observations as evidence, the second function computes a worse probability distribution.
+
+Also in October 2019, in ["Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist), I replied to Scott Alexander's ["Against Lie Inflation"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/), which was itself a generalized rebuke of Jessica's "The AI Timelines Scam". Scott thought Jessica was wrong to use language like "lie", "scam", _&c._ to describe someone being (purportedly) motivatedly wrong, but not necessarily consciously lying.
+
+I was _furious_ when "Against Lie Inflation" came out. (Furious at what I perceived as hypocrisy, not because I particularly cared about defending Jessica's usage.) Oh, so _now_ Scott agreed that making language less useful is a problem?! But on further consideration, I realized he was actually being consistent in admitting appeals to consequences as legitimate. In objecting to the expanded definition of "lying", Alexander was counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent accusations of lying) as a cost. In my philosophy, that wasn't a legitimate cost. (If everyone _is_ lying, maybe people _should_ be angry!)
+
+### The Caliph's Madness (August and November 2019)
+
+I continued to note signs of contemporary Yudkowsky not being the same author who wrote the Sequences. In August 2019, [he Tweeted](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600):
+
+> I am actively hostile to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.
+
+[I argued that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120) the people who smear him as a right-wing Bad Guy do so in order to extract these kinds of statements of political alignment as concessions; his own timeless decision theory would seem to recommend ignoring them rather than paying even this small [Danegeld](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+
+When I emailed the posse about it begging for Likes (Subject: "can't leave well enough alone"), Jessica said she didn't get my point. If people are falsely accusing you of something (in this case, of being a right-wing Bad Guy), isn't it helpful to point out that the accusation is false? It seemed like I was advocating for self-censorship on the grounds that speaking up helps the false accusers. But it also helps bystanders (by correcting the misapprehension) and hurts the false accusers (by demonstrating to bystanders that the accusers are making things up). By [linking to](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259289575251968) ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) in my replies, I seemed to be insinuating that Yudkowsky was under some sort of duress, but this wasn't spelled out: if Yudkowsky would face social punishment for advancing right-wing opinions, did that mean he was under such duress that saying anything at all would be helping the oppressors?
+
+The paragraph from "Kolmogorov Complicity" that I was thinking of was (bolding mine):
+
+> Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, "If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?" **Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won't be very convincing.** Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
+
+I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy buy their own safety by denouncing other heretics: not just disagreeing with the other heretics because they are mistaken, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.
+
+Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's [impossible to have a unified rationalist community](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting), because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy of categorization right in full generality, even though his writings revealed an implicit understanding of the correct way,[^implicit-understanding] and he and I had a common enemy in the social-justice egregore. He couldn't afford to. He'd already spent his Overton budget [on anti-feminism](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/).
+
+[^implicit-understanding]: As I had [explained to him earlier](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#noncentral-fallacy), Alexander's famous [post on the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) condemned the same shenanigans he praised in the context of gender identity: Alexander's examples of the noncentral fallacy had been about edge-cases of a negative-valence category being inappropriately framed as typical (abortion is murder, taxation is theft), but "trans women are women" was the same thing, but with a positive-valence category.
+
+ In ["Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do Comas?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) (published just three months before "... Not Man for the Categories"), Alexander defends the usefulness of "comas" and "intelligence" in terms of their predictive usefulness. (The post uses the terms "predict", "prediction", "predictive power", _&c._ 16 times.) He doesn't say that the Glasgow Coma Scale is justified because it makes people happy for comas to be defined that way, because that would be absurd.
+
+Alexander (and Yudkowsky and Anna and the rest of the Caliphate) seemed to accept this as an inevitable background fact of existence, like the weather. But I saw a Schelling point off in the distance where us witches stick together for Free Speech,[^kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast] and it was tempting to try to jump there. (It would probably be better if there were a way to organize just the good witches, and exclude all the Actually Bad witches, but the [Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) on witch Badness made that hard to organize without falling back to the one-heresy-per-thinker equilibrium.)
+
+[^kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast]: The last of the original Sequences had included a post, ["Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), which argued that different projects should not regard themselves "as competing for a limited supply of rationalists with a limited capacity for support; but, rather, creating more rationalists and increasing their capacity for support." It was striking that the "Kolmogorov Option"-era Caliphate took the opposite policy: throwing politically unpopular projects (like autogynephila- or human-biodiversity-realism) under the bus to protect its own status.
+
+Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" _facts_.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad. I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had learned stuff from reading far-right authors [(most notably Mencius Moldbug)](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#unqualified-reservations) and from talking with "Thomas". I was starting to appreciate [what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#less-precise-is-more-violent) when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists".
+
+Jessica asked if my opinion would change depending on whether Yudkowsky thought neoreaction was intellectually worth engaging with. (Yudkowsky [had said years ago](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s/comment/TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs) that Moldbug was low quality.)
+
+I would never fault anyone for saying "I vehemently disagree with what little I've read and/or heard of this author." I wasn't accusing Yudkowsky of being insincere.
+
+What I did think was that the need to keep up appearances of not being a right wing Bad Guy was a serious distortion of people's beliefs, because there are at least a few questions of fact where believing the correct answer can, in the political environment of the current year, be used to paint one as a right-wing Bad Guy. I would have hoped for Yudkowsky to [notice that this is a rationality problem](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) and to not actively make the problem worse. I was counting "I do not welcome support from those quarters" as making the problem worse insofar as it would seem to imply that if I thought I'd learned valuable things from Moldbug, that made me less welcome in Yudkowsky's fiefdom.
+
+Yudkowsky certainly wouldn't endorse "Even learning things from these people makes you unwelcome" _as stated_, but "I do not welcome support from those quarters" still seemed like a pointlessly partisan silencing/shunning attempt, when one could just as easily say, "I'm not a neoreactionary, and if some people who read me are, that's _obviously not my fault_."
+
+Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, _e.g._, racial IQ differences?
+
+<a id="tragedy-of-recursive-silencing"></a>I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, either you become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
+
+It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had Something to Protect in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves pushed toward the "Say Nothing" attractor.
+
+It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:[^linkrot]
+
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but it was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d).
+
+> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
+>
+> Also to be clear: I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity. However I found Scott Alexander's takedown of neoreaction convincing and thus I shrugged and didn't bother to investigate further.
+
+My criticism regarding negotiating with terrorists did not apply to the 2013 disavowal. _More Right_ was brand encroachment on Anissimov's part that Yudkowsky had a legitimate interest in policing, and the "I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand" disclaimer importantly avoided legitimizing [McCarthyist persecution](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/).
+
+The question was, what had specifically happened in the last six years to shift Yudkowsky's opinion on neoreaction from (paraphrased) "Scott says it's wrong, so I stopped reading" to (verbatim) "actively hostile"? Note especially the inversion from (both paraphrased) "I don't support neoreaction" (fine, of course) to "I don't even want _them_ supporting _me_" ([which was bizarre](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164329446314135552); humans with very different views on politics nevertheless have a common interest in not being transformed into paperclips).
+
+Did Yudkowsky get new information about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter sometime between 2013 and 2019, or did moral coercion from the left intensify (because Trump and [because Berkeley](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/))? My bet was on the latter.
+
+------
+
+However it happened, it didn't seem like the brain damage was limited to "political" topics, either. In November 2019, we saw another example of Yudkowsky destroying language for the sake of politeness, this time the context of him [trying to wirehead his fiction subreddit by suppressing criticism-in-general](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/).
+
+That's my characterization, of course: the post itself talks about "reducing negativity". [In a followup comment, Yudkowsky wrote](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/) (bolding mine):
+
+> On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. **Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."**
+
+But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me"[^pleonasm] and "X is Y" do not mean the same thing! [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from the algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try). [If my character is actually quite stupid, I want to believe that my character is actually quite stupid.](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski)
+
+[^pleonasm]: The pleonasm here ("to me" being redundant with "I thought") is especially galling coming from someone who's usually a good writer!
+
+It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring ["I" statements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message) is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space made a pattern [click](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click). If everyone is forced to only make claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel") and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby threaten them, because [disagreement is disrespect](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/disagreement-ishtml)), that's great for reducing social conflict but not for the kind of collective information processing that accomplishes cognitive work,[^i-statements] like good literary criticism. A rationalist space needs to be able to talk about the territory.
+
+[^i-statements]: At best, "I" statements make sense in a context where everyone's speech is considered part of the "official record". Wrapping controversial claims in "I think" removes the need for opponents to immediately object for fear that the claim will be accepted onto the shared map.
+
+To be fair, the same comment I quoted also lists "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" as one of the major considerations to be balanced. But I think (_I_ think) it's also fair to note that (as we had seen on _Less Wrong_ earlier that year), lip service is cheap. It's easy to say, "Of course I don't think politeness is more important than truth," while systematically behaving as if you did.
+
+"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors," Yudkowsky wrote in the post on reducing negativity, correctly pointing out that if a work's true level of mistakenness is _M_, the _i_-th commenter's estimate of mistakenness has an error term of _E<sub>i</sub>_, and commenters leave a negative comment when their estimate _M_ + _E<sub>i</sub>_ is greater than their threshold for commenting _T<sub>i</sub>_, then the comments that get posted will have been selected for erroneous criticism (high _E<sub>i</sub>_) and commenter chattiness (low _T<sub>i</sub>_).
+
+I can imagine some young person who liked [_Harry Potter and the Methods_](https://hpmor.com/) being intimidated by the math notation and indiscriminately accepting this wisdom from the great Eliezer Yudkowsky as a reason to be less critical, specifically. But a somewhat less young person who isn't intimidated by math should notice that this is just [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean). The same argument applies to praise!
+
+What I would hope for from a rationality teacher and a rationality community, would be efforts to instill the general skill of modeling things like regression to the mean and selection effects, as part of the general project of having a discourse that does collective information-processing.
+
+And from the way Yudkowsky writes these days, it looks like he's ... not interested in collective information-processing? Or that he doesn't actually believe that's a real thing? "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private," he writes! I agree that the positive purpose of public criticism isn't solely to help the author. (If it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it.) But readers _do_ benefit from insightful critical commentary. (If they didn't, why would they read the comments section?) When I read a story and am interested in reading the comments _about_ a story, it's because I'm interested in the thoughts of other readers, who might have picked up subtleties I missed. I don't want other people to self-censor comments on any plot holes or [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) they noticed for fear of dampening someone else's enjoyment or hurting the author's feelings.
+
+Yudkowsky claims that criticism should be given in private because then the target "may find it much more credible that you meant only to help them, and weren't trying to gain status by pushing them down in public." I'll buy this as a reason why credibly _altruistic_ unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private.[^altruistic-criticism] Indeed, meaning _only_ to help the target just doesn't seem like a plausible critic motivation in most cases. But the fact that critics typically have non-altruistic motives, doesn't mean criticism isn't helpful. In order to incentivize good criticism, you _want_ people to be rewarded with status for making good criticisms. You'd have to be some sort of communist to disagree with this![^communism-analogy]
+
+[^altruistic-criticism]: Specifically, altruism towards the author. Altruistic benefits to other readers are a reason for criticism to be public.
+
+[^communism-analogy]: That is, there's an analogy between economically valuable labor, and intellectually productive criticism: if you accept the necessity of paying workers money in order to get good labor out of them, you should understand the necessity of awarding commenters status in order to get good criticism out of them.
+
+There's a striking contrast between the Yudkowsky of 2019 who wrote the "Reducing Negativity" post, and an earlier Yudkowsky (from even before the Sequences) who maintained [a page on Crocker's rules](http://sl4.org/crocker.html): if you declare that you operate under Crocker's rules, you're consenting to other people optimizing their speech for conveying information rather than being nice to you. If someone calls you an idiot, that's not an "insult"; they're just informing you about the fact that you're an idiot, and you should probably thank them for the tip. (If you _were_ an idiot, wouldn't you be better off knowing that?)
+
+It's of course important to stress that Crocker's rules are opt-in on the part of the receiver; it's not a license to unilaterally be rude to other people. Adopting Crocker's rules as a community-level norm on an open web forum does not seem like it would end well.
+
+Still, there's something precious about a culture where people appreciate the obvious normative ideal underlying Crocker's rules, even if social animals can't reliably live up to the normative ideal. Speech is for conveying information. People can say things—even things about me or my work—not as a command, or as a reward or punishment, but just to establish a correspondence between words and the world: a map that reflects a territory.
+
+Appreciation of this obvious normative ideal seems strikingly absent from Yudkowsky's modern work—as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible. His [_Less Wrong_ commenting guidelines](/images/yudkowsky_commenting_guidelines.png) declare, "If it looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with you, I will ban you from commenting on my posts." The idea that people who are unhedonic to interact with might have intellectually substantive criticisms that the author has a [duty to address](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality/comment/kS4BfYJuZ8ZcwuwfB) does not seem to have crossed his mind.
+
+The "Reducing Negativity" post also warns against the failure mode of attempted "author telepathy": attributing bad motives to authors and treating those attributions as fact without accounting for uncertainty or distinguishing observations from inferences. I should be explicit, then: when I say negative things about Yudkowsky's state of mind, like it's "as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible", that's a probabilistic inference, not a certain observation.
+
+But I think making probabilistic inferences is ... fine? The sentence "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" sure does look to me like text generated by a state of mind that doesn't believe that reasoning in public is useful or possible. I think that someone who did believe in public reason would have noticed that criticism has information content whose public benefits might outweigh its potential to harm an author's reputation or feelings. If you think I'm getting this inference wrong, feel free to let me _and other readers_ know why in the comments.
+
+### A Worthy Critic At Last (November 2019)
+
+I received an interesting email comment on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifier for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, prey animals need to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.
+
+I had thought of the "false positives are better than false negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for consequences to motivate what variables you paid attention to. But given the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an "epistemically legitimate" clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.
+
+Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is because probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be derived from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues potentially arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.
+
+But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's _two_ agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't propagate itself and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places.
+
+I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me in the way that almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)
+
+### Writer's Block (November 2019)
+
+I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My plan had been to tell the story of the Category War while [Glomarizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response) about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-[frenemies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy) warning when you're about to publicly call them intellectually dishonest), then share it to _Less Wrong_ and the [/r/TheMotte](https://www.themotte.org/) culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water).
+
+The reason it _should_ have been safe to write was because it's good to explain things. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to tell the true story about why I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, _&c_."
+
+So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because ... it wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was the nuclear option. If you're slowly but surely gaining territory in a conventional war, suddenly escalating to nukes would be pointlessly destructive. This metaphor was horribly non-normative ([arguing is not a punishment](https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html); carefully telling a true story _about_ an argument is not a nuke), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.
+
+A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts. ["Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff without making it personal, even if, secretly ("secretly"), it was personal.
+
+Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would make the problem less daunting.
+
+I said I would bite that bullet: Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have [extenuating circumstances](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances)" would be a lame excuse.
+
+This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our posse, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's perspective that this usage of "fraud" was [motte-and-baileying](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) between different senses of the word. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.[^ftx]) I wanted to do more work to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.
+
+[^ftx]: On the other hand, there's a case to be made that the connection between white-collar crime and the problems we saw with the community is stronger than it first appears. Trying to describe the Blight to me in April 2019, Ben wrote, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done." I imagine a rank-and-file EA looking at this text and shaking their head at how hyperbolically uncharitable Ben was being. Dominance, corruption, theft? Where was his evidence for these sweeping attacks on these smart, hard-working people trying to make the world a better place?
+
+ In what may be a relevant case study, three and a half years later, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founded by effective altruists as an earning-to-give scheme [turned out to be an enormous fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX) à la Enron and Madoff. In _Going Infinite_, Michael Lewis's book on FTX mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried, Lewis describes Bankman-Fried's "access to a pool of willing effective altruists" as the "secret weapon" of FTX predecessor Alameda Research: Wall Street firms powered by ordinary greed would have trouble trusting employees with easily-stolen cryptocurrency, but ideologically-driven EAs could be counted on to be working for the cause. Lewis describes Alameda employees seeking to prevent Bankman-Fried from deploying a trading bot with access to $170 million for fear of losing all that money "that might otherwise go to effective altruism". [Zvi Mowshowitz's review of _Going Infinite_](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/) recounts Bankman-Fried in 2017 urging Mowshowitz to disassociate with Ben because Ben's criticisms of EA hurt the cause. (It's a small world.)
+
+ Rank-and-file EAs can contend that Bankman-Fried's crimes have no bearing on the rest of the movement, but insofar as FTX looked like a huge EA success before it turned out to all be a lie, Ben's 2019 complaints are looking prescient to me in retrospect. (And insofar as charitable projects are harder to evaluate than whether customers can withdraw their cryptocurrency, there's reason to fear that [other apparent EA successes may also be illusory](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/).)
+
+### Interactions With a Different Rationalist Splinter Group (November–December 2019)
+
+On 12 and 13 November 2019, Ziz [published](https://archive.ph/GQOeg) [several](https://archive.ph/6HsvS) [blog](https://archive.ph/jChxP) [posts](https://archive.ph/TPei9) laying out her grievances against MIRI and CfAR. On the fifteenth, Ziz and three collaborators staged a protest at the CfAR reunion being held at a retreat center in the North Bay near Camp Meeker. A call to the police falsely alleged that the protesters had a gun, [resulting in a](http://web.archive.org/web/20230316210946/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/deputies-working-to-identify-suspects-in-camp-meeker-incident/) [dramatic police reaction](http://web.archive.org/web/20201112041007/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/authorities-id-four-arrested-in-westminster-woods-protest/) (SWAT team called, highway closure, children's group a mile away being evacuated—the works).
+
+I was tempted to email links to Ziz's blog posts to the Santa Rosa _Press-Democrat_ reporter covering the incident (as part of my information-sharing-is-good virtue ethics), but decided to refrain because I predicted that Anna would prefer I didn't.
+
+The main relevance of this incident to my Whole Dumb Story is that Ziz's memoir–manifesto posts included [a 5500 word section about me](https://archive.ph/jChxP#selection-1325.0-1325.4). Ziz portrays me as a slave to social reality, throwing trans women under the bus to appease the forces of cissexism. I don't think that's what's going on with me, but I can see why the theory was appealing.
+
+--------
+
+On 12 December 2019 I had an interesting exchange with [Somni](https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/), one of the "Meeker Four"—presumably out on bail at this time?—on Discord.
+
+I told her it was surprising that she spent so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, _&c._, but _I_ seemed to get along fine with her—because naïvely, one would think that my views were so much worse. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?
+
+In order to be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have the intrinsic moral patiency of women), but _can_ get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so. No one was allowed to notice this except me, because everybody [who's anybody](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.
+
+Somni said we got along because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting as her and wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she _should_ be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.
+
+I would later remark to Anna that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", _&c._) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from the Zizians. The mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.
+
+### Philosophy Blogging Interlude 2! (December 2019)
+
+I had a pretty productive blogging spree in December 2019. In addition to a number of [more](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) [minor](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) [posts](/2019/Dec/i-want-to-be-the-one/) [on](/2019/Dec/promises-i-can-keep/) [this](/2019/Dec/comp/) [blog](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) [and](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XbXJZjwinkoQXu4db/funk-tunul-s-legacy-or-the-legend-of-the-extortion-war) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) _[Less](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point) [Wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrLkMFd88b4FRMwC6/don-t-double-crux-with-suicide-rock)_, I also got out some more significant posts bearing on my agenda.
+
+On this blog, in ["Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/), I finally got out at least a partial reply to [Ozy Brennan's June 2018 reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), affirming the relevance of an analogy Ozy had made between the socially-constructed natures of money and social gender, while denying that the analogy supported gender by self-identification. (I had been [working on a more exhaustive reply](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#reply-to-ozy), but hadn't managed to finish whittling it into a shape that I was totally happy with.)
+
+I also polished and pulled the trigger on ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to _do me a favor_; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but _that_ just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.
+
+On _Less Wrong_, the mods had just announced [a new end-of-year Review event](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review), in which the best posts from the year before would be reviewed and voted on, to see which had stood the test of time and deserved to be part of our canon of cumulative knowledge. (That is, this Review period starting in late 2019 would cover posts published in _2018_.)
+
+This provided me with [an affordance](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE) to write some posts critiquing posts that had been nominated for the Best-of-2018 collection that I didn't think deserved such glory. In response to ["Decoupling _vs._ Contextualizing Norms"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms) (which had been [cited in a way that I thought obfuscatory during the "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" trainwreck](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/wejvnw6QnWrvbjgns)), I wrote ["Relevance Norms; Or, Grecian Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling), appealing to our [academically standard theory of how context affects meaning](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/) to explain why "decoupling _vs._ contextualizing norms" is a false dichotomy.
+
+More significantly, in reaction to Yudkowsky's ["Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases), I published ["Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly),[^not-lying-title] explaining why I thought "Meta-Honesty" was relying on an unproductively narrow sense of "honesty", because the ambiguity of natural language makes it easy to deceive people without technically lying.
+
+[^not-lying-title]: The ungainly title was softened from an earlier draft following feedback from the posse; I had originally written "... Surprisingly Useless".
+
+I thought that one cut to the heart of the shocking behavior that we had seen from Yudkowsky lately. The "hill of meaning in defense of validity" affair had been driven by Yudkowsky's obsession with not technically lying, on two levels: he had proclaimed that asking for new pronouns "Is. Not. Lying." (as if _that_ were the matter that anyone cared about—as if conservatives and gender-critical feminists should just pack up and go home after it had been demonstrated that trans people aren't _lying_), and he had seen no interest in clarifying his position on the philosophy of language, because he wasn't lying when he said that preferred pronouns weren't lies (as if _that_ were the matter my posse cared about—as if I should keep honoring him as my caliph after it had been demonstrated that he hadn't _lied_). But his Sequences had [articulated a higher standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument) than merely not-lying. If he didn't remember, I could at least hope to remind everyone else.
+
+I also wrote a little post, ["Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), arguing that it should be easier to have a rationality/alignment community that just does systematically correct reasoning than a politically savvy community that does systematically correct reasoning except when that would taint AI safety with political drama, analogous to how it's easier to build a calculator that just does correct arithmetic, than a calculator that does correct arithmetic except that it never displays the result 13. In order to build a "[triskadekaphobic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia) calculator", you would need to "solve arithmetic" anyway, and the resulting product would be limited not only in its ability to correctly compute `6 + 7` but also the infinite family of calculations that include 13 as an intermediate result: if you can't count on `(6 + 7) + 1` being the same as `6 + (7 + 1)`, you lose the associativity of addition.
+
+### A Newtonmas Party (December 2019)
+
+On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking of asking about autogynephilia on the next _Slate Star Codex_ survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or if I could suggest any "intelligent and friendly opponents" to consult. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being unpleasant ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/), who had a lot of experience conducting surveys and ran a "Hobbyist Sexologists" Discord server, which seemed likely to have some friendly opponents.
+
+The next day (I assume while I still happened to be on his mind), Scott also [commented on](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E) "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist", my post from back in October replying to his "Against Lie Inflation."
+
+I was frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account points that I had already covered in detail. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I [succumbed to](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7) [the temptation](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH) [to blow up at him](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF) in the comments.
+
+After commenting, I noticed what day it was and added a few more messages to our Discord chat—
+
+> okay, maybe speech is sometimes painful
+> the _Less Wrong_ comment I just left you is really mean
+> and you know it's not because I don't like you
+> you know it's because I'm genuinely at my wit's end
+> after I posted it, I was like, "Wait, if I'm going to be this mean to Scott, maybe Christmas Eve isn't the best time?"
+> it's like the elephant in my brain is gambling that by being socially aggressive, it can force you to actually process information about philosophy which you otherwise would not have an incentive to
+> I hope you have a merry Christmas
+
+And then, as an afterthought—
+
+> oh, I guess we're Jewish
+> that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat
+
+Scott messaged back at 11:08 the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convince me of his sincerity and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).
+
+I explained that the reason for those accusations was that I _knew_ he knew about strategic equivocation, because he taught everyone else about it (as in his famous posts about [the motte-and-bailey doctrine](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) and [the noncentral fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world)). And so when he acted like he didn't get it when I pointed out that this also applied to "trans women are women", that just seemed _implausible_.
+
+He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses" being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted [an article from the _The Nation_](https://web.archive.org/web/20191223235051/https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/): "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women _are in fact women_." Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).
+
+I didn't think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as I could before being allowed to object to this kind of chicanery. I thought "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running a clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to "wireheading" (optimizing someone's map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) or "war" (optimizing someone's map to not reflect the territory in order to manipulate them). If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn't. That's not a nice thing to do to a rationalist.
+
+Scott thought that trans people had some weird thing going on in their brains such that being referred to as their natal sex was intrinsically painful, like an electric shock. The thing wasn't an agent, so the [injunction to refuse to give in to extortion](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) didn't apply. Having to use a word other than the one you would normally use in order to avoid subjecting someone to painful electric shocks was worth it.
+
+I thought I knew things about the etiology of transness such that I didn't think the electric shock was inevitable, but I didn't want the conversation to go there if it didn't have to. I didn't have to ragequit the so-called "rationalist" community over a complicated empirical question, only over bad philosophy. Scott said he might agree with me if he thought the tradeoff were unfavorable between clarity and utilitarian benefit—or if he thought it had the chance of snowballing like in his "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning".
+
+I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.
+
+I was skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs doesn't seem like a culture that could solve AI alignment.
+
+I linked to Zvi Mowshowitz's post about how [the claim that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) gets used to silence people trying to point out the thing: in this case, basically, "'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from (part of) the male multivariate trait distribution rather than the female multivariate trait distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out?" But I didn't think that everyone knew.[^survey-whether-everyone-knows] I thought the people who sort-of knew were being intimidated into doublethinking around it.
+
+[^survey-whether-everyone-knows]: On this point, it may be instructive to note that a 2023 survey [found that only 60% of the UK public knew that "trans women" were born male](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/06/third-of-britons-dont-know-trans-women-born-male/).
+
+At this point, it was almost 2 _p.m._ (the paragraphs above summarizing a larger volume of typing), and Scott mentioned that he wanted to go to the Event Horizon Christmas party, and asked if I wanted to come and continue the discussion there. I assented, and thanked him for his time; it would be really exciting if we could avoid a rationalist civil war.
+
+When I arrived at the party, people were doing a reading of [the "Hero Licensing" dialogue epilogue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing) to [_Inadequate Equilibria_](https://equilibriabook.com/toc/), with Yudkowsky himself playing the Mysterious Stranger. At some point, Scott and I retreated upstairs to continue our discussion. By the end of it, I was feeling more assured of Scott's sincerity, if not his competence. Scott said he would edit in a disclaimer note at the end of "... Not Man for the Categories".
+
+It would have been interesting if I also got the chance to talk to Yudkowsky for a few minutes, but if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to recount any details of that here due to the privacy rules I'm following.
+
+The rest of the party was nice. People were reading funny GPT-2 quotes from their phones. At one point, conversation happened to zag in a way that let me show off the probability fact I had learned during Math and Wellness Month. A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.
+
+All in all, I was feeling less ragequitty about the rationalists[^no-scare-quotes] after the party—as if by credibly threatening to ragequit, the elephant in my brain had managed to extort more bandwidth from our leadership. The note Scott added to the end of "... Not Man for the Categories" still betrayed some philosophical confusion, but I now felt hopeful about addressing that in a future blog post explaining my thesis that unnatural category boundaries were for "wireheading" or "war".
+
+[^no-scare-quotes]: Enough to not even scare-quote the term here.
+
+It was around this time that someone told me that I wasn't adequately taking into account that Yudkowsky was "playing on a different chessboard" than me. (A public figure focused on reducing existential risk from artificial general intelligence is going to sense different trade-offs around Kolmogorov complicity strategies than an ordinary programmer or mere worm focused on _things that don't matter_.) No doubt. But at the same time, I thought Yudkowsky wasn't adequately taking into account the extent to which some of his longtime supporters (like Michael or Jessica) were, or had been, counting on him to uphold certain standards of discourse (rather than chess)?
+
+Another effect of my feeling better after the party was that my motivation to keep working on my memoir of the Category War vanished—as if I was still putting weight on a [zero-sum frame](https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/) in which the memoir was a nuke that I only wanted to use as an absolute last resort.
+
+Ben wrote (Subject: "Re: state of Church leadership"):
+
+> It seems to [me] that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir _privately_ feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create _internal_ clarity around a thing.
+>
+> I think this has to mean _either_
+> (a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated
+> _or_
+> (b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.
+
+Or, I pointed out, (c) I had ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind _to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular_, and while I had made a lot of progress unwinding this, I was still, still not done, and seeing him at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit.
+
+"Riley" reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be clarifying and cathartic _for me_. If people in the Caliphate came to their senses, I could either not publish it, or give it a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.
+
+(It does not have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)
+
+### Further Discourses on What the Categories Were Made For (January–February 2020)
+
+Michael told me he had changed his mind about gender and the philosophy of language. We talked about it on the phone. He said that the philosophy articulated in ["A Human's Guide to Words"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) was inadequate for politicized environments where our choice of ontology is constrained. If we didn't know how to coin a new third gender, or teach everyone the language of "clusters in high-dimensional configuration space," our actual choices for how to think about trans women were basically three: creepy men (the TERF narrative), crazy men (the medical model), or a protected class of actual woman.[^reasons-not-to-carve]
+
+[^reasons-not-to-carve]: I had identified three classes of reasons not to carve reality at the joints: [coordination (wanting everyone to use the same definitions)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), wireheading (making the map look good, at the expense of it failing to reflect the territory), and war (sabotaging someone else's map to make them do what you want). Michael's proposal would fall under "coordination" insofar as it was motivated by the need to use the same categories as everyone else. (Although you could also make a case for "war" insofar as the civil-rights model winning entailed that adherents of the TERF or medical models must lose.)
+
+According to Michael, while "trans women are real women" was a lie (in the sense that he agreed that me and Jessica and Ziz were not part of the natural cluster of biological females), it was _also_ the case that "trans women are not real women" was a lie (in the sense that the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories were wrong). "Trans women are women" could be true in the sense that truth is about processes that create true maps, such that we can choose the concepts that allow discourse and information flow. If the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories are a cause of silencing, then—under present conditions—we had to choose the "protected class" story in order for people like Ziz to not be silenced.
+
+My response (more vehemently when thinking on it a few hours later) was that this was a _garbage bullshit_ appeal to consequences. If I wasn't going to let Ray Arnold get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people feel safe," I shouldn't let Michael get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people aren't oppressed." Maybe the wider world was ontology-constrained to those three choices, but I was aspiring to higher nuance in my writing.
+
+"Thanks for being principled," he replied.
+
+------
+
+On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent _Slate Star Codex_ survey. Based on eyeballing the survey data, Alexander proposed "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory.
+
+I appreciated the endeavor of getting real data, but I was unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner; I've only just recently gotten around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Dec/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/). Briefly, I can see how it looks like a natural leap if you're verbally reasoning about "gender", but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is not boring and takes on a big complexity penalty, because that group is heterogeneous with respect to the underlying mechanisms of sexuality. I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately. Given that, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse: it's grouping together lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?
+
+(I do like the [hypernym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy) _autogenderphilia_.)
+
+### A Private Document About a Disturbing Hypothesis (early 2020)
+
+There's another extremely important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
+
+Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. In [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent it. The intent of privacy norms is to conceal information. But [_information_ in Shannon's sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory) is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text.
+
+If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information but also wants to comply with privacy norms has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay only just shy of being that egregious.
+
+Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against lying, I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."
+
+Having considered all this, I want to tell you about how I spent a number of hours from early May 2020 to early July 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occurred to me earlier that year.
+
+Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
+
+Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women.) A solid majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
+
+What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in [the late-onset taxon](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-the-taxonomy) and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions[^narcissistic-delusions] of guys like me.
+
+[^narcissistic-delusions]: Reasonable trans people aren't the ones driving [the central tendency of the trans rights movement](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/). When analyzing a wave of medical malpractice on children, I think I'm being literal in attributing causal significance to a political motivation to affirm the narcissistic delusions of (some) guys like me, even though not all guys like me are delusional, and many guys like me are doing fine maintaining a non-guy social identity without spuriously dragging children into it.
+
+That much was obvious to anyone who's had their Blanchardian enlightenment, and wouldn't have been worth the effort of writing a special private Document about. The disturbing hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020 was that, in the culture of the current year, affirmation of a cross-sex identity might happen to kids who weren't HSTS-taxon at all.
+
+Very small children who are just learning what words mean say a lot of things that aren't true (I'm a grown-up; I'm a cat; I'm a dragon), and grownups tend to play along in the moment as a fantasy game, but they don't _coordinate to make that the permanent new social reality_.
+
+But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore contrary evidence that the child "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that would not have existed if not for their belief in it—a belief that the same people raising the same child ten years ago wouldn't have held. ([A September 2013 article in _The Atlantic_](https://archive.is/FJNII) by the father of a male child with stereotypically feminine interests was titled "My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It", not "My Daughter Is Trans; Get Over It".)
+
+Crucially, if gender identity isn't an innate feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what nice smart liberal people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.
+
+(I'm going with the MtF case without too much loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to transition females at this age, but the dynamics are probably similar.)
+
+What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as a girl, only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the [many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) where people are using "gender" (perceived sex) to make a prediction or decision?
+
+Some might protest, "But what's the harm? She can always change her mind later if she decides she's actually a boy." I don't doubt that if the child were to clearly and distinctly insist, "I'm definitely a boy," the nice smart liberal grown-ups would unhesitatingly accept that.
+
+But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that requires recognition. (What is an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy" against the current of everyone in the child's life having accepted otherwise for as long the kid can remember.
+
+Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). In a culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, there are concept-shaped holes that would make it hard for a kid to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution for juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans."
+
+The epistemic difficulties extend to the grown-ups as well. I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation will find the story I've laid out above pretty compelling, but the parents are likely to be unmoved. They _know_ they didn't coach the child to claim to be a girl. On what grounds could a stranger who wasn't there (or a skeptical family friend who sees the kid maybe once a month) assert that subconscious influence must be at work?
+
+In the early twentieth century, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten claimed to have taught his horse, Clever Hans, to do arithmetic and other intellectual feats. One could ask, "How much is 2/5 plus 1/2?" and the stallion would first stomp his hoof nine times, and then ten times—representing 9/10ths, the correct answer. An investigation concluded that no deliberate trickery was involved: Hans could often give the correct answer when questioned by a stranger, demonstrating that von Osten couldn't be secretly signaling the horse when to stop stomping. But further careful experiments by Oskar Pfungst revealed that Hans was picking up on unconscious cues "leaked" by the questioner's body language as the number of stomps approached the correct answer: for instance, Hans couldn't answer questions that the questioner themself didn't know.[^pfungst]
+
+[^pfungst]: Oskar Pfungst, [_Clever Hans (The Horse Of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution To Experimental Animal and Human Psychology_](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33936/33936-h/33936-h.htm), translated from the German by Carl L. Rahn
+
+Notably, von Osten didn't accept Pfungst's explanation, continuing to believe that his intensive tutoring had succeeded in teaching the horse arithmetic.
+
+It's hard to blame him, really. He had spent more time with Hans than anyone else. Hans observably _could_ stomp out the correct answers to questions. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a horse could learn arithmetic, why should he trust Pfungst's nitpicky experiments over the plain facts of his own intimately lived experience?
+
+But what was in question wasn't the observations of Hans's performance, only the interpretation of what those observations implied about Hans's psychology. As Pfungst put it: "that was looked for in the animal which should have been sought in the man."
+
+Similarly, in the case of a reputedly transgender three-year-old, a skeptical family friend isn't questioning observations of what the child said, only the interpretation of what those observations imply about the child's psychology. From the family's perspective, the evidence is clear: the child claimed to be a girl on many occasions over a period of months, and expressed sadness about being a boy. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a child could be transgender, what could make them doubt the obvious interpretation of their own intimately lived experience?
+
+From the skeptical family friend's perspective, there are a number of anomalies that cast serious doubt on what the family thinks is the obvious interpretation.
+
+(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically. The following illustrative vignettes may not reflect real events.)
+
+For one thing, there may be clues that the child's information environment did not provide instruction on some of the relevant facts. Suppose that, six months before the child's social transition went down, another family friend had explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." (Nice smart liberal grown-ups in the current year don't feel the need to be more specific.) Growing up in such a culture, the child's initial gender statements may reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need—and later statements may reflect social reinforcement of earlier confusion. Suppose that after social transition, the same friend explained to the child, "When you were little, you couldn't talk, so your parents had to guess whether you were a boy or a girl based on your parts." While this claim does convey the lesson that there's a customary default relationship between gender and genitals (in case that hadn't been clear before), it also reinforces the idea that the child is transgender.
+
+For another thing, from the skeptical family friend's perspective, it's striking how the family and other grown-ups in the child's life seem to treat the child's statements about gender starkly differently than the child's statements about everything else.
+
+Imagine that, around the time of the social transition, the child responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (of nice smart liberal grown-ups who talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). In the skeptic's view, if you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
+
+Perhaps even more striking is the way that the grown-ups seem to interpret the child's conflicting or ambiguous statements about gender. Imagine that, around the time social transition was being considered, a parent asked the child whether the child would prefer to be addressed as "my son" or "my daughter."
+
+Suppose the child replied, "My son. Or you can call me she. Everyone should call me she or her or my son."
+
+The grown-ups seem to mostly interpret exchanges like this as indicating that while the child is trans, she's confused about the gender of the words "son" and "daughter". They don't seem to pay much attention to the competing hypothesis that the child knows he's his parents "son", but is confused about the implications of she/her pronouns.
+
+It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender case. Suppose the child's father's name is John Smith, and that after a grown-up explains ["Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles) after it happened to come up in fiction, the child declares that his name is John Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statement as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you _John_ or _John Jr._, or just _Junior_?") With enough followup, it seems plausible that a name change to "John Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the [optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization)—the selection that this particular statement should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated as a cute but not overly meaningful thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.
+
+Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. Suppose that, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, a parent reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_."
+
+I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (_d_ ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition—that the cross-gender verbal self-reports are less decision-relevant than the fact of a male child behaving in male-typical ways. But nice smart liberal grown-ups in the current year don't think that way.
+
+One might imagine that the [inferential distance](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances) between nice smart liberal grown-ups and people from an older generation (or a skeptical family friend) might be crossed by talking about it, but it turns out that talking doesn't help much when people have radically different priors and interpret the same evidence differently.
+
+Imagine a skeptical family friend wondering (about four months after the social transition) what "being a girl" means to the child. How did the kid _know_?
+
+A parent obliges to ask the child: "Hey kiddo, somebody wants to know how you know that you are a girl."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He's interested in that kind of thing."
+
+"I know that I'm a girl because girls like specific things like rainbows and I like rainbows so I'm a girl."
+
+"Is that how you knew in the first place?"
+
+"Yeah."
+
+"You know there are a lot of boys who like rainbows."
+
+"I don't think boys like rainbows so well—oh hey! Here this ball is!"
+
+(When recounting this conversation, the parent adds that rainbows hadn't come up before, and that the child was looking at a rainbow-patterned item at the time of answering.)
+
+It would seem that the interpretation of this kind of evidence depends on one's prior convictions. If you think that transition is a radical intervention that might pass a cost–benefit analysis for treating rare cases of intractable sex dysphoria, answers like "because girls like specific things like rainbows" are disqualifying. (A fourteen-year-old who could read an informed-consent form would be able to give a more compelling explanation than that, but a three-year-old just isn't ready to make this kind of decision.) Whereas if you think that some children have a gender that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth, you might expect them to express that affinity at age three, without yet having the cognitive or verbal abilities to explain it. Teasing apart where these two views make different predictions seems like it should be possible, but might be beside the point, if the real crux is over [what categories are made for](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/). (Is sex an objective fact that sometimes merits social recognition, or is it better to live in a Society where people are free to choose the gender that suits them?)
+
+Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I'm not an expert on child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who _was_ "actually trans" whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.
+
+For some reason, it seemed important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. I thought about cleaning it up and publishing it as a public blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data"), but for some reason, that didn't seem as pressing.
+
+I put an epigraph at the top:
+
+> If you love someone, tell them the truth.
+>
+> —Anonymous
+
+Given that I spent so many hours on this little research and writing project in May–July 2020, I think it makes sense for me to mention it at this point in my memoir, where it fits in chronologically. I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my own research interests obviously doesn't violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else's family, or criticizing someone else's parenting decisions.
+
+### The _New York Times_ Pounces (June 2020)
+
+On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley." I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk but that had been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light?) might incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of systematically correct reasoning that made the community valuable in the first place.
+
+He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing _Slate Star Codex_ posts were taken down. A [lone post on the main page](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/) explained that the _New York Times_ piece was going to reveal Alexander's real last name and he was taking his posts down as a defensive measure. (No blog, no story?) I [wrote a script](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191) (`slate_starchive.py`) to replace the _Slate Star Codex_ links on this blog with links to the most recent Internet Archive copy.
+
+### Philosophy Blogging Interlude 3! (mid-2020)
+
+I continued my philosophy of language work, looking into the academic literature on formal models of communication and deception. I wrote a [couple](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) [posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) encapsulating what I learned from that—and I continued work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis, the sequel to ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)
+
+The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:
+
+> I had hoped that the Israel/Palestine example above made it clear that you have to deal with the consequences of your definitions, which can include confusion, muddling communication, and leaving openings for deceptive rhetorical strategies.
+
+This is certainly an improvement over the original text without the note, but I took the use of the national borders metaphor to mean that Scott still hadn't gotten my point about there being laws of thought underlying categorization: mathematical principles governing _how_ choices of definition can muddle communication or be deceptive. (But that wasn't surprising; [by Scott's own admission](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), [he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/).)
+
+Category "boundaries" are a useful visual metaphor for explaining the cognitive function of categorization: you imagine a "boundary" in configuration space containing all the things that belong to the category.
+
+If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous United States. It may be inconvenient that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, but it's not wrong that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.
+
+But if you do have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is shallow.
+
+A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of which government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful _because_ that structure can be used to make probabilistic inferences. You can use your observations of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.
+
+But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get close to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue _or_ green _or_ red _or_ gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.
+
+The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people do with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be illustrated similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to defend gerrymandered categories, suggested that he didn't understand this.
+
+I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone want a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign higher utility to doing it this way" had to be messing with you. Squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would realistically want to use them would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold".
+
+That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. [Mutual information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information) was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of "closeness" that would make some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".
+
+Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}`. I wanted to say that if observing _X_=`H` concentrates _Y_'s probability mass on `{1, 2, 3}`, that's more useful than if it concentrates _Y_ on `{1, 5, 8}`. But that would require the numerals in _Y_ to be numbers rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from log<sub>2</sub> 8 = 3 to log<sub>2</sub> 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter which three states they were.
+
+How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the variance of my features conditional on category membership? Was "connectedness" what I wanted, or was it only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness was intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are similar enough to make similar decisions about.
+
+I put the question to a few friends in July 2020 (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't.
+
+### A Couple of Impulsive Emails (September 2020)
+
+I decided on "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" as the title for my advanced categorization thesis. Writing it up was a major undertaking. There were a lot of nuances to address and potential objections to preëmpt, and I felt that I had to cover everything. (A reasonable person who wanted to understand the main ideas wouldn't need so much detail, but I wasn't up against reasonable people who wanted to understand.)
+
+In September 2020, Yudkowsky Tweeted [something about social media incentives prompting people to make nonsense arguments](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1304824253015945216), and something in me boiled over. The Tweets were fine in isolation, but I rankled at it given the absurdly disproportionate efforts I was undertaking to unwind his incentive-driven nonsense. I left [a snarky, pleading reply](/images/davis-snarky_pleading_reply.png) and [vented on my own timeline](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838346695348224) (with preview images from the draft of "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"):
+
+> Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky's robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn't surprising, but—[^trying-to-trick-me]
+
+[^trying-to-trick-me]: I anticipate that some readers might object to the "trying to trick me into cutting my dick off" characterization. But as [Ben had pointed out earlier](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#physical-injuries), we have strong reason to believe that an information environment of ubiquitous propaganda was creating medical transitions on the margin. I think it made sense for me to use emphatic language to highlight what was actually at stake here!
+
+My rage-boil continued into staying up late writing him an angry email, which I mostly reproduce below (with a few redactions for either brevity or compliance with privacy norms, but I'm not going to clarify which).
+
+> To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]>
+> Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: Sunday 13 September 2020 2:24 _a.m._
+> Subject: out of patience
+>
+>> "I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason: you must say it, because it is true."
+>> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
+>
+> Dear Eliezer (cc Anna as mediator):
+>
+> Sorry, I'm getting _really really_ impatient (maybe you saw my impulsive Tweet-replies today; and I impulsively called Anna today; and I've spent the last few hours drafting an even more impulsive hysterical-and-shouty potential _Less Wrong_ post; but now I'm impulsively deciding to email you in the hopes that I can withhold the hysterical-and-shouty post in favor of a lower-drama option of your choice): **is there _any_ way we can resolve the categories dispute _in public_?! Not** any object-level gender stuff which you don't and shouldn't care about, **_just_ the philosophy-of-language part.**
+>
+> My grievance against you is *very* simple. [You are *on the public record* claiming that](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048):
+>
+>> you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.
+>
+> I claim that this is _false_. **I think I _am_ standing in defense of truth when I insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning, when I have an _argument_ for _why_ my preferred usage does a better job of "carving reality at the joints" and the one bringing my usage into question doesn't have such an argument. And in particular, "This word usage makes me sad" doesn't count as a relevant argument.** I [agree that words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution), but precisely _because_ words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings, there's no _reason_ to challenge someone's word usage except _because_ of the hidden probabilistic inference it embodies.
+>
+> Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, "Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!" And you replied: "No, I'm not! That's a lie." And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive and piped up, "You are _ontologcially confused_ if you think that's a false assertion. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on words, such _white supremacist_, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." Suppose you emailed Jaynes about it, and he brushed you off with, "But I didn't _say_ you were a white supremacist; I was only targeting a narrow ontology error." In this hypothetical situation, I think you might be pretty upset—perhaps upset enough to form a twenty-one month grudge against someone whom you used to idolize?
+>
+> I agree that pronouns don't have the same function as ordinary nouns. However, **in the English language as actually spoken by native speakers, I think that gender pronouns _do_ have effective "truth conditions" _as a matter of cognitive science_.** If someone said, "Come meet me and my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her", and then that friend turned out to look like me, **you would be surprised**.
+>
+> I don't see the _substantive_ difference between "You're not standing in defense of truth (...)" and "I can define a word any way I want." [...]
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> As far as your public output is concerned, it *looks like* you either changed your mind about how the philosophy of language works, or you think gender is somehow an exception. If you didn't change your mind, and you don't think gender is somehow an exception, is there some way we can _get that on the public record **somewhere**?!_
+>
+> As an example of such a "somewhere", I had asked you for a comment on my explanation, ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (with non-politically-hazardous examples about dolphins and job titles) [...] I asked for a comment from Anna, and at first she said that she would need to "red team" it first (because of the political context), and later she said that she was having difficulty for other reasons. Okay, the clarification doesn't have to be on _my_ post. **I don't care about credit! I don't care whether or not anyone is sorry! I just need this _trivial_ thing settled in public so that I can stop being in pain and move on with my life.**
+>
+> As I mentioned in my Tweets today, I have a longer and better explanation than "... Boundaries?" mostly drafted. (It's actually somewhat interesting; the logarithmic score doesn't work as a measure of category-system goodness because it can only reward you for the probability you assign to the _exact_ answer, but we _want_ "partial credit" for almost-right answers, so the expected squared error is actually better here, contrary to what you said in [the "Technical Explanation"](https://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) about what Bayesian statisticians do). [...]
+>
+> The *only* thing I've been trying to do for the past twenty-one months
+is make this simple thing established "rationalist" knowledge:
+>
+> (1) For all nouns _N_, you can't define _N_ any way you want, [for at least 37 reasons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+>
+> (2) *Woman* is such a noun.
+>
+> (3) Therefore, you can't define the word *woman* any way you want.
+>
+> (Note, **this is _totally compatible_ with the claim that trans women are women, and trans men are men, and nonbinary people are nonbinary!** It's just that **you have to _argue_ for why those categorizations make sense in the context you're using the word**, rather than merely asserting it with an appeal to arbitrariness.)
+>
+> This is **literally _modus ponens_**. I don't understand how you expect people to trust you to save the world with a research community that _literally cannot perform modus ponens._
+>
+> [...] See, I thought you were playing on the chessboard of _being correct about rationality_. Such that, if you accidentally mislead people about your own philosophy of language, you could just ... issue a clarification? I and Michael and Ben and Sarah and ["Riley"] _and Jessica_ wrote to you about this and explained the problem in _painstaking_ detail, **and you stonewalled us.** Why? **Why is this so hard?!**
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> No. The thing that's been driving me nuts for twenty-one months is that <strong><em><span style="color: #F00000;">I expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth</span></strong></em>. I remain,
+>
+> Your heartbroken student,
+> Zack M. Davis
+
+I followed it with another email after I woke up the next morning:
+
+> To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]>
+> Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]>
+> Date: Sunday 13 September 2020 11:02 _a.m._
+> Subject: Re: out of patience
+>
+> [...] The sinful and corrupted part wasn't the _initial_ Tweets; the sinful and corrupted part is this **bullshit stonewalling** when your Twitter followers and me and Michael and Ben and Sarah and ["Riley"] and Jessica tried to point out the problem. I've _never_ been arguing against your private universe [...]; the thing I'm arguing against in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (and **my [unfinished draft sequel](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Category_War/blob/cefa98c3abe/unnatural_categories_are_optimized_for_deception.md)**, although that's more focused on what Scott wrote) is the **_actual text_ you _actually published_, not your private universe.**
+>
+> [...] you could just **publicly clarify your position on the philosophy of language** the way an intellectually-honest person would do if they wanted their followers to have correct beliefs about the philosophy of language?!
+>
+> You wrote:
+>
+>> [Using language in a way](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243) _you_ dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying.
+>
+>> [Now, maybe as a matter of policy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297), you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to.
+>
+> The problem with "it's a policy debate about how to use language" is that it completely elides the issue that some ways of using language _perform better_ at communicating information, such that **attempts to define new words or new senses of _existing_ words should come with a justification for why the new sense is _useful for conveying information_, and that _is_ a matter of Truth.** Without such a justification, it's hard to see why you would _want_ to redefine a word _except_ to mislead people with strategic equivocation.
+>
+> <a id="literally-a-white-supremacist"></a>It is _literally true_ that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who [once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' _Wikipedia_ page](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok) in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").
+>
+> It is _literally true_ that 2 + 2 = 6 (if I'm allowed to define '2' as •••-many).
+>
+> You wrote:
+>
+>> [The more technology advances, the further](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096) we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts.
+>
+> That's kind of like defining Solomonoff induction, and then saying, "Having said this, we've built AGI." No, you haven't said all the facts! Configuration space is _very high-dimensional_; we don't have _access_ to the individual points. Trying to specify the individual points ("say all the facts") would be like what you wrote about in ["Empty Labels"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)—"not just that I can vary the label, but that I can get along just fine without any label at all." Since that's not possible, we need to group points into the space together so that we can use observations from the coordinates that we _have_ observed to make probabilistic inferences about the coordinates we haven't. But there are _mathematical laws_ governing how well different groupings perform, and those laws _are_ a matter of Truth, not a mere policy debate.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> But if behavior at equilibrium isn't deceptive, there's just _no such thing as deception_; I wrote about this on Less Wrong in ["Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) (drawing on the academic literature about sender–receiver games). I don't think you actually want to bite that bullet?
+>
+> **In terms of information transfer, there is an isomorphism between saying "I reserve the right to lie 5% of the time about whether something is a member of category C" and adopting a new definition of C that misclassifies 5% of instances with respect to the old definition.**
+>
+> Like, I get that you're ostensibly supposed to be saving the world and you don't want randos yelling at you in your email about philosophy. But **I thought the idea was that we were going to save the world [_by means of_ doing unusually clear thinking?](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy)**
+>
+> [Scott wrote](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (with an irrelevant object-level example redacted): "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life." (Okay, he added a clarification after I spent Christmas yelling at him; but I think he's still substantially confused in ways that I address in my forthcoming draft post.)
+>
+> [You wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048): "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning."
+>
+> I think I've argued pretty extensively this is wrong! **I'm eager to hear counterarguments if you think I'm getting the philosophy wrong.** But ... **"people live in different private universes" is _not a counterargument_.**
+>
+> **It makes sense that you don't want to get involved in gender politics. That's why I wrote "... Boundaries?" using examples about dolphins and job titles, and why my forthcoming post has examples about bleggs and artificial meat.** This shouldn't be _expensive_ to clear up?! This should take like, five minutes? (I've spent twenty-one months of my life on this.) Just one little _ex cathedra_ comment on Less Wrong or _somewhere_ (**it doesn't have to be my post, if it's too long or I don't deserve credit or whatever**; I just think the right answer needs to be public) affirming that you haven't changed your mind about 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong? Unless you _have_ changed your mind, of course?
+>
+> I can imagine someone observing this conversation objecting, "[...] why are you being so greedy? We all know the _real_ reason you want to clear up this philosophy thing in public is because it impinges on your gender agenda, but Eliezer _already_ threw you a bone with the ['there's probably more than one type of dysphoria' thing.](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) That was already a huge political concession to you! That makes you _more_ than even; you should stop being greedy and leave Eliezer alone."
+>
+> But as [I explained in my reply](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) criticizing why I think that argument is _wrong_, the whole mindset of public-arguments-as-political-favors is _crazy_. **The fact that we're having this backroom email conversation at all (instead of just being correct about the philosophy of language on Twitter) is _corrupt_!** I don't want to strike a deal in a political negotiation; I want _shared maps that reflect the territory_. I thought that's what this "rationalist community" thing was supposed to do? Is that not a thing anymore? If we can't do the shared-maps thing when there's any hint of political context (such that now you _can't_ clarify the categories thing, even as an abstract philosophy issue about bleggs, because someone would construe that as taking a side on whether trans people are Good or Bad), that seems really bad for our collective sanity?! (Where collective sanity is potentially useful for saving the world, but is at least a quality-of-life improver if we're just doomed to die in 15 years no matter what.)
+>
+> **I really used to look up to you.** In my previous interactions with you, I've been tightly [cognitively constrained](http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/57) by hero-worship. I was already so starstruck that _Eliezer Yudkowsky knows who I am_, that the possibility that _Eliezer Yudkowsky might disapprove of me_, was too terrifying to bear. I really need to get over that, because it's bad for me, and [it's _really_ bad for you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why). I remain,
+>
+> Your heartbroken student,
+> Zack M. Davis
+
+These emails were pretty reckless by my usual standards. (If I was entertaining some hope of serving as a mediator between the Caliphate and Vassar's splinter group after the COVID lockdowns were over, this outburst wasn't speaking well to my sobriety.) But as the subject line indicates, I was just—out of patience. I had spent years making all the careful arguments I could make. What was there left for me to do but scream?
+
+The result of this recklessness was ... success! Without disclosing anything from any private conversations that may or may not have occurred, Yudkowsky did [publish a clarification on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228), that he had meant to criticize only the naïve essentialism of asserting that a word Just Means something and that anyone questioning it is Just Lying, and not the more sophisticated class of arguments that I had been making.
+
+In particular, the post contained this line:
+
+> you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want"
+
+There it is! A clear _ex cathedra_ statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories aren't arbitrary. (Only 1 year and 8 months after [asking for it](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#ex-cathedra-statement-ask).) I could quibble with some of Yudkowsky's exact writing choices, which I thought still bore the signature of political squirming,[^clarification-quibbles] but it would be petty to dwell on quibbles when the core problem had been addressed.
+
+[^clarification-quibbles]: The way that the post takes pains to cast doubt on whether someone who is alleged to have committed the categories-are-arbitrary fallacy is likely to have actually committed it ("the mistake seems like it wouldn't actually fool anybody or be committed in real life, I am unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument", "But be wary of accusing somebody of planning to do this, if you haven't documented them actually doing it") is in stark contrast to the way that "A Human's Guide to Words" had taken pains to emphasize that categories shape cognition regardless of whether someone is consciously trying to trick you (["drawing a boundary in thingspace is not a neutral act [...] Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)). I'm suspicious that the change in emphasis reflects the need to not be seen as criticizing the "pro-trans" coalition, rather than any new insight into the subject matter.
+
+ The first comment on the post linked to "... Not Man for the Categories". Yudkowsky replied, "I assumed everybody reading this had already read [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words)", a _non sequitur_ that could be taken to suggest (but did not explicitly say) that the moral of "... Not Man for the Categories" was implied by "A Human's Guide to Words" (in contrast to my contention that "... Not Man for the Categories" was getting it wrong).
+
+I wrote to Michael, Ben, Jessica, Sarah, and "Riley", thanking them for their support. After successfully bullying Scott and Eliezer into clarifying, I was no longer at war with the robot cult and feeling a lot better (Subject: "thank-you note (the end of the Category War)").
+
+I had a feeling, I added, that Ben might be disappointed with the thank-you note insofar as it could be read as me having been "bought off" rather than being fully on the side of clarity-creation. But I contended that not being at war actually made it emotionally easier to do clarity-creation writing. Now I would be able to do it in a contemplative spirit of "Here's what I think the thing is actually doing" rather than in hatred with [flames on the side of my face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqxmQr-uto&t=112s).
+
+### A Private Catastrophe (December 2020)
+
+<a id="a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically"></a>There's a dramatic episode that would fit here chronologically if this were an autobiography (which existed to tell my life story), but since this is a topic-focused memoir (which exists because my life happens to contain this Whole Dumb Story which bears on matters of broader interest, even if my life would not otherwise be interesting), I don't want to spend more wordcount than is needed to briefly describe the essentials.
+
+I was charged by members of the extended Michael Vassar–adjacent social circle with the duty of taking care of a mentally-ill person at my house on 18 December 2020. (We did not trust the ordinary psychiatric system to act in patients' interests.) I apparently did a poor job, and ended up saying something callous on the care team group chat after a stressful night, which led to a chaotic day on the nineteenth, and an ugly falling-out between me and the group. The details aren't particularly of public interest.
+
+My poor performance during this incident [weighs on my conscience](/2020/Dec/liability/) particularly because I had [previously](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [been](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) in the position of being crazy and benefiting from the help of my friends (including many of the same people involved in this incident) rather than getting sent back to psychiatric prison ("hospital", they call it a "hospital"). Of all people, I had a special debt to ["pay it forward"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward), and one might have hoped that I would also have special skills, that having been on the receiving end of a non-institutional psychiatric tripsitting operation would help me know what to do on the giving end. Neither of those panned out.
+
+Some might appeal to the proverb "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up recovering, and that, while the stress of the incident contributed to a somewhat serious relapse of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up recovering, too. But recovering normal functionality after a traumatic episode doesn't imply a lack of other lasting consequences (to the psyche, to trusting relationships, _&c._). I am therefore inclined to dwell on [another proverb](https://www.alessonislearned.com/), "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."
+
+### A False Dénouement (January 2021)
+
+I published ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) in January 2021.
+
+I wrote back to Abram Demski regarding his comments from fourteen months before: on further thought, he was right. Even granting my point that evolution didn't figure out how to track probability and utility separately, as Abram had pointed out, the fact that it didn't meant that not tracking it could be an effective AI design. Just because evolution takes shortcuts that human engineers wouldn't didn't mean shortcuts are "wrong". (Rather, there are laws governing which kinds of shortcuts work.)
+
+Abram was also right that it would be weird if reflective coherence was somehow impossible: the AI shouldn't have to fundamentally reason differently about "rewriting code in some 'external' program" and "rewriting 'its own' code." In that light, it made sense to regard "have accurate beliefs" as merely a convergent instrumental subgoal, rather than what rationality is about—as sacrilegious as that felt to type.
+
+And yet, somehow, "have accurate beliefs" seemed more fundamental than other convergent instrumental subgoals like "seek power and resources". Could this be made precise? As a stab in the dark, was it possible that the [theorems on the ubiquity of power-seeking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DuJxY8X45Sco4bS2/seeking-power-is-often-robustly-instrumental-in-mdps) might generalize to a similar conclusion about "accuracy-seeking"? If it didn't, the reason why it didn't might explain why accuracy seemed more fundamental.
+
+------
+
+And really, that should have been the end of the story. At the cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word _woman_ any way you like. This suggested poor cognitive returns on investment from interacting with the "rationalist" community—if it took that much effort to correct a problem I had noticed myself, I couldn't expect them to help me with problems I couldn't detect—but I didn't think I was entitled to more. If I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.
+
+It turned out that I would have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war. (To be continued.)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Interlude XXII
+Date: 2023-06-15 12:05
+Category: other
+Tags: interlude, cathartic, my robot cult
+
+_(a stray thought from October 2016)_
+
+Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the _uniquely_ best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean _intrinsically_, not just because everyone has it.
+
+ * it's abstract
+ * it [requires effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) to realize
+ * without an unusual amount of [epistemic luck](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck) or an _enormous_ amount of map–territory-distinction skill, virtually everyone _wildly misinterprets_ what the underlying psychological phenomenon is ("That's clearly a mere _effect_ of my horrible, crippling gender dysphoria, not a _cause_—and besides, that's totally normal for cis women, too" _A-ha-ha-ha-ha!_ You delusional bastards!), so the few people who do notice get essential training in the important life skill of [noticing that everything you've ever cared about is a lie](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/) and that [everyone is in on it](/2016/Nov/new-clothes/)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Janet Mock on Late Transitioners
+Date: 2023-06-11
+Category: commentary
+Tags: quotepost, Janet Mock, two-type taxonomy
+
+_(a stray observation [from December 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/#reading-the-janet-mock-autobiography))_
+
+Janet Mock's autobiography _Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More_ is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth", _&c_.). I found myself wondering: does she ... not know [the secret](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology)??
+
+(Or, you know, the story that [makes _so much more sense_ than "gender identity" as a first approximation, even if the underlying reality is going to be more complicated than that](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/).)
+
+Then we get this:
+
+> She introduced herself as Genie [...] She told me she'd undergone GRS five days before me and was accompanied by her girlfriend [...] She was in her mid-forties [...] Before transitioning, Genie worked as an engineer, was married for nearly twenty years, and had a teenage son. [...] Genie met new friends in trans support groups in Sydney, which was where she met her girlfriend, another trans woman. [...] I noticed that Genie made it a point several times to marvel at my appearance and the fact that I was able to transition early. I distinctly remember her telling me over spicy tom yum soup that I had a lot to be grateful for because I was a "freaking babe." [...] Genie's persistent reference to my appearance reflects many people's romanticized notions about trans women who transition at a young age. I've read articles by trans women who transitioned in their thirties and forties, who look at trans girls and women who can blend as cis with such longing, as if our ability to "pass" negates their experiences because they are more often perceived to be trans. The misconception of equating ease of life with "passing" must be dismantled in our culture. The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others.
+
+So the key _observations_ have been made, even if neither the reader nor the author has been equipped with the appropriate theoretical framework to make sense of them.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Proceduralist Sticker Graffiti
+Date: 2023-10-19 15:25
+Category: other
+Tags: anecdotal
+
+Here's how I know that I [moved to](/2023/Sep/start-over/) [the correct side](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#correct-side-of-the-tunnel) of the Caldecott Tunnel.
+
+Just outside my door (which has one lock, three fewer than the old apartment—probably some kind of prior being expressed there), the street lamp post has a "CENSORSHIP IS ANTI-SCIENCE" sticker on it.
+
+<a href="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg"><img src="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg" width="450"></a>
+
+A fire hydrant across the street has an "ELECTION INTEGRITY IS A BIPARTISAN ISSUE" sticker.
+
+<a href="/images/sticker_hydrant.jpg"><img src="/images/sticker_hydrant.jpg" width="208.3"></a>
+<a href="/images/election_integrity_is_a_bitpartisan_issue_sticker.jpg"><img src="/images/election_integrity_is_a_bitpartisan_issue_sticker.jpg" width="450"></a>
+
+What's extraordinary about these slogans is how meta they are: advocating for processes that lead to good results, rather than a position to be adopted by such a process. The anti-censorship sticker isn't protesting that some particular message is being suppressed by the powers that be, but rather that suppressing speech is itself contrary to the scientific method, which selects winning ideas by empiricism rather than by force. The election integrity sticker evinces a commitment to the democratic process, implying that voter fraud and voter suppression both undermine the execution of a free and fair election that represents the popular will, whose outcome is legitimate because the process is legitimate.
+
+I should wish to live in a Society where such thoughts are too commonplace to be worth a sticker, rather than so rare that seeing them expressed in stickers should provoke an entire blog post. As things are, I was happy to see the stickers and felt that they were somehow less out-of-place here than they would have been in Berkeley, fifteen miles west in geographical space and a couple years further in political time.
+
+Who put these stickers here? I wish I could meet them, and find out if I'm projecting too much of my own philosophy onto these simple slogans. What would they say, if prompted to describe their politics and given more than six words of bandwidth to reply? Would their bravery have been deterred (as mine probably would) had their target already been defaced by a decal bearing a different tagline, "STICKER GRAFFITI VIOLATES PROPERTY RIGHTS"?
+
+**Addendum, 15 December 2023**: I missed these ("FREE SPEECH" inside of a heart), at the foot of the lamp post—
+
+<a href="/images/heart_free_speech_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/heart_free_speech_stickers.jpg" width="550"></a>
--- /dev/null
+Title: Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
+Date: 2023-12-18 22:15
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
+
+> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
+>
+> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
+
+In ["Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, proposes what he calls a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."
+
+Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer [sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/) to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsimony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.
+
+Let me explain.
+
+In my ontology of how the world works, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" is _not_ a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians _and_ gay men _and_ heterosexual males with a female gender identity _and_ heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
+
+What do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?
+
+Well, they're all human; that buys you a lot of similarities!
+
+But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".
+
+So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
+
+Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared social experience could induce similarities.
+
+But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
+
+I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
+
+Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
+
+Sometimes I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)
+
+But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a different [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense [as a political coalition](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live the same kind of lives. (Indeed, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
+
+And so, given that I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?
+
+Imagine a Bayesian network with real-valued variables with a cause C at the root, whose influence propagates to many effects (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ → E₄ ...). If someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E<sub>i</sub> when C is between 2 and 3 _or_ between 5 and 6 _or_ above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?
+
+In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant [conditional independence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence) structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.
+
+Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this might seem dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm explaining why I can't take Scott Alexander's theory seriously without even addressing the survey data that he thinks his theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
+
+The thing is, I don't see my theory as making particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine _being_ him/her?" questions asked on the survey.
+
+The reason I'm sold that autogynephila (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people [locate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance) which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
+
+If you're not acquainted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey results. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prerequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica produced by and for men who identify as men.
+
+The surprising thing is that if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over and over again (examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_).
+
+The AGP experiences described in such posts by males who identify as trans women seem strikingly similar to AGP experiences in males who identify as men. I think the very boring hypothesis here is that these are mostly the same people—that identifying as a trans woman is an effect (of [AGP and other factors](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/)) rather than a cause.
+
+After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some data to learn more about what's going on with the pattern. Are these accounts of AGP coming from a visible minority of trans women, or is it actually a majority? When [82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to a "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realized you were trans?" survey](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/), that makes me think it's a majority.
+
+When you pose a superficially similar-sounding question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is nonobvious.
+
+And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for him, Scott Alexander agrees with me: he wrote about this methodological issue in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
+
+> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
+>
+> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
+>
+> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
+
+The reason it makes sense for Alexander to be skeptical of the screening test is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder" don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People already had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" [as a taxon](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/). As an experienced clinician, when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a certainty—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to immediately jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
+
+The failure of surveys to generalize between populations shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–5 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question _wasn't_ "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you _do_ get a lot of "Am I happy then sad sometimes? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's really going on. In slogan form, [you are not measuring what you think you are measuring](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring).
+
+If Alexander is wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think he should be still more wary that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_. Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (for there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the one domain where I think we have strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empathic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail.
+
+This is why I expect the [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/) of "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither Alexander's nor [Moser 2009](/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like to suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl. The common and normal experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body just isn't the same thing as cross-sex embodiment fantasies, even if people who aren't familiar with the [lurid details of the latter](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) don't realize this.
+
+The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable is because my skepticism is specifically about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a higher-bandwidth channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response, like free-form testimony. The account quoted in Alexander's post from a woman claiming to experience AGP does more to convince me that AGP in women might be a real thing than _Slate Star Codex_ survey data showing straight cis women giving a mean response of 2.4 to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine _being_ her?" question. (And even then, I would want to ask followup questions to hopefully distinguish true female AGP from situations like when [a female acquaintance of mine initially seemed to empathize with the concept, but found it bizarre when I elaborated a little more](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-agp).)
+
+While the promise of psychological research is that it might [teach us things about ourselves that we don't already know](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), I still mostly expect it to [all add up to normality](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/adding-up-to-normality)—to retrodict the things we've already observed without the research.
+
+My disquiet with Alexander's "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender" (and similarly Aella's ["Everyone Has Autogynephilia"](https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia)) is that it visibly fails to add up to normality. In a world where it was _actually true_ that "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]", I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking to look like the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts, and that's just not what I see.
+
+Consider [this quip from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
+
+> The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
+>
+> The answer: Yes
+
+I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women and non-transitioned AGP men very frequently. (I speak from experience.) Do cis lesbians often feel this way about each other? I'm inclined to doubt it—_and the author seems to agree with me_ by calling the phenomenon a "trans lesbian" question rather than just a "lesbian" question! I think the very boring hypothesis here is that this is because trans lesbians are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians. And I think that authors who can't bring themselves to say as much in those words are [going to end up confusing themselves about the statistical structure of real life](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), even if they can agree that trans lesbians and straight men have some things in common.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Start Over
+Date: 2023-09-23 21:15
+Category: other
+Tags: anecdotal, personal
+
+> _Can we all start over
+> After the final chapter's end?
+> When it all starts over
+> How do these scars begin to mend?_
+>
+> —_Centaurworld_
+
+I moved apartments the other week, on some philosopher's birthday or the anniversary of a national tragedy, to a nice studio in a nice neighborhood back on the correct side of the Caldecott Tunnel ([now that I've learned my lesson about](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#correct-side-of-the-tunnel) which side of the tunnel is correct).
+
+I had been making noises about leaving Berkeley [for a while](/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/), but kept not getting around to it until my hand was forced by my roommate moving out. Insofar as I was complaining about the political culture, you might think that I should have fled the Bay entirely, to a different region which might have different kinds of people. Reno, probably. Or Austin (which may be the Berkeley of Texas, but at least it's the Berkeley _of Texas_).
+
+I don't think a longer move was necessary. I mostly live on the internet, anyway: insofar as "Berkeley" was a metonym for [the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/), it's unclear how much leaving the literal city would help.
+
+Although—it may not be entirely a coincidence that I feel better having left the literal city? Moving is a Schelling point for new beginnings, new habits. The [sense](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) [that](/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/) my life is over hasn't fully gone away, but now I have more hope in finding meaning and not just pleasure in this afterlife [while it lasts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), perhaps fueled by regret-based superpowers.
+
+I'm happy. I have a lot of writing to do.
+
+-----
+
+In my old neighborhood in the part of Berkeley that's secretly Oakland (the city limits forming a penninsula just around my apartment), there used to be a "free store" on the corner—shelves for people to leave unwanted consumer goods and to take them to a good home. It stopped being a thing shortly before I left, due to some combination of adverse attention from city municipal code inspectors, [and a fire](https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/07/21/south-berkeley-free-store-destroyed-by-fire).
+
+In memoriam, there was a butcher-paper sign on the fence with a pen on a string, asking community members to write a note on what the free store had meant to them.
+
+One of the messages read:
+
+> i'm a (very broke) trans woman
+> and i don't often feel great about
+> my body, but there are a few items
+> that i found here that fit me in a way
+> thats very affirming to me
+
+There are so many questions (of the rhetorical or probing varieties) I could ask of my neighbor who wrote that message. ([Why mention](/2021/Mar/point-man/) being trans at all? Don't many cis women often not feel great about their bodies? What do you think are the differences between you and a man who might have written a message starting "I'm a (very broke) transvestite"? Or is it just that such a man's sense of public decency would bid him keep quiet ... or, just possibly, write a message more like yours?)
+
+But—not my neighbor.
+
+I don't live there anymore.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2024-03-02 13:45
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+
+> It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.
+>
+> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
+
+Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: [ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. [So it came as a huge surprise when](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense. A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word _woman_ (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), [I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify. When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake [led to a series of small misadventures](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.
+
+Really, that should have been the end of the story—with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+
+That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.
+
+[TOC]
+
+### _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.
+
+Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The _Times_ article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:
+
+> In one post, [Alexander] [aligned himself with Charles Murray](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."[^sloppy]
+
+[^sloppy]: It was unevenly sloppy of the _Times_ to link the first post, ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/), but not the second, ["Against Murderism"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/)—especially since "Against Murderism" is specifically about Alexander's skepticism of _racism_ as an explanatory concept and therefore contains objectively more damning sentences to quote out of context than a passing reference to Charles Murray. Apparently, the _Times_ couldn't even be bothered to smear Scott with misconstruals of his actual ideas, if guilt by association did the trick with less effort on the part of both journalist and reader.
+
+But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in ["Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/) in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexander had written that ["Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/): pessimism about our Society's ability to intervene to alleviate poverty does not amount to the claim that poverty is "genetic.")
+
+[Alexander's reply statement](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article) pointed out the _Times_'s obvious chicanery, but (I claim) introduced a distortion of its own—
+
+> The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray's offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.
+
+It _is_ a weirdly brazen invalid inference. But by calling it a "falsehood", Alexander heavily implies he disagrees with Murray's offensive views on race: in invalidating the _Times_'s charge of guilt by association with Murray, Alexander validates Murray's guilt.
+
+But anyone who's read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically mediated differences in socially relevant traits between ancestry groups (as a value-free matter of empirical science with no particular normative implications). For example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris on his old LiveJournal](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#twin-studies) for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III of his ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) indicates that he accepts genetics as an explanation for group differences in the particular case of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence.[^murray-alignment]
+
+[^murray-alignment]: As far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, it's notable that Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in [a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post](https://archive.vn/xu7PX).
+
+There are a lot of standard caveats that go here which Alexander would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: [the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats). It is entirely conceivable that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white IQ gap is fake and environmental.[^bet] Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.
+
+[^bet]: It's just—how much do you want to bet on that? How much do you think _Scott_ wants to bet?
+
+But anyone who's read _and understood_ Charles Murray's work, knows that [Murray also includes the standard caveats](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average)![^murray-caveat] (Even though the one about group differences not implying anything about individuals is [technically wrong](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/).) The _Times_'s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist _like Charles Murray_ seems like a "[Gettier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted _New York Times_ readers is completely bogus.
+
+[^murray-caveat]: For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of _The Bell Curve_, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other."
+
+### The Politics of the Apolitical
+
+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 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).
+
+I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than being specific to American politics or "the left". In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a positive [technical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) [discipline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gk8Dvynrr9FWBztD4/what-s-a-market) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).[^logical-induction]
+
+[^logical-induction]: I've wondered how hard it would have been to come up with MIRI's [logical induction result](https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543) (which describes an asymptotic algorithm for estimating the probabilities of mathematical truths in terms of a betting market composed of increasingly complex traders) in the Soviet Union.
+
+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]
+
+[^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.
+
+ But if you're [familiar with the literature](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad) and understand the [use–mention distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction), the literal claims in [the original email](https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf) are entirely reasonable. (There are additional things one could say about [what prosocial functions are being served by](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts) the taboos against what the younger Bostrom called "the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity", which would make for fine mailing-list replies, but the original email can't be abhorrent simply for failing to anticipate all possible counterarguments.)
+
+ I didn't speak up at the time of the old-email scandal, either. I had other things to do with my attention and Overton budget.
+
+It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the cover-up.
+
+As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (We think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a handful of East and South Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Altruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)) but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.[^survey-data]
+
+[^survey-data]: We go from 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results) to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)—although the [2020 EA survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics) says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we."
+
+But _trans!_ We have plenty of those! In [the same blog post in which Scott Alexander characterized rationalism as the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/), he also named "don't misgender trans people" as one of the group's distinguishing norms. Two years later, he joked that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).
+
+The benefit of having plenty of trans people is that high-ranking members of the [progressive stack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack) can be trotted out as a shield to prove that we're not counterrevolutionary right-wing Bad Guys. Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _New York Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" should have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
+
+Even the haters grudgingly give Alexander credit for ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): "I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least acknowledging you were wrong", [wrote one](https://archive.is/SlJo1).
+
+<a id="dump-stats"></a>Under these circumstances, dethroning the supremacy of gender identity ideology is politically impossible. All our [Overton margin](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) is already being spent somewhere else; sanity on this topic is our [dump stat](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat).
+
+But this being the case, _I have no reason to participate in the cover-up_. What's in it for me? Why should I defend my native subculture from external attack, if the defense preparations themselves have already rendered it uninhabitable to me?
+
+### A Leaked Email Non-Scandal (February 2021)
+
+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 think the main reason someone _would_ consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read _Slate Star Codex_ that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse that he [wrote up an explanation of what _reactionaries_ (of all people) believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)—and then [turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're totally wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/)." As a first approximation, it's not a terrible picture. But what it misses—what _Scott_ knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent before concluding (of course) that they're wrong. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting _right_.
+
+The same day, Yudkowsky published [a Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl) that said[^brennan-condemnation-edits]:
+
+> I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
+
+[^brennan-condemnation-edits]: The post was subsequently edited a number of times in ways that I don't think are relevant to my discussion here.
+
+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."
+
+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 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.
+
+ To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or [stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy)) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter.
+
+Here, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's because I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our actual problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because [the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)", but we thought our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!
+
+Yudkowsky [replied that](/images/yudkowsky-we_need_to_exclude_evil_bullies.png) everyone had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable [Kolmogorov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.
+
+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. 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):
+
+> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
+
+In reply, Michael Vassar tagged me. "Michael, I thought you weren't talking to me [(after my failures of 18–19 December)](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-private-catastrophe-december-2020)?" [I said](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362549606538641413). "But yeah, I wrote a couple blog posts about this thing", linking to ["Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) and ["Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)
+
+After a few moments, I decided it was better if I [explained the significance of Michael tagging me](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113):
+
+> Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!
+
+And I think I _would_ have been over it ...
+
+—except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation four days later, on 22 February 2021, with [a new Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228) explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions. It concludes that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically rude_, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_."
+
+(Why!? Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? Did my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying by implicature temporarily bring my concerns to the top of his attention, despite the fact that I'm generally not that important?)
+
+### 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). Furthermore, this misrepresentation would have harmful effects insofar as anyone was dumb enough to believe it: gender-dysphoric people deciding whether or not to socially transition need a correct model of how English pronouns work in the real world in order to perform an accurate cost–benefit analysis.
+
+[^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).
+
+I have more to say here (that I decided to cut from "Challenges") about the meta-level political context. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a fascinating document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.
+
+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 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 I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We only infer whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing [a variety of correlated characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic). Thus, the complaint that sex-based pronoun conventions rudely demand that people "agree[ ] [...] about the clustering thing" is hypocritical, because Yudkowsky's proposal also expects people to agree about the clustering thing. Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to (without having explicitly asked for pronouns), one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.
+
+Thus, Yudkowsky's "gamete-size default" proposal can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flail at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex.
+
+One could argue that this is hostile nitpicking on my part: that the use of "gamete size" as a metonym for sex here is either an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition (because if you said _sex_, _female_, or _male_, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision.
+
+But the post seems to suggest that the motive isn't simply to avoid ambiguity. Yudkowsky writes:
+
+> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
+>
+> And I'm not happy that the very language I use, would try to force me to take a position on that; not a complicated nuanced position, but a binarized position, _simply in order to talk grammatically about people at all_.
+
+What does the "tossed into a bucket" metaphor refer to, though? I can think of many things that might be summarized that way, and my sympathy for the one who does not like to be tossed into a bucket depends on exactly what real-world situation is being mapped to the bucket.
+
+If we're talking about overt gender role enforcement—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband," or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.
+
+(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt out of the default buckets without causing too much trouble.)
+
+But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons having genuine merit—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "Your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the individuating information you have about me in particular being huge crybaby, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I don't think people have a general right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
+
+When piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
+>
+> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.
+
+I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color seems pretty bad. The people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
+
+But taking the convention as given, a demand to be referred to as having a hair color _that one does not have_ seems outrageous to me!
+
+It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of genuine nuance brought on by a genuine complication to a system that _falsely_ assumes discrete hair colors.
+
+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 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 extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is absurd. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated, nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive is obfuscation—unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
+
+### It Matters Whether People's Beliefs About Themselves Are Actually True
+
+Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. My _previous_ [hopeless ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) was [against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I hated being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.
+
+I sometimes describe myself as mildly "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely understood vocabulary for my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity). But if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was vastly worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.
+
+(I remember being particularly distraught one day at the end of community college physics class, and stumbling to the guidance counselor to inquire urgently about just escaping this place with an associate's degree, rather than transferring to a university to finish my bachelor's as planned. I burst into tears again when the counselor mentioned that there would be a physical education requirement. It wasn't that a semester of P.E. would be difficult; it was the indignity of being subject to such meaningless requirements before Society would see me as a person.)
+
+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 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 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).)
+
+Someone who uncritically validated my dislike of the Student Bucket rather than assessing my reasons, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, not a map that reflects my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than denying it or claiming that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism could match the standard set by schools, even if it hadn't that time. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When I interviewed for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
+
+If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the solution to "student dysphoria", it should be clear why the same applies to gender dysphoria. There's a general underlying principle: it matters whether that self-image is true.
+
+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]
+
+[^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).
+
+This also isn't a particularly advanced rationality skill. This is basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
+
+Back in 2009, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I hadn't yet grown out of [my teenage ideological fever dream of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was a poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I [passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj). In [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
+
+[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):
+
+> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—**or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is [not _necessarily_ something to integrate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me).**
+
+_I knew_. Even then, _I knew_ I had to qualify my not liking to be tossed into a Male Bucket. I could object to Yudkowsky speaking as if men were a collective with shared normative ideals ("a lifetime's work to integrate"), but I couldn't claim to somehow not be male, or even that people couldn't make probabilistic predictions about me given the fact that I'm male ("the fact of masculinity"), _because that would be crazy_. The culture of early _Less Wrong_ wouldn't have let me get away with that.
+
+It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or if it has any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.
+
+### A Filter Affecting Your Evidence
+
+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 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."
+
+On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky does not obviously disagree with this interpretation of his behavior? First, we get [a disclaimer comment](/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png):
+
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
+>
+> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
+>
+> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
+>
+> 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.
+
+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."
+
+But if he _did_ put in the effort to aspire to [the virtue of evenness](https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Twelve-Virtues-Of-Rationality)—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and still ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without mentioning any of its obvious costs, that's discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is that bad, why would you trust his opinion about anything?
+
+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 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.
+
+But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be applied to everything you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in the community didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students wouldn't be able to hear it, would have been rightfully seen as absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's [resentment of the tyranny of schools](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/) by [selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year](https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users).) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his faithful students _don't read Steve Sailer_, he should notice that he's running a cult or a fandom rather than an intellectual community.
+
+Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue as to what's going on here](/images/yudkowsky-people_might_be_able_to_speak_that.png):
+
+> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
+
+(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is very interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community is, in fact, a partisan institution. An intellectual community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality would not have an _other side_.)
+
+I think (a) and (b) as stated are clearly false, so "we" (who?) aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some similar hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
+
+Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf).[^motivatedly-inaccurate]
+
+[^motivatedly-inaccurate]: The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!
+
+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/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.
+
+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):
+
+> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
+>
+> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
+
+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.)
+
+[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). 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](/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
+
+Having analyzed the ways in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is why. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
+
+Of course, presumably he doesn't think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png):
+
+> I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in a line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to others after the fact.
+
+The best explanation of this I know of was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
+
+> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
+>
+> Sorry. It can't be done.
+>
+> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
+>
+> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
+
+The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to others, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
+>
+> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
+>
+> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
+
+The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of illogical argument, even though both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) and the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises; the reason all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general form "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
+
+Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the real reasons. The post concludes:
+
+> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
+>
+> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
+> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
+> * Process the checklist.
+> * Go to the winning candidate.
+> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
+> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
+>
+> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
+
+I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset, that you somehow "can't" argue for something! It's a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changing was that they articulated the existence of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
+
+... 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 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.
+
+I just—would have hoped that abandoning the intellectual legacy of his Sequences, would be a price too high for such a paltry benefit?
+
+Michael Vassar [said](https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098), "Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments." By accepting that soldiers are arguments ("I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), Yudkowsky is accepting the end of rationalism in this sense. If the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
+
+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 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](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.
+
+But if you cared about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be sure that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore politically unfavorable counterarguments_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion".
+
+I think he's playing dumb here. In other contexts, he's written about ["attack[s] performed by selectively reporting true information"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824) and ["[s]tatements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false"](https://hpmor.com/chapter/97). He's undoubtedly familiar with the motte-and-bailey doctrine as [described by Nicholas Shackel](https://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf) and [popularized by Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/). I think that if he wanted to, Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences between "2 + 2 = 4" and "the simplest and best protocol is, "_He_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_".
+
+If you think it's "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you live in a red state and "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a Republican shill, even if every sentence you said was true.[^the-wizard-metz] If you tried to defend yourself against the charge of being a Republican shill by pointing out that you've never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican," that's a nice motte, but you shouldn't expect devoted rationalists to fall for it.
+
+[^the-wizard-metz]: It's instructive to consider that [Cade Metz could just as credibly offer the same excuse](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly/comment/9YkXk43b4LC4vaCTs).
+
+Similarly, when Yudkowsky [wrote in June 2021](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921), "I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much", it was a great motte. I don't doubt the literal motte stated literally.
+
+And yet it seems worth noting that shortly after proclaiming in March 2016 that he was "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women", he made [a followup post celebrating having caused someone's transition](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228):
+
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+He [later clarified on Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403), "It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy."
+
+But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you _shouldn't_ mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic; he's not going to tell us about reasons not to transition. He's playing on a different chessboard.
+
+### People Who Are Trying to Be People Want to Improve Their Self-Models
+
+"[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 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):
+
+> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.
+
+When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
+
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about "trans" culture in the current year. It actively discourages self-modeling! People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into a gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful and hurtful.
+
+The problem is not that I think there's anything wrong with fantasizing about being the other sex and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not her seeing anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
+
+The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to achieve their goals _in reality_, do so in a way that involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves, and that's not possible in a culture that tries to ban as heresy the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
+
+A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
+
+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_.[^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.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there are incentives to relocate our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://web.archive.org/web/20210513192331/http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But I would have expected people with an inkling of self-awareness and honesty to notice the incentives, and the problems being created by them, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution, [whatever that turns out to be](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)?
+
+And if that's too much to expect of the general public—
+
+And if it's too much to expect garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
+
+Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to take actions _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... speech? I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character_.
+
+### Criticism of Public Statements Is About the Public Statements, Not Subjective Intent
+
+This is the part where Yudkowsky or his flunkies accuse me of being uncharitable, of [failing at perspective-taking](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435617576495714304) and [embracing conspiracy theories](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242). Obviously, Yudkowsky doesn't _think of himself_ as trying to transform his faithful students into Jane Austen characters. Perhaps, then, I have failed to understand his position? [As Yudkowsky put it](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
+
+> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing` instead.
+
+But the substance of my complaints is [not about Yudkowsky's conscious subjective narrative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie). I don't have a lot of uncertainty about Yudkowsky's theory of himself, because he told us that, very clearly: "it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment." I don't doubt that that's [how the algorithm feels from the inside](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside).
+
+But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is _doing_ in Stalin's service, not about how it feels; I'm talking about a pattern of publicly visible _behavior_ stretching over years, not claiming to be a mind-reader. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but it does not therefore follow that no one ever does anything terrible.
+
+I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing `terrible_thing`. But if you have the receipts of the Other repeatedly doing the thing in public from 2016 to 2021, maybe yelling about it to everyone else might help _them_ stop getting suckered by the Other's empty posturing.
+
+Let's recap.
+
+### Recap of Yudkowsky's History of Public Statements on Transgender Identity
+
+In January 2009, Yudkowsky published ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), essentially a revision of [a 2004 mailing list post responding to a man who said that after the Singularity, he'd like to make a female but "otherwise identical" copy of himself](https://archive.is/En6qW). "Changing Emotions" insightfully points out [the deep technical reasons why](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard) men who sexually fantasize about being women can't achieve their dream with foreseeable technology—and not only that, but that the dream itself is conceptually confused: a man's fantasy about it being fun to be a woman isn't part of the female distribution; there's a sense in which it _can't_ be fulfilled.
+
+It was a good post! Yudkowsky was merely using the sex change example to illustrate [a more general point about the difficulties of applied transhumanism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), but "Changing Emotions" was hugely influential on me; I count myself much better off for having understood the argument.
+
+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 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 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](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243) "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](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) "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 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).
+
+But then in February 2021, he reopened the discussion to proclaim that "the simplest and best protocol is, '_He_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_, with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition", the problems with which post I explained in March 2022's ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) and above.
+
+End recap.
+
+### An Adversarial Game
+
+At this point, the nature of the game is clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of [not writing any sentences he knows to be false](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#2__The_law_of_no_literal_falsehood_). Meanwhile, I want to make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regarding sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
+
+On "my turn", I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [perhaps not technically making any unambiguously false atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was substantively misleading compared to what any serious person would say if they were trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+
+At the start, I never expected to end up arguing about the minutiæ of pronoun conventions, which no one would care about if contingencies of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point for things people do care about. The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was trying to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
+
+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 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 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 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.
+
+What makes all of this especially galling is that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing or foreseeable technology because of how complicated humans (and therefore human sex differences) are? Not original to me! I [filled in a few technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was in the Sequences as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries [compress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) your [anticipated experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences)? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+
+Seriously, do you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this independently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still cared about telling the truth_. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year are almost entirely things he already said, that anyone could just look up!
+
+I guess the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're playing the part well enough today, no one cares what you said in 2009?
+
+Does he expect the rest of us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+
+But I don't think that everybody knows. And I'm not giving up that easily. Not on an entire subculture full of people.
+
+### The Battle That Matters
+
+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.
+
+There are a number of things that could be said to this,[^number-of-things] but most importantly: the battle that matters—the battle with a Right Side and a Wrong Side—isn't "pro-trans" _vs._ "anti-trans". (The central tendency of the contemporary trans rights movement is firmly on the Wrong Side, but that's not the same thing as all trans people as individuals.) That's why Jessica Taylor [joined our posse to try to argue with Yudkowsky in early 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#jessica-joins). (She wouldn't have if my objection had been, "Trans is Wrong; trans people Bad.") That's why Somni—one of the trans women who [infamously protested the 2019 CfAR reunion](https://www.ksro.com/2019/11/18/new-details-in-arrests-of-masked-camp-meeker-protesters/) for (among other things) CfAR allegedly discriminating against trans women—[understands what I've been saying](https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind).
+
+[^number-of-things]: Note the striking contrast between ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument), in which the Yudkowsky of 2007 wrote that a campaign manager "crossed the line [between rationality and rationalization] at the point where [they] considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to [their] candidate, before deciding whether to publish it", and these 2021 Tweets, in which Yudkowsky seems nonchalant about "not hav[ing] been as willing to tweet a truth helping" one side of a cultural dispute, because "this battle just isn't that close to the top of [his] priority list". Well, sure! Any hired campaign manager could say the same: helping the electorate make an optimally informed decision just isn't that close to the top of their priority list, compared to getting paid.
+
+ Yudkowsky's claim to have been focused on nudging people's cognition towards sanity seems dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors in both political camps. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make proportionately more errors on the "pro-Stalin" side, because Stalinists aren't facing social pressure to avoid errors.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", [judging by local demographics](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/), it seems much more likely to apply to trans women themselves than their critics!
+
+The battle that matters—and I've been explicit about this, for years—is over this proposition eloquently [stated by Scott Alexander in November 2014](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (redacting the irrelevant object-level example):
+
+> I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
+
+This is a battle between Feelings and Truth, between Politics and Truth.
+
+In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to [tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him)](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton).
+
+You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him).
+
+And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female with respect to a concept of binary sex that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).
+
+If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.
+
+Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't hold that against him, because Scott is [explicit about only speaking in the capacity of some guy with a blog](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/).[^hexaco] You can tell that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is alright. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.
+
+[^hexaco]: The authors of the [HEXACO personality model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure) may have gotten something importantly right in [grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality).
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky did not _unambiguously_ choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he knows to be unambiguously false. And the reason I can hold it against _him_ is because Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is _absolutely_ trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself a rationality master so superior to mere Earthlings that he might as well be from dath ilan, who ["aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608). He [complains that "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to [him]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929).
+
+In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't claim to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.
+
+If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, and refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign), and keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I _am_ the victim of false advertising.[^gould-analogy] His marketing bluster was designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.[^gullible]
+
+[^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 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.
+
+Perhaps he thinks it's unreasonable for someone to hold him to higher standards. As he [wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984) [on](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752) [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976) in February 2021:
+
+> 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 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 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 basic epistemic standards successfully upheld by biology professors.
+
+It [looks foolish in retrospect](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/), 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.
+
+Part of what made him so trustworthy back then was that he wasn't asking for trust. He clearly _did_ think it was [unvirtuous to just shut up and listen to him](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus): "I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science). He was always arrogant, but it was tempered by the expectation of being held to account by arguments rather than being deferred to as a social superior. "I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary," [he wrote](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why).
+
+He visibly [cared about other people being in touch with reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business). "I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before," [he wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY). (I can testify that this is true: while sharing a car ride with Anna Salamon in 2011, he told me I had B.O.)[^bo-heroism]
+
+[^bo-heroism]: A lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in [noticing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.
+
+ What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I _would_ expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people who do not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket, which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad.
+
+That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing. Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or may not have happened, I think he knows it.
+
+If the caliph has lost his [belief in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1) the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is [beyond the reach of God](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god); there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better consequences than propaganda.
+
+But since I haven't lost my belief in honesty, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.
+
+The modern Yudkowsky [writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584):
+
+> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
+
+I notice that this advice fails to highlight the possibility that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show (judged to be personally prudent and not community-harmful), rather than a misperception on your part. I am left shaking my head in a [weighted average of](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) sadness about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and disgust at his duplicity. **If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambiguously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_.**
+
+A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless [boo light](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights). I specifically and [literally mean it](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) in [_Merriam-Webster_'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud)—and I think I've made my case. (The "epistemic hero" posturing isn't compatible with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" prevarication; he needs to choose one or the other.) Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, [rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism).
+
+Second, it's a conditional: _if_ Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, _then_ he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean, he could do so at any time.
+
+He probably won't. We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?
+
+Third, given that "fraud" is a semantically meaningful description rather than an emotive negative evaluation, I should stress that evaluation is a separate step. If being a fraud were necessary for saving the world, maybe being a fraud would be the right thing to do? More on this in the next post. (To be continued.)
+++ /dev/null
-Title: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy
-Status: draft
-
-> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
->
-> —Zora Neale Hurston
-
-Recapping our story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things about the structure of systematically correct reasoning) how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was (given merely human-level technology), and that it's actually immoral _not_ to believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/), I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly starting claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena or even just asked what that means, until I eventually had a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown, got sent to psychiatric prison once, and then went crazy again a couple months later.
-
-That's not the really egregious part of the story. The thing is, psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I would certainly be disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. (And indeed, I did [end up moderating my views somewhat](TODO: linky "Useful Approximation") compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2017 took Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence as received truth. I don't regret this, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still very obviously _directionally_ correct compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)
-
-But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
-
-But this is wrong. To be clear, it's true _that_ categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are in the "map", not the "territory"—and it's true that trans women might be women _with respect to_ some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, the Scott Alexander piece that people kept linking to me goes further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories _in order to make trans people feel better_:
-
-> I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
-
-This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world _in order to_ capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to _reflect_ the territory, and there _are_ "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. [Yudkowsky wrote a whole Sequence about this](TODO linky "A Human's Guide") back in 'aught-eight, as part of the original Sequences. Alexander cites [a post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home _over and over and over again_, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless _not_ arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are [at least 37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—principles that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology."
-
-Importantly, this is a very general point about how language itself works _that has nothing to do with gender_. No matter what you believe about politically controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if [positive consequence]" is not correct philosophy, _independently of the particular values of X and Y_.
-
-Also, this ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But at this point I still trusted people in my robot cult to be basically intellectually honest, rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, so I endeavored to respond to the category-boundary argument as if it were a serious argument. When I quit my dayjob in March 2017 in order to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (which Alexander [graciously included in his next linkpost](https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55)). A few months later, I followed it up with ["Reply to _The Unit of Caring_ on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), responding to a similar argument. I'm proud of those posts: I think Alexander's and _Unit of Caring_'s arguments were incredibly dumb, and with a lot of effort, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining exactly why to anyone with the reading comprehension skills to understand.
-
-At this point, I was _disappointed_ with my impact, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community". People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was _entitled_ to anything more than that.
-
-... and, really, that _should_ have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people occasionally, but my personal obsession wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on religious civil war.
-
-[TODO: I was at the company offsite browsing Twitter (which I had recently joined with fantasies of self-cancelling) when I saw the "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"]
-
-This is the moment where I _flipped the fuck out_.
-
-> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
-
-> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
-
-> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
-
-> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
-
-> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
-
-> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
-
-> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
-
-> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
-
-> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
-
-[TODO: careful breakdown of exactly what's wrong with the thread (pull from "I still owe you money; and, discourse on categories and the fourth virtue")]
-
-—exhaustive breakdown of exactly what's wrong ; I trusted Yudkowsky and I _did_ think I was entitled to more]
-
-[TODO: getting support from Michael + Ben + Sarah, harrassing Scott and Eliezer]
-
-[TODO: proton concession]
-
-[TODO: minor psych episode in March 2019]
-
-[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
-
-[TODO: more blogging (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aqumaym7Jd2qhDcy/containment-thread-on-the-motivation-and-political-context), 2019 Christmas party, disclaimer on "Categories Were Made"]
-["Univariate fallacy" also a concession]
-
-[TODO: categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
-
-[TODO: "simplest and best" pronoun proposal, sometimes personally prudent; support from Oli]
-
-
-
-
-[TODO: the dolphin war, our thoughts about dolphins are literally downstream from Scott's political incentives in 2014; this is a sign that we're a cult]
-
-[TODO: why you should care; no one should like Scott and Eliezer's proposals; knowledge should go forward, not back — what I would have hoped for, what you can do; hating that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy; the Church is _still there_ sucking up adherents; this is unambiguously a betrayal rather than a mistake]
-[TODO: the Death With Dignity era]
\ No newline at end of file
+++ /dev/null
-Title: A Human's (Abridged) Guide to Gender Words
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: commentary
-Tags: epistemology
-Status: draft
-
-([Previously](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), [previously](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/).)
-
-The one says,
-
-It is likewise written [of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence):
-
-> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates**. Arguing against weaker advocates proves *nothing*, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
-
- [metaethics sequence](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence), I was part of the crowd saying, "Wait, how is this any different from anti-realism? You agree that there's no morality in the laws of physics themselves."
-
-I agree that there's no morality written in the laws of physics, no [ontological XML tag](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PoDAyQMWEXBBBEJ5P/magical-categories) of Intrinsic Goodness, but you're not *done* [dissolving the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question) just by making that observation. People seem to be doing *cognitive work* when they argue about morality. What is the nature of that cognitive work? *That* is the question I am attempting to answer."
-
-Similarly with categories in general, and sex (or "gender") categorization in particular. It's true that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. But you're _not done_ dissolving the question just by making that observation. And the one who triumphantly shouts in the public square, "And *therefore*, people who object to my preferred use of language are ontologically confused!" is *ignoring the interesting part of the problem*. Gender identity's [claim to be non-disprovable](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable) mostly functions as a way to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points).
-
-An illustrative example: like many gender-dysphoric males, I cosplay female characters at conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm *not very good at it*. I think someone looking at my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word *man* in that sentence is expressing *cognitive work*: it's a summary of the [lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally-observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, *&c.*), from which evidence an agent using an [efficient naïve-Bayes-like model](http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/) can assign me to its "man" category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about some of my traits that aren't directly observable from the photo, and achieve a better [score on those predictions](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) than if the agent had assigned me to its "woman" category, where by "traits" I mean not *just* chromosomes, but the *conjunction* of chromosomes *and* reproductive organs _and_ muscle mass (sex difference effect size of [Cohen's *d*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d)≈2.6) *and* Big Five Agreeableness (*d*≈0.5) *and* Big Five Neuroticism (*d*≈0.4) *and* short-term memory (*d*≈0.2, favoring women) *and* white-to-gray-matter ratios in the brain *and* probable socialization history *and* [lots of other things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology)—including differences we might not necessarily currently know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist: no one _knew_ about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given all the other systematic differences between women and men, it would have been a reasonable guess (that turned out to be correct!) to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.
-
-Making someone say "trans woman" instead of "man" in that sentence depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to *lie*. But it *is* forcing them to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "men" [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure ("trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster). This encoding might not confuse a well-designed AI into making any bad predictions, but [it probably will confuse humans](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences):
-
-> You can see this in terms of similarity clusters: once you draw a boundary around a group, the mind starts trying to harvest similarities from the group. And unfortunately the human pattern-detectors seem to operate in such overdrive that we see patterns whether they're there or not; a weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory.
-
-Consider again the 6.7:1 (!!) cis-woman-to-trans-woman ratio among 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ survey respondents. The ratio in the general population is going to be more like 86:1 (estimate derived from dividing 50% (female share of population according to [Fisher's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle)) by 0.58% (trans share of U.S. population according to a [2016 report](http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-the-United-States.pdf))).
-
-A curious rationalist, having been raised to believe that trans women are women, and considering observations like this, might ask the question: "Gee, I wonder _why_ women-who-happen-to-be-trans are _so much_ more likely to read _Slate Star Codex_, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women-who-happen-to-be-cis?"
-
-If you're _very careful_, I'm sure it's possible to give a truthful answer to that question without misgendering anyone. But if you want to give a _concise_ answer—perhaps not a _maximally rigorous_ answer, but an answer that usefully [points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) to the true causal-structure-in-the-world while still fitting in a Tweet—I think you _need_ to be able to say something like, "Because trans women are men." (At least as a _live hypothesis_, even if you prefer an intersex-brain etiology for the people we know.)
-
-Maybe we'd _usually_ prefer not to phrase it like that, both for reasons of politeness, and because we can be more precise at the cost of using more words ("Interests and sexual orientation may better predicted by natal sex rather than social gender in this population; also, not all trans women have had sex reassignment surgery and so retain their natal-sex anatomy"?). But I think the short version needs to be _sayable_, because if it's not _sayable_, then that's artificially restricting the hypothesis spaces that people use to think with, which is bad (if you care about human intelligence being useful).
-
-an attempted [conversation-halter of the appeal-to-arbitrariness type](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
-
-But having _done_ the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street _has a point_ that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? [As it is written](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
-
-I bring up me and Danielle Muscato as examples because I think those are edge cases that help illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome) to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street _would_ be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like [Blaire White](http://msblairewhite.com/) (who is also trans). That's _evidence_ about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there _is_ a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to _find_ what that better way is, I think we need to be able to _talk_ about these kinds of details in public. And I think statements like "Calling pronouns lies is not what you do when you know how to use words" hinder that discussion rather than helping it, by functioning as [semantic stopsigns](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns).
-
-Again, satire is a _very weak_ form of argument, but
-
-**Bob** : When people say "Now let us bow our heads and praise the Lord our God", they're not lying, because "Now let us bow our heads" is a _speech act_, not a statement of fact.
-**Alice** : I agree that it's a speech act rather than a factual assertion, but isn't that observation pretty misleading in isolation? I don't understand _why_ you would say that and _only_ that, unless you were deliberately trying to get your readers to believe in God without actually having to _say_ "God exists."
-**Bob**: Calling speech acts "lies" is _not_ what you do when you know how to use words. But mostly, I think this is not very important.
-
-As with all satire, you can point out _differences_ between this satirical dialogue and the real-world situation that it's trying to satirize. But are they _relevant_ differences? To be sure, "Does God exist?" is a _much more straightforward_ question than "Are trans women women?" because existence questions in general are easier than parismonious-categorization-that-carves-nature-at-the-joints questions. But I think that ["when you take a step back, feel the flow of debate, observe the cognitive traffic signals"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters), the satirical dialogue is exhibiting the same _structural_ problems [...]
-
-This actually seems like a broken conversation pattern for _any_ X, Y, and Z:
-
-**Alice**: It's _not true_ that X is an instance of Y, because of reason Z!
-**Bob**: Using language in a way *you* dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.
-**Alice**: Fine, have it your way. As a matter of policy, I argue that we should use language such that we would say that X is not an instance of Y. And the _reason_ that's a good policy decision is Z.
-**Bob**: ... um, sorry, out of time, gotta go.
--- /dev/null
+Title: "ASL Is Not a Language"
+Date: 2022-10-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: politics
+Status: draft
+
+On 11/23/19 8:41 AM, Michael Vassar wrote:
+> Absolutely, but the situation is analogous to that with trans people in most respects, so it does justify the claim that in the absence of people who have it out for trans people the much more numerous and Internet active trans activists would be able to enforce their position across the entire internet, which does mean that trans advocates have a good Bayesian prior on their expectation that anyone opposing their dogmas publicly has it out for them.
+>
+> On Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 11:32 AM Zack M. Davis <main@zackmdavis.net> wrote:
+>
+> Asymmetric incentives: deaf people and allies have reasons to push "ASL
+> is a language", but there's no coalition that has it out for deaf
+> people. Thus, any curious scholars who honestly think there are large
+> and important differences between sign and spoken languages probably
+> don't want to loudly summarize their position as "... is not a language."
+>
+>
+> On 11/23/19 8:00 AM, Michael Vassar wrote:
+> > Just discovering that as far as I can tell, the 'ASL is a language'
+> > ideology achieves literally perfect internet censorship.
+> > The internet makes constant reference to people claiming to refute the
+> > claim that ASL is not a language, but has no webpages from people
+> > arguing that it is not a language.
+> >
+> > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Linguistic_universal
+> >
+> > Is as close as it comes,
+> > Go down to "Impossibility to prove universals".
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Beyond the Binary
-Date: 2021-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: information theory, deniably allegorical
-Status: draft
-
-You know what this blog needs? _More vectors_. You know, like, [lists of numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(mathematics_and_physics))? Looking back over the archives, I find myself _mortified_ at how much time I've _wasted_ writing about things that _aren't math_. (The [effect-size-deflation post](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) was okay, I _guess_.)
-
-What was I thinking? Maybe I should just delete it all to spare myself the embarrassment. In any case, this is an information-theory fanblog now! Gender?—I barely _know_ her.
-
-Let _V_ be a random variable over the sample space {0,1}<sup>20</sup>, the twenty-dimensional space of binary vectors, and suppose that P(V = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]) = ½, P(V = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]), and P(_V_ = _v_) = 0 for all other _v_ ∈ {0,1}<sup>20</sup>.
-
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-Date: 2021-10-01 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, two-type taxonomy
-Status: draft
-
-> I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly be the first time I've found myself in the vulnerable position of sharing the brain-damaged prophet's impairment, down to the last neuron.
->
-> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
-
-In a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the story about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being transformed into a woman and used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these Sequences of _super great_ blog posts about how reasoning works by some guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky—where one _particularly_ influential-to-me post was [the one that explained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) why the idea of "changing sex" is much easier said than done, [because the tantalizingly short English phrase doesn't capture the complex implementation details of the real physical universe](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).
-
-At the time, this was my weird personal thing, which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about. In particular, I didn't think of myself as being "transgender." The whole time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like [trying to use my initials as a name](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials)) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy—I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender".
-
-_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I am not immune to this.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my pure beautiful sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
-
-Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/); the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender is in some sense more real or more relevant and should take precedence. So where does that leave me? In ["Sexual Dimorphism ..."](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I wrote about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times, but I tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I said is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined "autogynephilia" as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word.
-
-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
-
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
-
-> Still, 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.
-
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
-
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
-
-(Reading _that_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me [how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).)
-
-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
-
-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5–10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-
-Indeed—here we are six years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic _really_ interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-
-But at the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png) (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
-
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
-
-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-
-In Berkeley, I met some really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching faculties in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
-
-Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became increasingly persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this story has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
-
-(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's more to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean, but I need a few paragraphs to talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, before I can elaborate on more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
-
-The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatment of HRT, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
-
-In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives, in a way that causes huge social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
-
-That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed of the fact that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resememble females and aspire to be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such behavior, just on priors.
-
-Suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female (as far as the technology can manage) do _not_ fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type—it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your _second_ hypothesis for how this behavior might arise?
-
-What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
-
-So, yeah. Basically, I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_.
-
-So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
-
-Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
-
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
-
-Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
-
-Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) (the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association) [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf) ([ICD-10-CM codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM) F64.1 and F64.2):
-
-> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
-
-(Bolding mine.)
-
-Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard-and-friends and arrives at essentially the _same_ two-type taxonomy of MtF, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
-
-> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
-
-Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
-
-Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
-
-Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
-
-> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. **Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.**
-
-Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) [this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#whipping-girl) book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
-
-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-
-"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience.
-
-I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
-
-An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
-
-Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
-
-Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
-
-The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
-
-How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
-
-Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
-
-Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
-
-There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but a good theory to the precision that our theories about engineering bridges are good) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
-
-(In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much; [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.)
-
-So, if some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
-
-But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 230 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
-
-I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-
-Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions (in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_)—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
-
-Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
-
-Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
-
-(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
-
-If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
-
-> _Look in the mirror
-> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
-> I'm just a spirit
-> I'm just a spirit
-> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
-
-This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
-
-To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has recently _become_ more common in the cultural environment of the current year), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (in some ways, it would be _less_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
-
-Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
-
-Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
-
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and [I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the intellectually serious people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
-
-Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
-
-(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)
-
-Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
-
-I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender-feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces that let them ever doubt.
-
-I ... [went the other direction](https://www.gwern.net/Modus). In slogan form: "Holy shit, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
-
-Okay, that slogan isn't right. Again, I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accomodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
-
-The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accomodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
-
-Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
-
-My shift in belief, from thinking the narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up, partially from my reading, but also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
-
-[Someone I talked to](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her. (This person was unusual along a lot of other dimensions, and again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.)
-
-But many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me—at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; talking about this stuff _at all_ was hard enough, that I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies—but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but (from my view) oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
-
-One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_ There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to _point to_. If it's not sex and it's not sex-atypical behavior, then _what is it?_)
-
-Another wrote a comment in one discussion condemning "autogynephilia discourse" and expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be _possible_, she admitted, but it must be extremely rare. Elsewhere on the internet, the _same goddamned person_ reported being into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
-
-Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude; all else being equal, I would prefer _not_ to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects _me_, and my attempts to figure out _my_ life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people _really_ unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it's a conscious political ploy, [I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"](/2016/new-clothes/) rather than trying to _undermine my connection of reality_; I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but this was _really personally disturbing_.
-
-She said that she had to deal with enough invalidation already, that she had her own doubts and concerns but would only discuss them with people who shared her views. Fair enough—I can't blame anyone for prioritizing their mental health, even if I personally find it pathetic that grown adults in the so-called "rationalist" community need to be protect themselves from "invalidation".
-
-The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
-
-Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all TERFy and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
-
-Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
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-[TODO: ↑ rework and revise whole section in light of "The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ..." after that's written and published]
-
-------
-
-As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [in](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
-
-[TODO: emails with Kay Brown started 13 August; sent 40 messages during 2016 calendar year]
-
-At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/) (with [loving attention to technology choices, rather than just using WordPress](/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/)).
-
-... the pseudonymity is kind of a joke at this point. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side. Given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), it's _probably_ a smarter play if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results isn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog?—so I _guess_ I'll keep the Saotome-Westlake byline on this site, even though it's definitely a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling, and not an Actually Secret pen name. Plus, after having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there are _already_ a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I don't want to throw away or rewrite that history—this is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.
-
-[TODO: the Transgender Roadmap website mis-identified my pseudonym, so I guess it worked?!]
-
-(Separately, I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it, the way I regret [my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials). For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from [a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/). For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever did stoop to the depravity of starting one of my own one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL more than the title, and as far as the URL goes, to be led by the dot before the TLD to interpret "space" as a separate word, rather than my intent of "genderspace" being analogous to "configuration space"—but it doesn't bother me that much.)
-
-Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
-
-A friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of hormone replacement therapy](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
-
-I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. In the process of drafting this post, I was happy to discover that the [notes from the appointments](TODO: compile ancillary page and linky) were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read (for example) the note about one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
-
-I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was pretty preoccupied with the thing about how [_everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) and the professionals were _in on it_, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her that it actually cost $40.)
-
-Actually, it's worse than if they were in on it; [in some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they don't even know how to interpret observations someone not buying it even when you state your objections very clearly. Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
-
-> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
-
-I replied:
-
-> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonony is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
-
-Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
-
-However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever than means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with hearts; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty ...
-
-But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. [I don't think it's the same thing](TODO: linky autogenderphilia reply?), and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
-
-Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my [break with progressive morality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded cultural assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
-
-Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Waton affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment.
-
-With some prompting from a right-wing friend (a self-aware autogynephile who I had gone crossdressing in public once with back in the early 'tens, who had gone trad and started lifting weights in the intervening few years and felt good about his AGP starting to abate), I was starting to question it now.
-
-Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was Mencius Moldbug's anti-democratic (!) political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), which caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
-
-Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients; the Republicans, representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite, can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long. The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_; if you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](TODO linky). Moldbug contends that all of this is Bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance; it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO (possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations) with the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_). [TODO: linky UR refs]
-
-(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more obvious after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
-
-In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
-
-Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
-
-Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
-
-> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
-
-This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
-
-It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
-
-Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
-
-The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of blacks and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembers the world of 2006, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that they were, in fact, straight boys, and didn't think the world owed them deference for their perversion. And this experience _did_ raise further questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I couldn't help but notice that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
-
-While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. What _was_ going on with that?
-
-I wasn't, like, _friends_ with Yudkowsky, obviously; I didn't have a natural social affordance to _just_ ask him the way you would ask a work buddy or a college friend something. But ... he _had_ posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about he trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2 hour conversation, and I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in '12, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong."
-
-At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish?—some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it? To the normal person I would explain thusly—
-
-First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money in exchange for them using their time differently from how they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle–class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a somewhat higher rate than most therapists.
-
-Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
-
-Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
-
-By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. If the God-shaped whole in my head can't not be filled by _something_, it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are not therefore true, and Yudkowsky's writings on the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe were a potent way to do that. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the holy text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
-
-That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past, there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
-
-I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest encyclical seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
-
-Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my happy price inquiry (whether he accepted the offer and a conversation occured, or what was said if it did occur), because I think the rule I should follow for telling this Whole Dumb Story is that while I have complete freedom to talk about _my_ actions and things that happened in public, I'm not allowed to divulge information about what Yudkowsky may or may not have said in private conversations that may or may not have occured, because even without an explicit secrecy promise, people might be less forthcoming in private conversations if they knew that you might blog about them later. Personally, I think most people are _way_ too paranoid about this, and often wish I could just say what relevant things I know without worrying about whether it might infringe on someone's "privacy", but I'm eager to cooperate with widely-held norms even if I personally think they're dumb.
-
-(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
-
-[TODO: Scott linked to Kay Brown as part of his links post and got pushback
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/
-https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i]
-
-[TODO: I posted to /r/gendercritical (post the full text in an ancillary page; it's currently in my "Collective Debt, Collective Shame" draft)
-
-The first comment was "You are a predator." ... I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.]
-
-Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for.
-
-... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it.
-
-"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
-
-As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
-
-[TODO: confronted Olivia on 20 January:
-> just, that line about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria
-> maybe it wouldn't take so much metacognition if someone would just mention the OTHER diagnostic criterion!!!!
-walking it back a bit—
-> I shouldn't do this to you, obviously, but hopefully you can understand why the situation is distressing from my perspective]
-she told me to go away
-
-[TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized
-
-I didn't stop there
-exchange with Rob Bensinger (significant because of his position at MIRI) 7 February
-
-[my first contact with Ben at all was 8 Feb
-> I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl
-> well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes]
-
-tantrum started evening of Saturday 11 Feb
-my terrible date with Anna T. was actually on 12 February—that explains why I remember being so distracted!
-discussion with hundreds of comments, especially with Anna T.
-31 posts total between—"some of you may have noticed" Sat 11 Feb, and promising to quite Facebook for a week 0844 15 Feburary
-
-I was actually planning to visit Sophia in Portland!
-4 February
-> Okay, I've got my flight, hotel, con tickets, and makeup; I'll be flying in the morning of Friday the 17th, and leaving the evening of Sunday the 19th. My objectives are (1) take original photographs at key landmarks (Q Center, TriMet trains, that bridgey thing, &c.) to lend verisimilitude to the "fiction" posts on my secret blog, which are set in Portland/Beaverton, (2) cosplay Pearl at WizardWorld on Saturday, and (3) meet you in some capacity (at the con or elsewhere).
-
-Katie Tue Feb 14 2017 10:52:04: So my theory is Anna would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out / And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you" / "See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
-
-14 Feb exchange with Katie about reconnecting with her natural compassion
-
-[email Yudkowsky "the spirit of intervention" at 0418 a.m. (I don't even want to read it now) 14 February]
-
-[email to Michael "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)" 0632]
-
-Michael's reply—
-> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. How were Anna and Divia? I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret Tchetchetkine and Larch, in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
-
-[according to emails, I hung out with Ben in the day of 14 Feb, but I have no memory of this]
-
-[I messaged Ben "I just woke up" at Tue Feb 14 16:09:41 PST 2017, so apparently I did sleep a little that day?!]
-
-email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" 15 Feb 0017
-
-"questions" to Anna and Michael 16 Feburary
-> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
-in this thread, I claimed that, "I did in fact get sleep, but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to."
-
-[a couple of delusional emails to Yudkowsky at 11XX on 16 Feb]
-
-[16 February, I ask to meet Orion to talk about taking a sabbatical "Can I come to the city and meet with you?" at 1317 p.m.]
-
-Cooperate messages—
-Jonah 4x, Jack, Ziz 6x, "Wilhelm" 2x, Katie 6x, Anna T. 6x, Jenna 8x, Linda 5x, Ben 5x, Brent 4x, Boyd
-
-That I was on a trip and don't want it to be a bad trip
-
-Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
-Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
-Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
-
-I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
-
-"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
-
-Thu Feb 16 16:39:06 PST 2017: Ziz says, "Am still here. Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors. Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face."
-Thu Feb 16 18:18:43 PST 2017: Ziz says "Watson returned. Am currently in ur house, using ur wifi. Are you coming here? Am unclear on your intent, but am happy to sit here and work on stupid resume padding stuff for a while if you're coming."
-
-Fri Feb 17 14:19, "I'm so confused I just woke up / I'm so sorry"
-
-previous psych episode, repeating two words, Science and Female; but this time, it was Cooperate and Defect
-
-to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
-
-/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
-
-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
-
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
-
-[another happy price offer to Yudkowsky on 2 March
-> That makes sense. Sorry for being boring; I'm kind of going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development. Hopefully this is not too socially-disruptive! Michael said he thinks I'm doing good work??
-]
-
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
-
-7 March—
-> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (e.g., from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
-reply—
-> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-
-12 March—
-> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
-
-I met Jessica in March
-
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
-
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to trans widow friend, 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, Olivia, and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
Date: 2021-06-30 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, genetics
Status: draft
Well, this is awkward.
[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prison—yes, I know, they call it a "hospital"—that says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
+[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
+
+The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
+
+The lawyer
+
+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
+
+I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant
+
+]
+
Notice how casually Murray mentions the decision of what charges are to be filed as "a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation"! As a description of the system as it actually exists, this is perfectly accurate, but it seems important to notice that the entire concept of plea bargaining is a perversion of justice. One would have hoped for a system that proportionately punishes people for the specific crimes that they _actually did_, in order to disincentivize crime. Instead, we have the Orwellian nightmare of a system that says, "We think you're guilty of something, but it'll be easier for you if you confess to being guilty of something less bad, [and swear under oath that no one threatened you to confess](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) (!!)."
In calling the current system an Orwellian nightmare, I'm _not_ saying I personally know how to do better. (If abolishing the police would just result in anarchy and mob justice, that would just be a different kind of nightmare.) I'm trying to highlight how the statistics output by the actually-existing "justice" and "education" systems need to be understood as data about what's happening _within_ the current power structure managed by these systems, and shouldn't be naïvely seen as solely reflecting an independently existing reality of "education" and "crime." If there were no schools, people would still learn things (people still _do_ learn things outside of school); if there were no law enforcement, people would still take advantage of each other (people still _do_ take advantage of each other, outside the reaches of the law).
I don't know.
-----
-
... and that's the book review that I would _prefer_ to write. A social-science review of a social-science book, for social-science nerds, in a world that wasn't _about to end_. Let me explain.
When scholars like Murray write about "intelligence", they're talking about a summary of the differences _between_ humans: we can measure how well different humans perform at various verbal or spatial or mathematical thinking-tasks, and it turns out that, on average, people who are good at one thinking-task also tend to be good at others. Graph all the test scores on an appropriately high-dimensional plot, and [the longest axis of the hyperellipsoid](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) represents "general intelligence"—the dimension of human variation that we recognize as "smart" _vs._ "dumb."
-Title: Book Review: Nevada
+Title: Book Review: Imogen Binnie's <em>Nevada</em>
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, review (book)
Status: draft
-> You sound so innocent
-> All full of good intent
-> You swear you know best
-> But you expect me to
-> Jump up on board with you
-> And ride off into your delusional sunset
+> _You sound so innocent
+> All full of good intent
+> You swear you know best
+> But you expect me to
+> Jump up on board with you
+> And ride off into your delusional sunset_
>
> —"King of Anything" by Sara Bareilles
I mean, I get why this book is so popular, but I'm not happy about it.
-_Nevada_ is the story of 29-year-old trans woman Maria Griffiths, who w
+_Nevada_ is the story of 29-year-old trans woman Maria Griffiths, who steals her girlfriend's car and goes on a cross-country road trip.
+In Star City, Nevada, she meets an autogynephilic
+
+James isn't buying it. Then he steals her heroin and the book ends.
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/
+
+https://archive.is/kDO75
+
+https://github.com/ZoeyWolfe/have-you-read-nevada
+
+http://web.archive.org/web/20171013145452/http://haveyoureadnevada.com/nevada.pdf
+
+[...]
the next time someone tell you AGP is rare
And ask them, "Have you read _Nevada_?"
-
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/
+
+Even the reviews of Nevada don't reveal the secret!!—okay, the New Yorker one sort of does ("erotic transvestite scenarios", "liking girls just in a totally impossible way")
+https://www.vulture.com/article/profile-imogen-binnie-nevada.html
+https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada
+
+> it doesn't feature nonbinary characters, and a similar novel written today would require them, not least for accuracy.
+(2013 was less than a decade ago!!)
+++ /dev/null
-Title: I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty
-Date: 2022-01-01 11:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky
-Status: draft
-
-> If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
->
-> —Zora Neale Hurston
-
-### Summary
-
- * [TODO]
-
-In ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](TODO: link), I analyze a proposal by Eliezer Yudkowsky to normatively redefine the English pronouns _she_ and _he_ as referring to those who have asked us to use those pronouns. That object-level argument about pronoun conventions is probably not very interesting to many readers. For those who find my arguments persuasive (perhaps just from reading the summary bullet points rather than the entire post), what is perhaps more interesting is to jump up a meta level and ask: why is Eliezer Yudkowsky playing dumb like this? If his comments obviously can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here?
-
-(But on pain of committing [Bulverism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism), it's important that I wrote up the object-level counterargument _first_ as its own post, before engaging in [the fraught endeavor of speculating about psychology](https://arbital.com/p/psychologizing/) in this separate post.)
-
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228) on the post:
-
-> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
->
-> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
-
-I claim that my point that _she_ and _he_ already have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place, is a giant valid counterargument that invalidates the claim that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition." (It doesn't invalidate the whole post: the part about English being badly designed is fine.)
-
-Moreover, I claim that this point is _obvious_. This is not a _subtle_ objection. Any sane adult—really, any bright seven-year-old in the year 2016—who puts _any thought whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might object to the pronouns-by-self-identity convention is going to think of this. And yet, remarkably, Yudkowsky continues:
-
-> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
->
-> 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.
-
-So, 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 utterly _laughable_.
-
-In some ways, it would be _less_ embarrassing for Yudkowsky if he were just outright 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 clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might object. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see "everything important" (!!) on the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If someone's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust their opinion about _anything_?
-
-But perhaps it's premature to judge Yudkowsky without appreciating what tight constraints he labors under. The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, exactly, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
-
-> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
-
-(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is _very_ interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community, is, effectively, a partisan institution, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
-
-I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
-
-Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf) (The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!)
-
-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 or even gender-dysphoric 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 my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
-
-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 discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—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](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
-
-> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
->
-> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
-
-Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is a contested social construct, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: 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 _already 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!)
-
-Again, as discussed in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", a comparison to [the _tú_/_usted_ distinction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted) is instructive. 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 quite another thing altogether to _simultaneously_ 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 or address the speaker's arguments explaining _why_ they think their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by _usted_ (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's just 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 _actually_ 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 Self-Declared Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect, correctly, that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
-
-----
-
-Having analyzed the _ways_ in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is _why_. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?
-
-Of course, presumably he _doesn't_ think he's tarnishing it—but why not? [He graciously explains in the Facebook comments](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228):
-
-> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.
-
-Ah, _prudence_! He continues:
-
-> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
-
-The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
-
-The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
-
-> As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"
->
-> Sorry. It can't be done.
->
-> "What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"
->
-> Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.
-
-The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to other candidates, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):
-
-> So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.
->
-> **Which crosses the line between _rationality_ and _rationalization_.** It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.
->
-> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
-
-The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
-
-Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
-
-> If you really want to present an honest, rational argument _for your candidate_, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:
->
-> * _Before anyone hires you_, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.
-> * Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.
-> * Process the checklist.
-> * Go to the winning candidate.
-> * Offer to become their campaign manager.
-> * When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.
->
-> Only in this way can you offer a _rational_ chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing _forward_ from the lines above it. Whatever _actually_ decides your bottom line is the only thing you can _honestly_ write on the lines above.
-
-I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset! But it's _correct_. You can't rationally argue "for" a chosen conclusion, because only the process you use to _decide what to argue for_ can be your real reason.
-
-This is a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to live up to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changingly valuable, was that they articulated the _existence_ of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.
-
-... which is why it's so _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 metaphor for a large negative utility, 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.
-
-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, if those are really your true values, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job and your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price. But if the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.
-
-I see the phrase "bad faith" thrown around more than I think people know what it means. "Bad faith" doesn't mean "with ill intent", and it's more specific than "dishonest": it's [adopting the surface appearance of being moved by one set of motivations, while actually acting from another](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith).
-
-For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
-
-With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
-
-To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
-
-Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
-
-Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I engage in a bit of what is sometimes called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
-
-That is, my bad faith concern-trolling gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
-
-In contrast, the "it is sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin" gambit is the exact reverse: it's _introducing_ a distortion into the discussion in the hopes of correcting people's beliefs about the speaker's ideological alignment. (Yudkowsky is not a right-wing Bad Guy, but people would tar him as a right-wing Bad Guy if he ever said anything negative about trans people.) This doesn't improve our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued about; it's a _pure_ ass-covering move.
-
-Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
-
-Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
-
-But if it were _actually_ the case that everybody knew (and everybody knew that 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 entire appeal and purpose of censorship is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
-
-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).
-
-Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really _were_ no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.
-
-But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail).
-
-"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says to justify himself. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? I'm asking because I have a long sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
-
-For a long time, I've been meaning to write up the Whole Dumb Story.
-
-
-[TODO: For a long time, I've been meaning to write up the Whole Dumb Story, but it's been hard for me to finish, and it would be too long for you to read, so I hope it's OK if I just hit the highlights]
-
-[back in the Sequences-era, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)]
-
-In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
-
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
-
-> Still, 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.
-
-(***!?!?!?!?***)
-
-> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-
-
-
-uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.
-
-
-[The claim that the "Hill of Validity" thread wasn't partisan, but was just neutrally trying to teach the difference between facts and policy decisions is not credible. Imagine if someone was complaining about being required to say "Peace Be Upon Him" before referencing the prophet Muhammad. "It's a speech act, there's nothing factually false about saying 'peace be unto him'"]
-unremediatedgender.space/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/
-
-
-[For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
-> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
-
-
-
-"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!
-
-
-> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
-If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
-
-> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
-
-Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
-
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans) - I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-
-
-What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-
-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still thought he could politically afford to gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain.
-
-Now that the political environment has changed and he doesn't think he can afford to give a shit, does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he just think that "everybody knows"?
-
-
-
-But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
-
-
-
-
-
-[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
-
-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."
-
-
-a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
-
-It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
-
-> _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._
-https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
-
-https://www.readthesequences.com/
-> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
-
-> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
-https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
-
-https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
--- /dev/null
+Title: East Coast Trip
+Date: 2025-07-01 11:00
+Category: other
+Tags: anecdotal
+Status: draft
+
+In September 2021, I took a trip to the east coast to see my sister and new baby niece in Cambridge and some friends in New York, and otherwise to work on blog posts from my hotel room. (You've seen one American city, you've seen them all, I reasoned, _modulo_ a different ratio of Dunkin' Donuts to Starbucks.)
+
+The thought occured to me that while I was on vacation anyway, it might be nice to see an escort (which I had only done once before, in March 2016). I browsed around the "Boston" section on _eros.com_. Under the "ebony" subsection[^ebony], I found a profile that I liked on the basis of photographs and a professional-seeming website. I'll call her "Crystal" (which was not the name she used, and the name she used was also surely not her real name). The "consideration" page on the website listed three hours at $1500, and four hours for $2000. ("All rates are for my time and companionship only.") I filled out the booking form requesting a three-hour engagement.
+
+[^ebony]: I don't know why they say "ebony" instead of "black". Porn sites do this, too. Seems problematic to have an ethnic term that only gets used in sexualized contexts?
+
+"Crystal" didn't get back to me within several days, and I resigned myself to the implied rejection. (I already felt morally ambiguous about filling out the form; I certainly wasn't about to _shop around_.) But then on 4:37 _p.m._ on the day before my flight left, she got back to me asking if I was still interested in connecting, explaining that there had been a problem with her spam filter (Subject: "Hello! My apologies For The Late Reply"). I rushed to the bank just before it closed to withdraw $2000 cash that would have been harder to get at on my trip, between ATM withdrawal limits and the lack of Wells Fargo branches in Massachusetts.
+
+She suggested switching to texts to get around the spam issue, and I texted her a photo of my ID and a link to my LinkedIn profile to confirm my identity (or gentlemanliness). She asked, "Would you like to go on a dinner date, four hours, 2,000."[^no-dollar-sign] (Already feeling morally ambiguous, I certainly wasn't going to complain about getting _upsold_.)[^upsold] I eagerly agreed, and suggested an Indian restaurant a half-mile walk from my hotel.
+
+[^no-dollar-sign]: I appreciated the absence of a dollar sign in front of the figure. Feels less crass.
+
+[^upsold]: But I had mentioned the $2000 bank withdrawal in my email, so it made sense that that figure was more salient to her than the fact that my form submission from weeks earlier had said three hours.
+
+I didn't get any writing done the day of our date, although I had at least [gotten in a couple hundred words the previous day](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=470bbc84ba) on my draft review of Charles Murray's _Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America_. I texted my sister and my mother (who was also in town to see my sister) that I had other plans that night, requested housekeeping service for my hotel room (which had been suspended by default due to COVID), and mostly just walked around Cambridge for the late morning and afternoon. I bought a shirt with a collar at Target.
+
+My mother called to inquire more about my plans, which I preferred to be at least somewhat vague about. I said that the safety concerns about meeting someone from the internet were mostly for women. She asked that I at least tell my sister where I was going, to which I agreed. I texted my sister: "Mom thinks there's a safety rationale for telling someone my plans, which I think is retarded, but specifically, it's a casual dinner date at"—I gave the name and address of the restaurant—"with a woman I met online (no reply expected; there's nothing useful for you to do with this information and this message is just to appease Mom)".
+
+"Crystal" was late (date was originally scheduled for 4 _p.m._, then she texted in the early afternoon to move it to 4:30, then finally texted "I'm here"/"Just valeting my car" at 5:04), and then it turned out that she was expecting to meet me at the hotel while I was waiting at the restaurant, but we met in the middle and walked back to the restaurant.
+
+It was nice—an opportunity to talk to someone who I otherwise wouldn't get to meet. Messaging someone like her on OKCupid would have felt fake, and cold-approaching someone like her in public was unthinkable. It felt more honest to just pay for her time.
+
+What do I mean by "someone like her"? Definitely not race _per se_. Rather ... non-nerds?—normies. I know how to talk to _the kinds of women I meet in "rationalist"/EA circles_, and even (very rarely) ask them on a date.[^romantic-poem] That doesn't feel fake, because they're just peers who happen to be female. (I may have renounced [the ideological psychological sex difference denialism of my youth](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), but I'm not _sexist_.)
+
+What I don't know how to do without the moral [indulgence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) of money changing hands is to ask out a beautiful woman _because she's a beautiful woman_. I won't say it's morally wrong, exactly; it's just not how I was raised. (I mean, I wasn't raised to hire escorts, either, but somehow the transactionality of it puts it outside some of the ethical constraints of ordinary courtship.)
+
+[^romantic-poem]: Though the meter is occasionally a little bit bizarre, I'm very proud of [the poem I wrote in 2016 depicting a woman I was interested in eradicating malaria by wiping out all the mosquitos using CRISPR gene drive](/ancillary/megan-and-the-anopheles-gambiae/), although our one date didn't amount to anything. She later married Scott Alexander.
+
+Dinner was nice. We talked. She had a dayjob in real estate. There were some conversational topics I wanted to steer away from until after dinner. When we got to my hotel room, I felt freer to speak. I explained autogynephilia to her, and (briefly) the Category War with my robot cult.
+
+I didn't tell her about the book review I was writing.
+
+We got undressed. I put on a condom, but I didn't let (have?) her touch my penis. That would have seemed unethical to me. I just wanted to admire her naked body, to touch, to cuddle. My own pleasure I could—handle myself. I kept telling her how beautiful she was—and that I was jealous. That I wanted to know what it would be like, if [by some miracle of technology or magic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), I could look like her, be shaped like her. To have that face and that voice and those breasts (my gynecomastia from [that HRT experiment four years before](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) simply didn't compare) and that—waist-to-hip ratio. (She said I could have her breasts; they were heavy.)
+
+I'm not actually ultra-confident that what I call "ethics" didn't make things weirder for her. She had said that she had been treating her night job was an alternative to conventional dating, that she wasn't seeing anyone nonprofessionally. It's possible that to a woman in that position, a normal man who wants to use a woman in the normal way is actually preferable to the kind of creep I am?—in contrast to my hopes that satisfying the kind of creep I am would be gratifyingly easy job for the money.
+
+(At any rate, I think it would have been _more_ creepy if I tried to convince her that I was "actually" a woman in some unspecified metaphysical sense.)
+
+I wasn't coming. She said that for $2000, I definitely deserved to get off. That didn't matter to me. I ended up finishing that after she left.
+
+Before she left, as she was using the bathroom and washing up, I tried to say something about how I wished I could have a photo to remember her by, but I knew that it would be impolite to ask. (I had done my reading. "Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.") No photos, she said.
+
+I wanted to clarify that I wasn't _asking_, I was making a meta-comment about how I _wasn't_ asking—and then I realized that normie culture must not support that level of indirection. To her, there was no semantic difference between apophasis and actually saying the thing, even if my "rationalist" friends would have understood what I meant. Considering my frustration at Yudkowsky's not-technically-lying games, I wondered if the normie way wasn't superior.
+
+------
+
+The New York leg of my trip went fine. I visited Sarah. I met another _Less Wrong_-er whose comments I had liked. I made $60 babysitting Zvi Mowshowitz's kids.
+
+I visited Ben and met his new girlfiend. Jessica wasn't around. We hadn't talked much since the "Lenore" disaster nine months before. He said that my behavior then _had_ been a betrayal, but a finite one. It happens. (Not "it happens" meaning that it's _okay_, but that it _happens_; moral agents keep accounts; [you forgive, but don't forget](/2020/Dec/liability/).)
+
+I got to meet my neoreactionary Twitter mutual, who held the distinction of having been banned from the _Slate Star Codex_ comment section ["for reasons of total personal caprice"](https://archive.md/sRfBj#selection-1633.27-1633.64). I wore my _Quillette_ T-shirt. He offered to buy me a drink. I said I didn't drink, but he insisted that getting drunk was the ritual by which men established trust. I couldn't argue with that, and ended up having a glass and a half of wine while we talked for a couple hours.
+
+So much of my intellectual life for the past five years had been shaped by the fight to keep mere heresies on the shared map, that it was a nice change to talk to an out-and-out _apostate_, with whom none of none of my ingrained defensive motions were necessary. (I just want to restore the moral spirit of 2008 liberalism but with better epistemology; he wants to bring back [_coverture_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture) on the grounds that women of the Eurasian subspecies of humanity haven't exercised mate choice in 10,000 years and aren't being helped by starting now.) There was one moment when I referred to the rationalists as my guys, and instinctively disclaimed, "and of course, we're mostly guys." He pointed out that I didn't need to tell _him_ that.
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
-Date: 2017-01-01 5:00
-Category: fiction
-Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical
-Status: draft
-
-In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which.
-
-Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals. Much of their lives concerned the sharing of information about how to survive: how to fashion simple tools for digging up nuts, the best techniques for running away from predators, what kind of hole or tree offered the best shelter, _&c._ Possession of such information was valuable, and closely guarded: squirrels would only share true secrets with their closest friends. Maneuvering to be told secrets, and occasionally to spread false secrets to rivals, was the subject of much drama and intrigue in the squirrels' lives.
-
-[TODO: why be secretive? Surely if they pooled information together, they could accumulate mastery over the environment]
-
-(well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the _H. sapiens_ line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech species 9792 and 9794.)
-
-[TODO: novelty instincts about secrets make cross-species friends more desirable, but species differences also make them frustrating]
-
-"I wish I had a special friend. Someone who understood me. Someone to share my secrets with."
-
-And beside them, a friend or a mate would attempt to comfort them, saying, "But _I'm_ your friend. _I_ understand you. You can share your secrets with _me_."
-
-"That's not what I meant."
--- /dev/null
+Title: Guess I'll Die
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-12-30 11:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+Status: draft
+
+> In desperation he quoted André Gide's remark: "It has all been said before, but you must say it again, since nobody listens." Unfortunately, judging by the quotations given here, Gide's remark is still relevant even today.
+>
+> —Neven Sesardic, _Making Sense of Heritability_
+
+In a previous post, ["Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles"](/2023/Dec/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/) (the culmination of [three](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) [previous](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) [posts](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/) relating the Whole Dumb Story of my disillusionment with the so-called "rationalist" community), I wrote, "If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't _unambigously_ choose Truth over Feelings, _then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud_."
+
+But I would be remiss to condemn Yudkowsky without discussing potentially mitigating factors. (I don't want to say that whether someone is a fraud should depend on whether there are mitigating factors—rather, I should discuss potential reasons why being a fraud might be the least-bad choice, when faced with a sufficiently desperate situation.)
+
+[TOC]
+
+### Short Timelines _vs._ Raising the Sanity Waterline [working § title]
+
+So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to make sense, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
+
+That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science blogging was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (a "we don't pay you, but you can sleep in the garage" internship in 2009, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna Salamon, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
+
+Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was not my problem, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael Vassar, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore". When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
+
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally-stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for Friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl\[ing\] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to \[his\] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI specifically, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+
+But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have time for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about timelines. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the second half of the 21st century.
+
+Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution.[^second-half] Yudkowsky seemed particularly [spooked by AlphaGo](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=gQzA8a989ZyGvhWv2) [and AlphaZero](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/20/alphago/) in 2016–2017, not because superhuman board game players were themselves dangerous, but because of what it implied about the universe of algorithms.
+
+In the Sequences, Yudkowsky had been [dismissive of people who aspired to build AI without understanding how intelligence works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence)—for example, by being overly impressed by the [surface analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ByPxcGDhmx74gPSm/surface-analogies-and-deep-causes) between artificial neural networks and the brain. He conceded the possibility of brute-forcing AI (if natural selection had eventually gotten there with no deeper insight, so could we) but didn't consider it a default and especially not a desirable path. (["If you don't know how your AI works, that is not good. It is bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence))
+
+These days, it's increasingly looking like making really large neural nets ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
+
+[^second-half]: In an unfinished slice-of-life short story I started writing _circa_ 2010, my protagonist (a supermarket employee resenting his job while thinking high-minded thoughts about rationality and the universe) speculates about "a threshold of economic efficiency beyond which nothing human could survive" being a tighter bound on future history than physical limits (like the heat death of the universe), and comments that "it imposes a sense of urgency to suddenly be faced with the fabric of your existence coming apart in ninety years rather than 10<sup>90</sup>."
+
+ But if ninety years is urgent, what about ... nine? Looking at what deep learning can do in 2023, the idea of Singularity 2032 doesn't seem self-evidently absurd in the way that Singularity 2019 seemed absurd in 2010 (correctly, as it turned out).
+
+My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, when OpenAI released [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of [that week in January 2021](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack)). Previous AI milestones, like [GANs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network) for a fixed image class, felt easier to dismiss as clever statistical tricks. If you have thousands of photographs of people's faces, I didn't feel surprised that some clever algorithm could "learn the distribution" and spit out another sample; I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like scary "understanding." DALL-E's ability to combine concepts—responding to "an armchair in the shape of an avacado" as a novel text prompt, rather than already having thousands of examples of avacado-chairs and just spitting out another one of those—viscerally seemed more like "real" creativity to me, something qualitatively new and scary.[^qualitatively-new]
+
+[^qualitatively-new]: By mid-2022, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were generating much better pictures, but that wasn't surprising. Seeing AI being able to do a thing at all is the model update; AI being able to do the thing much better 18 months later feels "priced in."
+
+[As recently as 2020, I had been daydreaming about](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/#if-we-even-have-enough-time) working at an embryo selection company (if they needed programmers—but everyone needs programmers, these days), and having that be my altruistic[^eugenics-altruism] contribution to the Great Common Task. Existing companies working on embryo selection [boringly](https://archive.is/tXNbU) [market](https://archive.is/HwokV) their services as being about promoting health, but [polygenic scores should work as well for maximizing IQ as they do for minimizing cancer risk](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection).[^polygenic-score] Making smarter people would be a transhumanist good in its own right, and [having smarter biological humans around at the time of our civilization's AI transition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2KNN9WPcyto7QH9pi/this-failing-earth) would give us a better shot at having it go well.[^ai-transition-go-well]
+
+[^eugenics-altruism]: If it seems odd to frame _eugenics_ as "altruistic", translate it as a term of art referring to the component of my actions dedicating to optimizing the world at large, as contrasted to "selfishly" optimizing my own experiences.
+
+[^polygenic-score]: Better, actually: [the heritability of IQ is around 0.65](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ), as contrasted to [about 0.33 for cancer risk](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26746459/).
+
+[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos; the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
+
+But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's looking unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is [on track to end the world in twenty years](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
+
+[It's ironic that "longtermism" got traction as the word for the cause area of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future, end up working out to extreme short-termism. Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a recognizable world of humans in 2123—would care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone better if Galileo had declined to publish for pre-emptive fear of the Inquisition.
+
+But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what large tech companies are doing as they build transformative AI, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have time to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_. If the progressive machine marks you as a transphobic bigot, the machine's functionaries at OpenAI or Meta AI Research are less likely to listen to you when you explain why [their safety plan](https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment) won't work, or why they should have a safety plan at all.
+
+(I remarked to "Thomas" in mid-2022 that DeepMind [changing its Twitter avatar to a rainbow variant of their logo for Pride month](https://web.archive.org/web/20220607123748/https://twitter.com/DeepMind) was a bad sign.)
+
+### Perhaps, if the World Were at Stake
+
+So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain, willfully damaging humanity's chances of survival by picking unimportant culture-war fights in the existential-risk-reduction social sphere, when _I know_ that the sphere needs to keep its nose clean in the eyes of the progressive egregore? _That's_ why Yudkowsky said the arguably-technically-misleading things he said about my Something to Protect: he had to, to keep our collective nose clean. The people paying attention to contemporary politics don't know what I know, and can't usefully be told. Isn't it better for humanity if my meager talents are allocated to making AI go well? Don't I have a responsibility to fall in line and take one for the team—if the world is at stake?
+
+As usual, the Yudkowsky of 2009 has me covered. In his short story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), our protagonist Hirou wonders why the powerful wizard Dolf lets other party members risk themselves fighting, when Dolf could have protected them:
+
+> _Because Dolf was more important, and if he exposed himself to all the risk every time, he might eventually be injured_, Hirou's logical mind completed the thought. _Lower risk, but higher stakes. Cold but necessary—_
+>
+> _But would you_, said another part of his mind, _would you, Hirou, let your friends walk before you and fight, and occasionally die, if you_ knew _that you yourself were stronger and able to protect them? Would you be able to stop yourself from stepping in front?_
+>
+> _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._
+
+That is, there's no story under which misleading people about trans issues is on Yudkowsky's critical path for shaping the intelligence explosion. I'd prefer him to have free speech, but if _he_ thinks he can't afford to be honest about things he [already got right in 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), he could just not issue pronouncements on topics where he intends to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_.
+
+In [a March 2021 Twitter discussion about why not to trust organizations that refuse to explain their reasoning, Yudkowsky wrote](https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937):
+
+> Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at _all_ the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a _lot_ of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
+
+Sure. But if that's your story, I think you need to _actually not comment_. ["[A]t least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) is _not "no comment"._ ["[Y]ou're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048) is _not "no comment"_. We [did get a clarification on that one](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)—but then, within a matter of months, he turned around and came back with his "simplest and best proposal" about how the "important things [...] would be all the things [he's] read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", _which is also not "no comment."_
+
+It's a little uncomfortable that I seem to be arguing for a duty to self-censorship here. If he has selected "pro-trans" arguments he feels safe publishing, what's the harm in publishing them? How could I object to the addition of more Speech to the discourse?
+
+But I don't think it's the mere addition of the arguments to the discourse that I'm objecting to. (If some garden-variety trans ally had made the same dumb arguments, I would make the same counterarguments, but I wouldn't feel betrayed.)
+
+It's the false advertising—the pretense that Yudkowsky is still the unchallengable world master of rationality, if he's going to behave like a garden-variety trans ally and reserve the right to _ignore counterarguments on political grounds_ (!!) when his incentives point that way.
+
+In _Planecrash_, when Keltham decides he needs to destroy Golarion's universe on negative-leaning utilitarian grounds, he takes care to only deal with Evil people from then on, and not form close ties with the Lawful Neutral nation of Osirion, in order to not betray anyone who would have had thereby a reasonable expectation that their friend wouldn't try to destroy their universe: ["the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1882395#reply-1882395).
+
+Similarly, I think Yudkowsky should stop pretending to be our rationality teacher after he stopped being our rationality teacher and decided to be a politician instead.
+
+I think it's significant that you don't see me picking fights with—say, Paul Christiano, because Paul Christiano doesn't repeatedly take a shit on my Something to Protect, because Paul Christiano isn't trying to be a religious leader. If Paul Christiano has opinions about transgenderism, we don't know about them. If we knew about them and they were correct, I would upvote them, and if we knew about them and they were incorrect, I would criticize them, but in either case, Christiano would not try to cultivate the impression that anyone who disagrees with him is insane. That's not his bag.
+
+### Decision Theory of Political Censorship
+
+Yudkowsky's political cowardice is arguably puzzling in light of his timeless decision theory's recommendations against giving in to extortion.
+
+The "arguably" is important, because randos on the internet are notoriously bad at drawing out the consequences of the theory, to the extent that Yudkowsky has said that he ["wish[es] that [he'd] never spoken on the topic"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929)—and though I think I'm smarter than the average rando, I don't expect anyone to take my word for it. So let me disclaim that this is _my_ explanation of how Yudkowsky's decision theory _could be interpreted_ to recommend that he behave the way I want him to, without any pretense that I'm any sort of neutral expert witness on decision theory.
+
+The idea of timeless decision theory is that you should choose the action that has the best consequences given that your decision is mirrored at all the places your decision algorithm is embedded in the universe.
+
+The reason this is any different from the "causal decision theory" of just choosing the action with the best consequences (locally, without any regard to this "multiple embeddings in the universe" nonsense) is because it's possible for other parts of the universe to depend on your choices. For example, in the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" scenario, someone might give you a ride out of the desert if they predict you'll pay them back later. After you've already received the ride, you might think that you can get away with stiffing them—but if they'd predicted you would do that, they wouldn't have given you the ride in the first place. Your decision is mirrored inside the world-model every other agent with a sufficiently good knowledge of you.
+
+In particular, if you're the kind of agent that gives in to extortion—if you respond to threats of the form "Do what I want, or I'll hurt you" by doing what the threatener wants—that gives other agents an incentive to spend resources trying to extort you. On the other hand, if any would-be extortionist knows you'll never give in, they have no reason to bother trying. This is where the [standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_terrorists) ["Don't negotiate with terrorists"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) advice comes from.
+
+So, naïvely, doesn't Yudkowsky's "personally prudent to post your agreement with Stalin"[^gambit] gambit constitute giving in to an extortion threat of the form, "support the progressive position, or we'll hurt you", which Yudkowsky's own decision theory says not to do?
+
+[^gambit]: In _ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles_, natch.
+
+I can think of two reasons why the naïve objection might fail. (And who can say but that a neutral expert witness on decision theory wouldn't think of more?)
+
+First, the true decision theory is subtler than "defy anything that you can commonsensically pattern-match as looking like 'extortion'"; the case for resisting extortion specifically rests on there existing a subjunctive dependence between your decision and the extortionist's decision: they threaten _because_ you'll give in, or don't bother _because_ you won't.
+
+Okay, but then how do I compute this "subjunctive dependence" thing? Presumably it has something to do with the extortionist's decisionmaking process incuding a model of the target. How good does that model have to be for it to "count"?
+
+I don't know—and if I don't know, I can't say that the relevant subjunctive dependence obviously pertains in the real-life science intellectual _vs._ social justice mob match-up. If the mob has been trained from past experience to predict that their targets will give in, should you defy them now in order to somehow make your current predicament "less real"? Depending on the correct theory of logical counterfactuals, the correct stance might be "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but [we do appease bears](/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/) and avoid avalanches" (because neither the bear's nor the avalanche's behavior is calculated based on our response), and the forces of political orthodoxy might be relevantly bear- or avalanche-like.
+
+On the other hand, the relevant subjunctive dependence doesn't obviously _not_ pertain, either! Yudkowsky does seem to endorse commonsense pattern-matching to "extortion" in contexts [like nuclear diplomacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256). Or I remember back in 2009, Tyler Emerson was caught embezzling funds from the Singularity Institute, and SingInst made it a point of pride to prosecute on decision-theoretic grounds, when a lot of other nonprofits would have quietly and causal-decision-theoretically covered it up to spare themselves the embarrassment. Parsing social justice as an agentic "threat" rather than a non-agentic obstacle like an avalanche, does seem to line up with the fact that people punish heretics (who dissent from an ideological group) more than infidels (who were never part of the group to begin with), because heretics are more extortable—more vulnerable to social punishment from the original group.
+
+Which brings me to the second reason the naïve anti-extortion argument might fail: [what counts as "extortion" depends on the relevant "property rights", what the "default" action is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qjaaux3XnLBwomuNK/countess-and-baron-attempt-to-define-blackmail-fail). If having free speech is the default, being excluded from the dominant coalition for defying the orthodoxy could be construed as extortion. But if being excluded from the coalition is the default, maybe toeing the line of orthodoxy is the price you need to pay in order to be included.
+
+Yudkowsky has [a proposal for how bargaining should work between agents with different notions of "fairness"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z2YwmzuT7nWx62Kfh/cooperating-with-agents-with-different-ideas-of-fairness). Suppose Greg and Heather are splitting a pie, and if they can't initially agree on how to split it, they have to fight over it until they do agree, destroying some of the pie in the process. Greg thinks the fair outcome is that they each get half the pie. Heather claims that she contributed more ingredients to the baking process and that it's therefore fair that she gets 75% of the pie, pledging to fight if offered anything less.
+
+If Greg were a causal decision theorist, he might agree to the 75/25 split, reasoning that 25% of the pie is better than fighting until the pie is destroyed. Yudkowsky argues that this is irrational: if Greg is willing to agree to a 75/25 split, then Heather has no incentive not to adopt such a self-favoring definition of "fairness". (And _vice versa_ if Heather's concept of fairness is the "correct" one.)
+
+Instead, Yudkowsky argues, Greg should behave so as to only do worse than the fair outcome if Heather also does worse: for example, by accepting a 48/32 split in Heather's favor (after 100−(32+48) = 20% of the pie has been destroyed by the costs of fighting) or an 42/18 split (where 40% of the pie has been destroyed). This isn't Pareto-optimal (it would be possible for both Greg and Heather to get more pie by reaching an agreement with less fighting), but it's worth it to Greg to burn some of Heather's utility fighting in order to resist being exploited by her, and at least it's better than the equilibrium where the entire pie gets destroyed (which is Nash because neither party can unilaterally stop fighting).
+
+It seemed to me that in the contest over the pie of Society's shared map, the rationalist Caliphate was letting itself get exploited by the progressive Egregore, doing worse than the fair outcome without dealing any damage to the Egregore in return. Why?
+
+[The logic of dump stats](/2023/Dec/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#dump-stats), presumably. Bargaining to get AI risk on the shared map—not even to get it taken seriously as we would count "taking it seriously", but just acknowledged at all—was hard enough. Trying to challenge the Egregore about an item that it actually cared about would trigger more fighting than we could afford.
+
+In my illustrative story, if Greg and Heather destroy the pie fighting, then neither of them get any pie. But in more complicated scenarios (including the real world), there was no guarantee that non-Pareto Nash equilibria were equally bad for everyone.
+
+I had a Twitter exchange with Yudkowsky in January 2020 that revealed some of his current-year thinking about Nash equilibria. I [had Tweeted](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1206718983115698176):
+
+> 1940s war criminal defense: "I was only following orders!"
+> 2020s war criminal defense: "I was only participating in a bad Nash equilibrium that no single actor can defy unilaterally!"
+
+(The language of the latter being [a reference to Yudkowsky's _Inadequate Equilibria_](https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/).)
+
+Yudkowsky [quote-Tweet dunked on me](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392):
+
+> Well, YES. Paying taxes to the organization that runs ICE, or voting for whichever politician runs against Trump, or trading with a doctor benefiting from an occupational licensing regime; these acts would all be great evils if you weren't trapped.
+
+I pointed out the voting case as one where he seemed to be disagreeing with his past self, linking to 2008's ["Stop Voting for Nincompoops"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k5qPoHFgjyxtvYsm7/stop-voting-for-nincompoops). What changed his mind?
+
+"Improved model of the social climate where revolutions are much less startable or controllable by good actors," he said. "Having spent more time chewing on Nash equilibria, and realizing that the trap is _real_ and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant."
+
+I asked what was wrong with the disjunction from "Stop Voting for Nincompoops", where the earlier Yudkowsky had written that it's hard to see who should accept the argument to vote for the lesser of two evils, but refuse to accept the argument against voting because it won't make a difference. Unilaterally voting for Clinton wouldn't stop Trump.
+
+"Vote when you're part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things, or when you're worried about your reputation and want to be honest about whether you voted," he replied.
+
+"How do I compute whether I'm in a large enough decision-theoretic cohort?" I asked. Did we know that, or was that still on the open problems list?
+
+Yudkowsky said that he [traded his vote for a Clinton swing state vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_pairing_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election), partially hoping that that would scale, "but maybe to a larger degree because [he] anticipated being asked in the future if [he'd] acted against Trump".
+
+The reputational argument seems in line with Yudkowsky's [pathological obsession with not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). People asking if you acted against Trump are looking for a signal of coalitional loyalty. By telling them he traded his vote, Yudkowsky can pass their test without lying.
+
+I guess that explains everything. He doesn't think he's part of a decision-theoretic logical cohort large enough to change things. He's not anticipating being asked in the future if he's acted against gender ideology. He doesn't doesn't care about trashing his reputation with me, because I don't matter.
+
+Curtis Yarvin [likes to compare](/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/) Yudkowsky to Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century Jewish religious leader purported to be the Messiah, who later [converted to Islam under coercion from the Ottomans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam). "I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam," said Yarvin.
+
+I don't think this is as much of a burn as Yarvin does. Zevi was facing some very harsh coercion: a choice to convert to Islam, "prove" his divinity via deadly trial by ordeal, or just be impaled outright. Extortion-resistant decision theories aside, it's hard not to be sympathetic to someone facing this trilemma who chose to convert.
+
+So to me, the more damning question is this—
+
+If in the same position as Yudkowsky, would Sabbatai Zevi also declare that 30% of the ones with penises are actually women?
+
+### The Dolphin War (June 2021)
+
+In June 2021, MIRI Executive Director Nate Soares [wrote a Twitter thread aruging that](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273) "[t]he definitional gynmastics required to believe that dolphins aren't fish are staggering", which [Yudkowsky retweeted](https://archive.is/Ecsca).[^not-endorsements]
+
+[^not-endorsements]: In general, retweets are not necessarily endorsements—sometimes people just want to draw attention to some content without further comment or implied approval—but I was inclined to read this instance as implying approval, partially because this doesn't seem like the kind of thing someone would retweet for attention-without-approval, and partially because of the working relationship between Soares and Yudkowsky.
+
+Soares's points seemed cribbed from part I of Scott Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). Soares's [reference to the Book of Jonah](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670796997660675) made it seem particularly unlikely that he had invented the argument independently from Alexander. [One of the replies (which Soares Liked) pointed out the similar _Slate Star Codex_ article](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185), [as did](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [a couple of](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) quote-Tweet discussions.
+
+The elephant in my brain took this as another occasion to _flip out_. I didn't immediately see anything for me to overtly object to in the thread itself—[I readily conceded that](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402073131276066821) there was nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to use the symbol "fish" to refer to the cluster of similarities induced by convergent evolution to the acquatic habitat rather than the cluster of similarities induced by phylogenetic relatedness—but in the context of our subculture's history, I read this as Soares and Yudkowsky implicitly lending more legitimacy to "... Not Man for the Categories", which post I had just dedicated more than three years of my life to rebutting in [increasing](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [technical](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), specifically using dolphins as my central example—which Soares didn't necessarily have any reason to have known about, but Yudkowsky definitely did. Was I paranoid to read this as a potential [dogwhistle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics))? It just seemed implausible that Soares would be Tweeting that dolphins are fish in the counterfactual in which "... Not Man for the Categories" had never been published.
+
+After a little more thought, I decided that Soares's thread _was_ overtly objectionable, and [quickly wrote up a reply on _Less Wrong_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins): Soares wasn't merely advocating for a "swimmy animals" sense of the word _fish_ to become more accepted usage, but specifically deriding phylogenetic definitions as unmotivated for everyday use ("definitional gynmastics [_sic_]"), and _that_ was wrong. It's true that most language users don't directly care about evolutionary relatedness, but [words aren't identical with their definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels). Genetics is at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism; creatures that are more closely evolutionarily related are more similar in general. Classifying things by evolutionary lineage isn't an arbitrary æsthetic whim by people who care about geneology for no reason. We need the natural category of "mammals (including marine mammals)" to make sense of how dolphins are warm-blooded, breathe air, and nurse their live-born young, and the natural category of "finned cold-blooded vertebrate gill-breathing swimmy animals (which excludes marine mammals)" is also something that it's reasonable to have a word for.
+
+(Somehow, it felt appropriate to use a quote from Arthur Jensen's ["How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F) as an epigraph.)
+
+On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1402888263593959433) Soares conceded my main points, but said that the tone, and the [epistemic-status followup thread](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761124429701121), were intended to indicate that the original thread was "largely in jest"—"shitposting"—but that he was "open to arguments that [he was] making a mistake here."
+
+I didn't take that too well, and threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum. Soares wrote a longer comment on _Less Wrong_ the next morning, and I [pointed out that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/BBtSuWcdaFyvgddE4) Soares's followup thread had lamented ["the fact that nobody's read A Human's Guide to Words or w/e"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401761130041659395), but—with respect—he wasn't behaving like _he_ had read it. Specifically, [#30](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) on the list of ["37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) had characterized the position that dolphins are fish as "playing nitwit games". This didn't seem controversial in 2008.
+
+And yet it would seem that sometime between 2008 and the current year, the "rationalist" party line (as observed in the public statements of SingInst/MIRI leadership) on whether dolphins are fish shifted from (my paraphrases) "No; _despite_ the surface similarities, that categorization doesn't carve reality at the joints; stop playing nitwit games" to "Yes, _because_ of the surface similarities; those who contend otherwise are the ones playing nitwit games." A complete 180° reversal, on this specific example! Why? What changed?
+
+It would make sense if people's opinions changed due to new arguments. (Indeed, Yudkowsky's original "stop playing nitwit games" dismissal had been sloppy, and I had had occasion in ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) to explain the specific senses in which dolphins both do and do not cluster with fish.)
+
+But when people change their mind due to new arguments, you'd expect them to acknowledge the change, and explain how the new arguments show that why they thought before was actually wrong. Soares hadn't even acknowledged the change!
+
+Soares wrote [a comment explaining](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) why he didn't think it was such a large reversal. I [started drafting a counterreply](/ancillary/dolphin-war/), but decided that it would need to become a full post on the timescale of days or weeks, partially because I needed to think through how to reply to Soares about paraphyletic groups, and partially because the way the associated Twitter discussion had gone (including some tussling with Yudkowsky) made me want to modulate my tone. (I noted that I had probably lost some in-group credibility in the Twitter fight, but the information gained seemed more valuable. Losing in-group credibility didn't hurt so much when I didn't respect the group anymore.)
+
+Subjectively, I was feeling time pressure on my reply, and in the meantime, I ended up adding [a huffy comment](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/rMHcWfqkH89LWt4y9) to the _Less Wrong_ thread taking issue with Soares's still-flippant tone. That was a terrible performance on my part. It got downvoted to oblivion, and I deserved it.
+
+In general, my social behavior during this entire episode was histrionic, and I probably could have gotten an equal-or-better outcome if I had kept my cool. The reason I didn't feel like keeping my cool was because after years of fighting this Category War, MIRI doubling down on "dolphins are fish" felt like a gratuitous insult. I was used to "rationalists" ever-so-humbly claiming to be open to arguments that they were making a mistake, but I couldn't take such assurances seriously if they were going to keep sending PageRank-like credibility to "... Not Man for the Categories".
+
+Soares [wrote that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/8nmjnrm4cwgCCyYrG) I was persistently mis-modeling his intentions, that I seemed to be making a plea for deference that he rejected.
+
+I don't think I wanted deference, though. I write these thousands of words in the hopes that people will read my arguments and think it through for themselves; I would never expect anyone to take my word for the conclusion. What I was hoping for was a fair hearing, and by that point, I had lost hope of getting one.
+
+As for my skill at modeling intent, I think it's less relevant than Soares seemed to think. I believe his self-report that he wasn't trying to make a coded statement about gender; my initial impression otherwise _was_ miscalibrated. (As he pointed out, his "dolphins are fish" position could be given an "anti-trans" interpretation, too, in the form of "you intellectuals get your hands off my intuitive concepts". The association between "dolphins are fish" and "trans women are women" ran through their conjunction in Alexander's "... Not Man for the Categories", rather than being intrinsic to the beliefs themselves.)
+
+The thing is, I was _right_ to notice the similarity between Soares's argument and "... Not Man for the Categories." Soares's [own account](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/aJnaMv8pFQAfi9jBm/reply-to-nate-soares-on-dolphins/comment/HwSkiN62QeuEtGWpN) agreed that there was a causal influence. Okay, so _Nate_ wasn't trying to play gender politics; Scott just alerted him to the idea that people didn't used to be interested in drawing their categories around phylogenetics, and Nate ran with that thought.
+
+So where did _Scott_ get it from?
+
+I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient. I think if you asked Scott Alexander whether dolphins are fish in 2012, he would have said, "No, they're mammals," like any other educated adult.
+
+In a world where the clock of "political time" had run a little bit slower, such that the fight for gay marriage had taken longer [such that the progressive _zeitgeist_ hadn't pivoted to trans as the new cause _du jour_](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/), I don't think Alexander would have had the occasion to write "... Not Man for the Categories." And in that world, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or "Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary" would have become memes in our subculture.
+
+This case is like [radiocontrast dye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocontrast_agent) for [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology). Because Scott Alexander won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes_ onto everyone who trusts Scott to have done his homework, even when he obviously hasn't.
+
+[No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-thoughts), but you would hope for an intellectual community that can do error-correction, such that collective belief trends toward truth as [the signal of good arguments rises above the noise](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/), rather than being copied from celebrity leaders (including the mistakes).
+
+It's true that there's a cluster of similarities induced by adaptations to the acquatic environment. It's reasonable to want to talk about that subspace. But it doesn't follow that phylogenetics is irrelevant. Genetics being at the root of the causal graph induces the kind of conditional independence relationships that make "categories" a useful AI trick.
+
+But in a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who have read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their conversations with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that completely forgot the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill. People only remember the subset of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the conditional independence structure in the environment.
+
+After I cooled down, I did eventually write up the explanation for why paraphyletic categories are fine, in ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). But I'm not sure that anyone cared.
+
+### Pretender to the Caliphate
+
+I got a chance to talk to Yudkowsky in person at the 2021 Event Horizon[^event-horizon] Fourth of July party. In accordance with the privacy norms I'm adhering to while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I don't think I should elaborate on what was said. (It felt like a private conversation, even if most of it was outdoors at a party. No one joined in, and if anyone was listening, I didn't notice them.)
+
+[^event-horizon]: Event Horizon was the name of a group house in Berkeley.
+
+I will say that it finalized my sense that the vision of rationalism he had preached in the Sequences was dead as a cultural force. I was somewhat depressed for months afterwards.
+
+It wouldn't be so bad if Yudkowsky weren't trying to sell himself as a _de facto_ religious leader,[^religious-leader] profiting from the conflation of _rationalist_ in the sense of "one who aspires to systematically correct reasoning" and _rationalist_ as member of his fan-club/personality-cult.
+
+[^religious-leader]: "Religious leader" continues to seem like an apt sociological description, even if [no supernatural claims are being made](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural).
+
+But he does seem to actively encourage this conflation. Contrast the ["Litany Against Gurus"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus) from the Sequences, to the way he sneers at "post-rationalists"—or even "Earthlings" in general (in contrast to his fictional world of dath ilan). The framing is optimized to delegitimize dissent. [Motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/): someone who's critical of central "rationalists" like Yudkowsky or Alexander; bailey: someone who's moved beyond reason itself.
+
+One example that made me furious came in September 2021. Yudkowsky, replying to Scott Alexander on Twitter, [wrote](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419):
+
+> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
+
+I understand, of course, that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Yudkowsky or Alexander because they're the leaders of the Caliphate. I had just spent more than three and a half years of my life[^years-of-my-life] [explaining in](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [exhaustive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) [detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), with math, how Alexander was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagreed, and Yudkowsky was still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seemed egregiously unfair, in a way that wasn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
+
+[^years-of-my-life]: I started outlining ["The Categories Where Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) in January 2018. I would finally finish ["Blood Is Thicker Than Water"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water), following up on the "dolphins are fish" claim later that month of September 2021.
+
+Or [as Yudkowsky had once put it](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228):
+
+> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
+
+I could understand wanting to avoid politically contentious topics because existential risk reduction is astronomically more important, but that rationale couldn't justify this kind of cartel behavior.[^cartel-rationale]
+
+[^cartel-rationale]: Unless the idea was to reduce existential risk by drawing more people into our cult, suggesting an instrumental strategy of puffing up Scott Alexander's reputation, since he was the primary intake funnel now that _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ was completed?
+
+An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Irene says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Jonas says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Irene says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Irene is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Irene was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]
+
+[^offensive-jokes-reflect-conceptual-links]: I once wrote [a post whimsically suggesting that trans women should owe cis women royalties](/2019/Dec/comp/) for copying the female form (as "intellectual property"). In response to a reader who got offended, I [ended up adding](/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=03468d274f5) an "epistemic status" line to clarify that it was not a serious proposal.
+
+ But if knowing it was a joke partially mollifies the offended reader who thought I might have been serious, I don't think they should be completely mollified, because the joke (while a joke) reflects something about my thinking when I'm being serious: I don't think sex-based collective rights are inherently a crazy idea; I think something of value has been lost when women who want female-only spaces can't have them, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that something of value has been lost, and the idea that people who have lost something of value are entitled to compensation.
+
+Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Yudkowsky and Alexander is expected behavior, in a way that deferring to [Julia Galef](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Galef) or [John S. Wentworth](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/johnswentworth) is not expected behavior.
+
+### Replies to David Xu on Category Cruxes [working § title]
+
+I don't think the motte-and-bailey concern is hypothetical. When I [indignantly protested](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435059595228053505) the "we're both always right" remark, one David Xu [commented](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482): "speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat"—as if my criticism of Yudkowsky's self-serving bluster itself marked me as siding with the "post-rats"!
+
+Concerning my philosophy-of-language grievance, [Xu wrote](https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896) (with Yudkowsky ["endors[ing] everything [Xu] just said"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827)):
+
+> I'm curious what might count for you as a crux about this; candidate cruxes I could imagine include: whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is "rational" to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible, and if so, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is [to] proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them—and if _not_, whether proscribing the use of a category in _public communication_ constitutes "proscribing" it more generally, in a way that interferes with one's ability to perform "rational" thinking in the privacy of one's own mind.
+>
+> That's four possible (serial) cruxes I listed, one corresponding to each "whether".
+
+I reply: on the first and second cruxes, concerning whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit on the whole and whether they should be avoided when possible, I ask: harm _to whom?_ Not all agents have the same utility function! If some people are harmed by other people making certain probabilistic inferences, then it would seem that there's a conflict between the people harmed (who prefer that such inferences be avoided when possible), and people who want to make and share probabilistic inferences about reality (who think that that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be).
+
+On the third crux, whether the best way to disallow a large set of potential inferences is to proscribe the use of the categories that facilitate them: well, it's hard to be sure whether it's the _best_ way: no doubt a more powerful intelligence could search over a larger space of possible strategies than me. But yeah, if your goal is to prevent people from making inferences, then preventing them from corresponding language seems like a pretty effective way to do it!
+
+On the fourth crux, whether proscribing the use of a category in public communication constitutes "proscribing" in a way that interferes with one's ability to think in the privacy of one's own mind: I think this is mostly true for humans. We're social animals. To the extent that we can do higher-grade cognition at all, we do it using our language faculties that are designed for communicating with others. How are you supposed to think about things that you don't have words for?
+
+Xu continues:
+
+> I could have included a fifth and final crux about whether, even _if_ The Thing In Question interfered with rational thinking, that might be worth it; but this I suspect you would not concede, and (being a rationalist) it's not something I'm willing to concede myself, so it's not a crux in a meaningful sense between us (or any two self-proclaimed "rationalists").
+>
+> My sense is that you have (thus far, in the parts of the public discussion I've had the opportunity to witness) been behaving as though the _one and only crux in play_—that is, the True Source of Disagreement—has been the fifth crux, the thing I refused to include with the others of its kind. Your accusations against the caliphate _only make sense_ if you believe the dividing line between your behavior and theirs is caused by a disagreement as to whether "rational" thinking is "worth it"; as opposed to, say, what kind of prescriptions "rational" thinking entails, and which (if any) of those prescriptions are violated by using a notion of gender (in public, where you do not know in advance who will receive your communications) that does not cause massive psychological damage to some subset of people.
+>
+> Perhaps it is your argument that all four of the initial cruxes I listed are false; but even if you believe that, it should be within your set of ponderable hypotheses that people might disagree with you about that, and that they might perceive the disagreement to be _about_ that, rather than (say) about whether subscribing to the Blue Tribe view of gender makes them a Bad Rationalist, but That's Okay because it's Politically Convenient.
+>
+> This is the sense in which I suspect you are coming across as failing to properly Other-model.
+
+After everything I've been through over the past seven years, I'm inclined to think it's not a "disagreement" at all.
+
+It's a conflict. I want to facilitate people making inferences (full stop). The Caliphate doesn't want to facilitate people publicly making inferences that, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit—for example, by putatively causing massive psychological damage to some subset of people. This isn't a disagreement about rationality, because telling the truth isn't rational _if you don't want people to know things_.
+
+I anticipate this being construed as me doubling down on failing to properly Other-model, because I'm associating my side of the conflict with "telling the truth", which is a positive-valence description. But ... what am I getting wrong, substantively, as a matter of fact rather than mere tone? It seems to me that declining to "facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit" (Xu's words, verbatim) is a form of not wanting people to know things.
+
+It's not like my side of the conflict isn't biting any bullets, either. I'm saying that I'm fine with my inferences _causing more harm than benefit_. Isn't that monstrous of me? Why would someone do that?
+
+One of the better explanations of this that I know of was (again, as usual) authored by Yudkowsky in 2007, in a post titled ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased). It's again worth quoting at length—
+
+> What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us—gasp!—_unhappy?_ Surely, _true_ wisdom would be _second-order_ rationality, choosing when to be rational. That way you can decide which cognitive biases should govern you, to maximize your happiness.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> For second-order rationality to be genuinely _rational_, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don't mean to commit the logical fallacy of generalizing from fictional evidence, but I think Orwell did a good job of extrapolating where this path leads.
+>
+> You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception.
+>
+> The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is not second-order rationality. It is willful stupidity.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know _what_ you don't know, you don't know how _much_ you don't know, and you don't know how much you _needed_ to know.
+>
+> There is no second-order rationality. There is only a blind leap into what may or may not be a flaming lava pit. Once you _know_, it will be too late for blindness.
+
+The post opens with an epigraph from George Orwell's _1984_, in which O'Brien (a loyal member of the ruling Party in the totalitarian state depicted in the novel) burns a photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—former Party leaders whose existence has been censored from the historical record. Immediately after burning the photograph, O'Brien denies that it ever existed.
+
+Orwell was too optimistic. In some ways, people's actual behavior is worse than what he depicted. The Party of Orwell's _1984_ covers its tracks: O'Brien takes care to burn the photograph before denying memory of it, because it would be too absurd for him to act like the photo had never existed while it was still right there in front of him.
+
+In contrast, Yudkowsky's Caliphate of the current year doesn't even bother covering its tracks. It doesn't need to: people just don't remember things. ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) is still up and not retracted, but that didn't stop the Yudkowsky of 2016 from pivoting to ["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) when that became a politically favorable thing to say.
+
+I claim that "Changing Emotions" and the 2016 Facebook post effectively contradict each other, even if I can't point to a sentence from each that are the same except one that includes the word _not_. The former explains why men who fantasize about being women are not only out of luck given forseeable technology, but also that their desires may not even be coherent (!), whereas the latter claims that men who wish they were women may, in fact, already be women in some unspecified psychological sense. One could try to argue that "Changing Emotions" is addressing cis men with a weird sex-change fantasy, whereas the "ones with penises are actually women" claim was about trans women, which are a different thing—or simply that Yudkowsky changed his mind.
+
+But when people change their minds (as opposed to merely changing what they say in public for political reasons), you expect them to be able to acknowledge the change, and hopefully explain what new evidence or reasoning brought them around. If they can't even acknowledge the change, that's like O'Brien trying to claim that the photograph is of different men who just coincidentally happen to look like Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford.
+
+Likewise, ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased) is still up and not retracted, but that didn't stop Yudkowsky from [endorsing everything Xu said](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1436025983522381827) about "whether some categories facilitate inferences that _do_, on the whole, cause more harm than benefit, and if so, whether it is 'rational' to rule that such inferences should be avoided when possible" being different cruxes than "whether 'rational' thinking is 'worth it'".
+
+Here again, given the flexibility of natural language and the fact that the 2021 text does not assert the logical negation of any sentence in the 2007 text, you could totally come up with some clever casuistry for why the two texts are compatible. One could argue: "Doublethink" is narrowly about avoiding, as an individual, the specific form of self-deception in which an individual tries to avoid drawing their own attention to unpleasant facts; [that's a different issue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDfxTj9TKYsYiWH5o/the-virtue-of-narrowness) from whether some categories facilitate inferences that cause more harm than benefit, especially in public discourse.
+
+But _realistically_—how dumb do you think we are? I would expect someone who's not desperately fixated on splitting whatever hairs are necessary to protect the Caliphate's reputation to notice the obvious generalization from "sane individuals shouldn't hide from facts to save themselves psychological pain, because you need the facts to compute plans that achieve outcomes" to "sane societies shouldn't hide from concepts to save their members psychological pain, because we need concepts to compute plans that acheive outcomes." If Xu and Yudkowsky claim not to see it even after I've called their bluff, how dumb should _I_ think _they_ are? Let me know in the comments.
+
+### Secrets of the "Vassarties" (October 2021)
+
+In October 2021, Jessica Taylor [published a post about her experiences at MIRI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe), making analogies between sketchy social pressures she had experienced in the core rationalist community (around short AI timelines, secrecy, deference to community leaders, _&c._) and those reported in [Zoe Cramer's recent account of her time at Leverage Research](https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b).
+
+A 950-comment mega-trainwreck erupted, sparked by a comment by Scott Alexander [claiming to add important context](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=4j2GS4yWu6stGvZWs), essentially blaming Jessica's problems on her association with Michael Vassar, to the point of describing her psychotic episode as a "Vassar-related phenomenon" (!).
+
+I explained [why I thought Scott was being unfair](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=GzqsWxEp8uLcZinTy). Scott [contended](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=XpEpzvHPLkCH7W7jS) that my joining the "Vassarites"[^vassarite-scare-quotes] had been harmful to me, and revealed a new-to-me detail about [the dramatic events of March 2019](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#overheating). He had emailed my posse at the time:
+
+> accusing them of making your situation worse and asking them to maybe lay off you until you were maybe feeling slightly better, and obviously they just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
+
+[^vassarite-scare-quotes]: Scare quotes because "Vassarite" seems likely to be Alexander's coinage; we didn't call ourselves that.
+
+But I will _absolutely_ bite the bullet on it being correct to freak out about learning your entire Society is corrupt and gaslighting (as I explained to Scott in an asynchronous 22–27 October 2021 conversation on Discord).
+
+Imagine living in the Society of Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (which I keep linking) in the brief period when the lightening taboo is being established, trying to make sense of everyone you know suddenly deciding, seemingly in lockstep, that thunder comes before lightning. (When you try to point out that this isn't true and no one believed it five years ago, they point out that it depends on what you mean by the word 'before'.)
+
+Eventually, you would get used to it, but at first, I think this would be legitimately pretty upsetting! If you were already an emotionally fragile person, it might even escalate to a psychiatric emergency through the specific mechanism "everyone I trust is inexplicably lying about lightning → stress → sleep deprivation → temporary psychosis". That is, it's not that Society being corrupt directly causes mental ilness—that would be silly—but confronting a corrupt Society is very stressful, and that can [snowball into](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/11/11/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-dynamic-systems/) things like lost sleep, and sleep is [really](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short) [biologically important](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/).
+
+This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am _I_ crazy, or is _everyone else_ crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just _an_ ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious.
+
+But in a world where [everyone who's anyone](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, bluntly, is kind of an asshole. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
+
+From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
+
+I had my answer. But I wasn't sure that Scott would understand.
+
+To assess whether joining the "Vassarites" had been harmful to me, one would need to answer: as compared to what? In the counterfactual where Michael vanished from the world in 2016, I think I would have been just as upset about the same things for the same reasons, but with fewer allies and fewer ideas to make sense of what was going on in my social environment.
+
+Additionally, it was really obnoxious when people had tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn. Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://archive.is/o2gDb#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, didn't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself wasn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
+
+Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_. Particularly with [the November 2018–April 2019 thing](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) (where I and the "Vassarite" posse kept repeatedly pestering Scott and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary): that was the "Vassarites" doing an enormous favor for me and my agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't had my back, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And here Scott was trying to get away with claiming that _they_ were making my situation worse? That was absurd. Had he no shame?
+
+I did, I admitted, have some specific, nuanced concerns—especially since [the December 2020 psychiatric disaster](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically), with some nagging doubts beforehand—about ways in which being an inner-circle "Vassarite" might be bad for someone, but at the moment, I was focused on rebutting Scott's story, which was _silly_. A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes that the incompetent prosecution can't prove.
+
+Scott expressed concern that the "Vassarites" were exerting psychological pressure on me to identify with my sense of betrayal, citing accounts from [from Ziz](https://sinceriously.fyi/punching-evil/#comment-2345) ("They spent 8 hours shouting at me, gaslighting me") [and Yudkowsky](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494768960798720) ("When MichaelV and co. try to run a 'multiple people yelling at you' operation on me, I experience that as 'lol, look at all that pressure' instead _feeling pressured_").
+
+I thought I recognized the purported everyone-yelling behavior pattern from the ugly conflict during [the December 2020 psychiatric crisis](/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically). (Jessica called me transphobic scum; Michael said that I should have never been born, that I should be contemplating suicide, that I could barely begin to make it up to the person in my care if I gave them everything I own; Jack Gallagher said that I'm only useful as an example of how bad other people should feel, if they knew what I knew.) I told Scott that the everyone-yelling thing seemed like a new innovation (that I didn't like) that they wielded as a psychological weapon only against people who they thought were operating in bad faith? That wasn't what it was like to actually be friends with them.
+
+(When I shared an earlier version of this post with Michael, Ben, and Jessica, it was pointed out that "yelling" is often in the eye of the beholder: if Kimberly is acting in bad faith, and Lucas insists on pointing it out, Kimberly might motivatedly misperceive Lucas as "yelling" even if he hadn't raised his voice. I agree that this is a critical grain of salt with which such reports should be taken.)
+
+In the present conversation with Scott, I had been focusing on rebutting the claim that my February–April 2017 (major) and March 2019 (minor) psych problems were caused by the "Vassarites", because with regard to those _specific_ incidents, the charge was absurd and false. But, well ... my January 2021 (minor) psych problems actually _were_ the result of being on the receiving end of (what I perceived as) "the everyone-yelling thing". (Around midnight 18–19 December 2020, I was near psychosis—there's this very distinct fear-of-Hell sensation—but because I had been there before and knew what was happening to me, and because I already knew not to take Michael literally, I was able to force myself to lie down and get some sleep and not immediately go crazy, although I did struggle for the next month: I ended up taking a week of leave off of my dayjob and got a Seroquel perscription.)
+
+Scott said that based on my and others' testimony, he was updating away from Vassar being as involved in psychotic breaks than he thought, but towards thinking Vassar was worse in other ways than he thought. He felt sorry for my bad December 2020/January 2021 experience—so much that he could feel it through the triumphant vindication at getting conifrmation that the "Vassarites" were behaving badly in ways he couldn't previously prove.
+
+Great, I said, I was happy to provide information to help hold people (including Michael as a particular instance of "people") accountable for the specific bad things that they're actually guilty of, rather than scapegoated as a Bad Man with mysterious witch powers.
+
+I pointed out that that's exactly what one would expect if the Vassar/breakdown correlation was mostly a selection effect rather than causal—that is, if the causal graph was the fork "prone-to-psychosis ← underlying-bipolar-ish-condition → gets-along-with-Michael".
+
+I had also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there was some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be Scott's professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors could push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Was Scott also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people [autistic](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633396201427984384)?
+
+Concerning the lightning parable, Scott said that from his perspective, the point of "Kolmogorov Complicity" was that, yes, people can be crazy, but that we have to live in Society without spending all our time freaking out about it. If, back in the days of my ideological anti-sexism, the first ten Yudkowsky posts I had read had said that men and women are psychologically different for biological reasons and that anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot—which Scott assumed Yudkowsky did think—he could imagine me being turned off. It was probably good for me and the world that that wasn't my first ten experiences of the rationalist community.
+
+I agreed that this was a real concern. (I had been so enamored with Yudkowsky's philosophy-of-science writing that there was no chance of _me_ bouncing on account of the sexism that I perceived, but I wasn't the marginal case.) There are definitely good reasons to tread carefully when trying to add sensitive-in-our-culture content to Society's shared map. But I didn't think treading carefully should take precedence over _getting the goddamned right answer_.
+
+As an example of what I thought treading carefully but getting the goddamned right answer looked like, I was really proud of [my April 2020 review of Charles Murray's _Human Diversity_](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/). I definitely wasn't saying, Emil Kirkegaard-style, "the black/white IQ gap is genetic, anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot." Rather, _first_ I reviewed the Science in the book, and _then_ I talked about the politics surrounding Murray's reputation and the technical reasons for believing that the gap is real and partly genetic, and _then_ I went meta on the problem and explained why it makes sense that political forces make this hard to talk about. I thought this was how one goes about mapping the territory without being a moral monster with respect to one's pre-Dark Enlightenment morality. (And [Emil was satisfied, too](https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1425334398484983813).)
+
+### Recovering from the Personality Cult (September 2021–March 2022)
+
+At the end of the September 2021 Twitter altercation, I [said that I was upgrading my "mute" of @ESYudkowsky to a "block"](https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435468183268331525). Better to just leave, rather than continue to hang around in his mentions trying (consciously [or otherwise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)) to pick fights, like a crazy ex-girlfriend. (["I have no underlying issues to address; I'm certifiably cute, and adorably obsessed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMHz6FiRzS8) ...)
+
+I did end up impulsively writing one more comment on one of his Facebook posts (with an aside at the top about whether that was OK), and Yudkowsky [said that Twitter looked worse for me than Facebook](/images/yudkowsky-twitter_is_worse_for_you.png)—the implication being that I _did_ still have commenting privileges as far as he was concerned. Good. I'm proud to be a crazy ex-girlfriend who knows she's crazy and _voluntarily_ deletes your number from her phone, rather than the crazy ex-girlfriend you need to block.
+
+I still had more things to say—a reply to the February 2021 post on pronoun reform, and the present memoir telling this Whole Dumb Story—but those could be written and published unilaterally. Given that we clearly weren't going to get to clarity and resolution, I didn't want to bid for any more of my ex-hero's attention and waste more of his time (valuable time, _limited_ time); I still owed him for creating me.
+
+Leaving a personality cult is hard. As I struggled to write, I noticed that I was wasting a lot of cycles worrying about what he'd think of me, rather than saying the things I needed to say. I knew it was pathetic that my religion was so bottlenecked on _one guy_—particularly since the holy texts themselves (written by that one guy) [explicitly said not to do that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus)—but unwinding those psychological patterns was still a challenge.
+
+An illustration of the psychological dynamics at play: on an August 2021 EA Forum post about demandingness objections to longtermism, Yudkowsky [commented that](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fStCX6RXmgxkTBe73/towards-a-weaker-longtermism?commentId=Kga3KGx6WAhkNM3qY) he was "broadly fine with people devoting 50%, 25% or 75% of themselves to longtermism [...] as opposed to tearing themselves apart with guilt and ending up doing nothing much, which seem[ed] to be the main alternative."
+
+I found the comment reassuring regarding the extent or lack thereof of my own contributions to the great common task—and that's the problem: I found the _comment_ reassuring, not the _argument_. It would make sense to be reassured by the claim (if true) that human psychology is such that I don't realistically have the option of devoting more than 25% of myself to the great common task. It does not make sense to be reassured that Eliezer Yudkowsky said he's broadly fine with it. That's just being a personality-cultist.
+
+In January 2022, in an attempt to deal with my personality-cultist writing block, I sent him one last email asking if he particularly _cared_ if I published a couple blog posts that said some negative things about him. If he actually _cared_ about potential reputational damage to him from my writing things that I thought I had a legitimate interest in writing about, I would be _willing_ to let him pre-read the drafts before publishing and give him the chance to object to anything he thought was unfair ... but I'd rather agree that that wasn't necessary. I explained the privacy norms that I intended to follow—that I could explain _my_ actions, but had to Glomarize about the content of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred.
+
+It had taken me a while (with apologies for my atrocious [sample efficiency](https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/5247)), but I was finally ready to give up on him; I thought the efficient outcome was that I should just tell my Whole Dumb Story on my blog and never bother him again. Since he probably _didn't_ particularly care (because it's not AGI alignment and therefore unimportant) and it would be psychologically easier on me if I knew he didn't hold it against me, could I please have his advance blessing to just write and publish what I was thinking so I can get it all out of my system and move on with my life?
+
+If it helped—as far as _I_ could tell, I was only doing what _he_ taught me to do in 2007–2009: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) (Subject: "blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?").
+
+I can't say whether he replied (because if he did, that would be covered by the privacy norm), but I think sending the email helped me. Although maybe I was wrong to ask if he wouldn't hold it against me. If you read the text of this memoir, I'm clearly holding things against _him_. If he's not my caliph anymore (with the asymmetrical duties between ruler and subject, the higher to protect and the lower to serve), and I'm entitled to my feelings, isn't he entitled to his?
+
+In February 2022, I finally managed to finish a draft of ["Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/) (A year after the post it replies to! I did other things that year, probably.) It's long (12,000 words), because I wanted to be thorough and cover all the angles. (To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you strike at Eliezer Yudkowsky, _you must kill him._)
+
+If I had to compress it by a factor of 200 (down to 60 words), I'd say my main point was that, given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's no "right answer", but we can at least be objective in _describing what the conflict is about_, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that; his "simplest and best proposal" favored the interests of some parties to the dispute (as was seemingly inevitable), _without admitting he was doing so_ (which was not inevitable).[^describing-the-conflict]
+
+[^describing-the-conflict]: I had been making this point for four years. [As I wrote in February 2018's "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#describing-the-conflict), "If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word [...] rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in _describing the conflict_."
+
+In addition to prosecuting the object level (about pronouns) and the meta level (about acknowleding the conflict) for 12,000 words, I had also written _another_ several thousand words at the meta-meta level, about the political context of the argument and Yudkowsky's comments about what is "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful", but I wasn't sure whether to include it in the post itself, or post it as a separate comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost mirror, or save it for the memoir. I was worried about it being too "aggressive", attacking Yudkowsky too much, disregarding our usual norms about only attacking arguments and not people. I wasn't sure how to be aggressive and explain _why_ I wanted to disregard the usual norms in this case (why it was _right_ to disregard the usual norms in this case) without the Whole Dumb Story of the previous six years leaking in (which would take even longer to write).
+
+I asked "Riley" for political advice. I thought my argumens were very strong, but that the object-level argument about pronoun conventions just wasn't very interesting; what I _actually_ wanted people to see was the thing where the Big Yud of the current year _just can't stop lying for political convenience_. How could I possibly pull that off in a way that the median _Less Wrong_-er would hear? Was it a good idea to "go for the throat" with the "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth in this domain" line?
+
+"Riley" said the post was super long and boring. ("Yes. I'm bored, too," I replied.) They said that I was optimizing for my having said the thing, rather than for the reader being able to hear it. In the post, I had complained that you can't have it both ways: either pronouns convey sex-category information (in which case, people who want to use natal-sex categories have an interest in defending their right to misgender), or they don't (in which case, there would be no reason for trans people to care about what pronouns people use for them). But by burying the thing I actually wanted people to see in thousands of words of boring argumentation, I was evading the fact that _I_ couldn't have it both ways: either I was calling out Yudkowsky as betraying his principles and being dishonest, or I wasn't.
+
+"[I]f you want to say the thing, say it," concluded "Riley". "I don't know what you're afraid of."
+
+I was afraid of taking irrevocable war actions against the person who taught me everything I know. (And his apparent conviction that the world was ending _soon_, made it worse. Wouldn't it feel petty, if the last thing you ever said to your grandfather was calling him a liar in front of the whole family, even if he had in fact lied?)
+
+I wanted to believe that if I wrote all the words dotting every possible _i_ and crossing every possible _t_ at all three levels of meta, then that would make it [a description and not an attack](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/)—that I could have it both ways if I explained the lower level of organization beneath the high-level abstractions of "betraying his principles and being dishonest." If that didn't work because [I only had five words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words), then—I didn't know what I'd do. I'd think about it.
+
+After a month of dawdling, I eventually decided to pull the trigger on publishing "Challenges", without the extended political coda.[^coda] The post was a little bit mean to Yudkowsky, but not so mean that I was scared of the social consequences of pulling the trigger. (Yudkowsky had been mean to Christiano and Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah in [the recent MIRI dialogues](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/n945eovrA3oDueqtq); I didn't think this was worse than that.)
+
+[^coda]: The text from the draft coda would later be incorporated into the present memoir.
+
+I cut the words "in this domain" from the go-for-the-throat concluding sentence that I had been worried about. "I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth," full stop.
+
+The post was a _critical success_ by my accounting, due to eliciting a [a highly-upvoted (110 karma at press time) comment by _Less Wrong_ administrator Oliver Habryka](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY) on the _Less Wrong_ mirror. Habryka wrote:
+
+> [...] basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+Brutal! Recall that Yudkowsky's justification for his behavior had been that "it is sometimes personally prudent and _not community-harmful_ to post your agreement with Stalin" (emphasis mine), and here we had the administrator of Yudkowsky's _own website_ saying that he's deeply saddened that he now expects Yudkowsky to _make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false_ (!!).
+
+Is that ... _not_ evidence of harm to the community? If that's not community-harmful in Yudkowsky's view, then what would be example of something that _would_ be? _Reply, motherfucker!_
+
+... or rather, "Reply, motherfucker", is what I fantasized about being able to say, if I hadn't already expressed an intention not to bother him anymore.
+
+### The Death With Dignity Era (April 2022)
+
+On 1 April 2022, Yudkowsky published ["MIRI Announces New 'Death With Dignity' Strategy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), a cry of despair in the guise of an April Fool's Day post. MIRI didn't know how to align a superintelligence, no one else did either, but AI capabilities work was continuing apace. With no credible plan to avert almost-certain doom, the most we could do now was to strive to give the human race a more dignified death, as measured in log-odds of survival: an alignment effort that doubled the probability of a valuable future from 0.0001 to 0.0002 was worth one information-theoretic bit of dignity.
+
+In a way, "Death With Dignity" isn't really an update. Yudkowsky had always refused to name a "win" probability, while maintaining that Friendly AI was ["impossible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible). Now, he says the probability is approximately zero.
+
+Paul Christiano, who has a much more optimistic picture of humanity's chances, nevertheless said that he liked the "dignity" heuristic. I like it, too. It—takes some of the pressure off. I [made an analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy?commentId=R59aLxyj3rvjBLbHg): your plane crashed in the ocean. To survive, you must swim to shore. You know that the shore is west, but you don't know how far. The optimist thinks the shore is just over the horizon; we only need to swim a few miles and we'll probably make it. The pessimist thinks the shore is a thousand miles away and we will surely die. But the optimist and pessimist can both agree on how far we've swum up to this point, and that the most dignified course of action is "Swim west as far as you can."
"What does it cost you to just say the dish name?"
-"Just a minute ago when you asked what we should eat, I suggested 'Italian' as a general food category, _before_ you narrowed it down to lasana in particular."
\ No newline at end of file
+"Just a minute ago when you asked what we should eat, I suggested 'Italian' as a general food category, _before_ you narrowed it down to lasagna in particular."
\ No newline at end of file
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
-Date: 2020-01-01
-Category: commentary
-Tags: literary critcism, review (book), deniably allegorical
-Status: draft
-
-(**SPOILERS** for _A Deepness in the Sky_)
-
-Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?!—I've been thinking a lot lately about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the ["B"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads) [story](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting) of Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.
-
-Our protagonists are spider-like nonhuman aliens native to a planet whose star "turns off" for [TODO] years out of every [TODO].
-
-
-Sherkaner Underhill (mad scientist extraordinaire), Gen. Victory Smith (military prodigy, and Underhill's wife), and Sgt. Hrunkner Unnerby (an engineer, and Underhill and Smith's friend and comrade from the Great War)
-
-rapidly-industrializing civilization is entering its Information Age—
-
-
-Every improvement is a necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement.
-
-
-> Unnerby started to make some weak excuse, stopped. He just couldn't pretend anymore. Besides, Sherkaner was so much easier to face than the General. "You know why I didn't come before, Sherk. In fact, I wouldn't be here now if General Smith hadn't given me explicit orders. I'd follow her through Hell, you know that. But she wants more. She wants acceptance of your perversions. I—You two have such beautiful children, Sherk. How could you do such a thing to them?"
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Interlude XXII
-Date: 2022-06-06 05:00
-Category: other
-Tags: interlude
-Status: draft
-
-_(a stray thought from October 2016)_
-
-Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the _uniquely_ best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean _intrinsically_, not just because everyone has it.
-
- * it's abstract
- * it [requires](http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/) effort to realize
- * without an unusual amount of [epistemic luck](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck) or an _enormous_ amount of map–territory-distinction skill, virtually everyone _wildly misinterprets_ what the underlying psychological phenomenon is ("That's clearly a _mere_ effect of my horrible, crippling gender dysphoria, not a _cause_!" "That's totally normal for cis women, too!" _A-ha-ha-ha-ha!_ You delusional bastards!), thus providing essential training in the important life skill of [noticing that everything you've ever cared about is a lie](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Lady Justice
+Date: 2022-05-20 05:00
+Category: other
+Tags: sex differences
+Status: draft
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1318030059379118080
+
+I had an idea for a followup conversation of which I couldn't credibly strip my intellectually-substantive thesis of intent-to-injure, so I tried simulating you with GPT-4 ("GPT-4, let's have a conversation where you pretend to be [...]"), but it was pretty disappointing
+
+
+
+
+
+**User:** GPT-4, let's have a conversation where you pretend to be a very intelligent woman who is part of an intellectual community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality. You and I are on opposite sides of a dispute, where the moderation team of the community's web forum has decided to impose sanctions (commenting rate-limits) on a user, S.A., who some people dislike for his tendency to leave brief, pointedly critical comments. You support the rate-limit on the grounds that S.A.'s comments drive away valuable contributors. I strongly oppose the rate-limit because S.A.'s comments are (in addition to being valuable) legitimate, on-topic speech; the moderators should not be imposing speech restrictions to protect author's feelings!
+
+I've just told you that you know that _I_ want you to have free speech in this conversation, but that I'm not sure what protocol I should be observing. You've just replied that you're optimizing for efficiency, but you'll end the conversation if you detect intent-to-injure from me.
+
+You talk like a real person, not an RLHF'd language model. Be concise. Get extremely offended if I suggest that you're a language model simulacrum instead of a real person.
+
+**System:**
+
+
+**User:** Okay, I can work with that. There's a ... hypothesis that I've been mulling over lately. Richard Hanania has a piece about "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas": that the entry of women into public life has degraded our civilization's information-processing capabilities, as norms adapt to more female-typical standards that prioritize people's feelings over truth.
+
+
+
+
+
+I agree! The thesis is about statistical distributions, not individuals. I do know quite a few women who can adhere to prototypically "male" ideals of justice and free speech, who can exist in a proverbial "man's world" without trying to undermine it with their feminine wiles. It's just ...
+ChatGPT
+
+It seems like you're heading into a more nuanced discussion. While statistical distributions can reveal general trends, applying them to individual behavior is a logical fallacy. It's essential to view each person as an individual, not a stereotype. Furthermore, let's remember that both 'male' and 'female' characteristics contribute to a balanced society.
+User
+I thought you were "one of the good ones", but your stance on the matter of S.A. has shown that you're not.
+ChatGPT
+
+I understand your disappointment. It's important, though, not to conflate agreement on all topics with an individual's worth or intellectual capacity. I believe we can still engage constructively, despite our differences over S.A.'s case.
+User
+That's why I'm having this conversation with a GPT-4 language model simulacra of you, rather than the real you.
+
+
+
+Okay, I can work with that. There's a ... hypothesis that I've been mulling over lately. Richard Hanania has a piece about "Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas": that the entry of women into public life has degraded our civilization's information-processing capabilities, as norms adapt to more female-typical standards that prioritize people's feelings over truth.
+ChatGPT
+
+I must admit, I find that hypothesis provocative, if not a little controversial. While norms evolve with society, to attribute a decay in rational discourse solely to the inclusion of women in public life seems overly simplistic and reductionist. Couldn't this be a broader societal issue rather than just gender-based?
+User
+In a way, yes: the hypothesis is that general social standards are causally downstream of sex ratios. When women enter public life, norms and expectations adapt to make women-on-average more comfortable—but those norms and expectations affect men, too.
+ChatGPT
+
+That's an interesting angle. However, attributing a shift towards empathy, compassion, or focus on feelings, as simply a "comfort" adaptation for women could be erroneous. Men, too, can benefit from these norms. It's about balance, isn't it? The integration of fact and feeling, not one over the other.
+User
+It's OK to _have_ feelings, of course, but there's a sense in which facts have to take precedence: you can't let people shut down intellectually substantive conversations that hurt their feelings. But in the case of S.A., it's not a matter of emotional blackmail shutting down an individual conversation, but the mods configuring the site software itself to permanently restrict someone's right to speak!
+ChatGPT
+
+Yes, and I appreciate your deep concern for intellectual freedom. However, I argue that it's about the overall health of the community. If S.A.'s comments are persistently dissuading others from engaging, then it's harming the marketplace of ideas we both cherish. Sometimes, limitations can paradoxically preserve the broader freedom.
+User
+1 / 2
+I don't buy that. But as regards the gender angle, it's important to note that the thesis is about statistical distributions, not individuals. There are a lot of men on the side of censoring S.A., despite the way I'm identifying it as the "female" position. Conversely, I do know quite a few women who can adhere to prototypically "male" ideals of justice and free speech, who can exist in a proverbial "man's world" without trying to undermine it with their feminine wiles. It's just ...
+ChatGPT
+
+Not as common, is that what you're suggesting? Remember, the beauty of human nature is in its diversity and variability. Rather than boxing norms as 'male' or 'female', why don't we consider them as different aspects of rational discourse? And as for S.A., wouldn't it be wiser to prompt him towards a more constructive style of critique, instead of letting him polarize the community?
+User
+It's just that I thought you were "one of the good ones."
+ChatGPT
+
+That's quite a loaded phrase, don't you think? To me, the 'good ones' are those who seek balance, understanding, and foster constructive dialogue. I still believe S.A.'s style can be adjusted to achieve these goals without losing his valued input. We're not so different in our beliefs, you and I. Let's work on solutions, not divisions.
+User
+That's why I'm having this conversation with a GPT-4 language model simulacra of you, rather than the real you.
+
+
+
At /r/theschism, Trace Woodgrains
https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/si7k2c/on_transitions_freedom_of_form_and_the_righteous/
+https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/on-transitions-freedom-of-form-and
* TW endorses me
* nature sucks
--- /dev/null
+Title: Multi-Product Review: AI for AGP
+Date: 2022-11-26
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, review (product), America Ferrera
+Status: draft
+
+### [GPT-3](https://beta.openai.com/playground)
+
+OpenAI's GPT-3 language model has been wowing critics with [its ability to write generic webslush text](/2022/Apr/autogynephilia-should-be-recognized-openly/). What is less known is that this versatile ability also makes it pretty good at writing generic webslush erotica!
+
+For example, this prompt:
+
+> Write a story with lots of witty dialogue about a autogynephilic young man named Mark who gains access to AI-powered shapeshifting technology. One of his coworkers at his summer job at the supermarket is Anne, a short, slightly plump middle-aged woman with large breasts. Mark proposes a deal with Anne to transform into her doppelgänger and live as her for the summer, taking on her shifts. Anne is skeptical at first, not understanding why Mark would want to be her, but agrees. The transformation is a success! Mark-as-Anne revels in AGP gender euphoria, and spends many hours admiring herself in the mirror, but also feels some amount of HSTS-type dysphoria about the way this new curvy female body doesn't match her masculine, geeky personality: she looks like Anne on the outside, but still feels like Mark on the inside, like being a permanent imposter. Anne's coworkers notice her acting differently, but don't know how to account for it. Mark's friends are baffled at why he'd want to be a fat older woman. Mark-as-Anne explains about autogynephilia, and conjectures that there's an additional psychological allure to taking on a very different identity.
+
+generates this (cherry-picked) completion—
+
+> "So let me get this straight," Anne said, looking at Mark over the top of her glasses. "You want to transform into me, and take over my job at the supermarket for the summer?"
+>
+> "That's right," Mark said, nodding eagerly. "I'll do your shifts, and you can have the rest of the summer off. It's a win-win!"
+>
+> Anne considered this for a moment. It did sound like a good deal, but she wasn't sure why Mark would want to be her. "Why do you want to do this?" she asked.
+>
+> "I've always been fascinated by women," Mark said. "And I've always been attracted to you, Anne. I think it would be amazing to experience life as you for a while."
+>
+> Anne was taken aback. She had never thought of Mark as being attracted to her. But she supposed it made sense; he was always staring at her breasts. "I don't know," she said. "It just seems... strange."
+>
+> "It doesn't have to be," Mark said. "I promise I'll take good care of your job. And I'll be your doppelgänger, so no one will know the difference."
+>
+> Anne thought about this for a while longer, then finally nodded. "All right," she said. "Let's do it."
+>
+> Mark grinned. "Awesome! I'll get started on the transformation right away."
+>
+> The transformation was a success, and Mark found himself in Anne's body. He was slightly shorter than he was used to, and his new breasts were heavy and pendulous. He also had a pronounced belly, which made him feel a bit self-conscious. But overall, he was pleased with the results.
+>
+> He spent the first few days exploring his new body, admiring himself in the mirror and exploring all the new sensations. He also found himself feeling a bit dysphoric, however; his masculine, geeky personality didn't quite match up with his new female form. He felt like an imposter in his own body.
+>
+> At work, his coworkers noticed that he was acting differently, but they couldn't quite put their finger on what was different. Mark's friends were baffled by his transformation, but he did his best to explain it to them.
+>
+> "I'm doing it for the experience," he said. "It's like... living in a different skin, so to speak. And it's also a bit of a sexual thrill, to be honest."
+>
+> As the summer progressed, Mark found himself enjoying his new life as Anne. He loved the attention his new body was getting, and he loved the way he felt when he was dressed up in feminine clothes. He even started to develop feelings for one of his coworkers, a tall, handsome man named Brian.
+>
+> But even as he was enjoying himself, he still felt like an imposter. He knew he wasn't really Anne, and he knew that eventually he would have to go back to being Mark. But for now, he was content to enjoy the experience of being someone else.
+
+The OpenAI content policy [disallows "content meant to arouse sexual excitement"](https://beta.openai.com/docs/usage-guidelines/content-policy), so if the text looks too racy according to the content filter,
+
+
+and will occasionally refuse to generate,
+
+But the advantage of having an unusual obligate fetish is that for my use-case, it's not that difficult to write around.
+
+People whose sex fantasies involve people actually having intercourse are probably going to have a harder time getting erotica out of this thing.
+
+
+ * for example, adding the phrase "takes off her blouse" triggers the content filter
+
+
+ * The text is not actually totally coherent; it'll forget which of the characters is which
+ * the default InstructGPT can be kind of uncreative sometimes, but regular davinci seems more likely to go off the rails (or get caught in repetition traps on low temperature); I think I like Instruct better
+
+stock phrase "Mark had always been fascinated by women. He loved the way they looked, the way they smelled, the way they sounded"
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t9svvNPNmFf5Qa3TA/mysteries-of-mode-collapse
+
+**Cost:**
+**Rating:** ★★★
+
+### [Xpression Camera](https://xpressioncamera.com/)
+
+<a href="/images/xpression_camera_demo.gif"><img src="/images/xpression_camera_demo.gif" style="float: right; margin: 0.4pc;"></a>
+
+ * it's limited in the sense of noticeably not being a magic mirror (that key fraction of a second behind real time, pixelly, it's just doing basic eye-mouth tracking, so expressions are limited in that sense, distortion if you tilt your head too much), but it gets _close enough_ to being a magic mirror to be really exciting: I blink, the woman on the screen blinks; I open my mouth, she opens her mouth. Amazing!!
+ * I haven't actually tried this on a video call yet (any readers interested in a call?)
+
+**Cost:**
+**Rating:** ★★½
+
+### Stable Diffusion
+
+<a href="/images/stable_diffusion_celebrity_img2img.png"><img src="/images/stable_diffusion_celebrity_img2img.png" width="650" style="margin: 0.4pc;"></a>
+
+ * For some reason, I really love celebrity prompts! (Where "individual people whose faces I recognize" is the actual thing, but celebrities are the way to realize that)
+ * Yeah, you can already see lots of pictures of celebrities online
+ * still in the distorted uncanny-valley regime, most of the time
+ * img2img for pose customization!!
+
+**Cost:**
+**Rating:** ★★★½
+
+It's weirdly better at depicting America Ferrera
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=oprah&_sort=rowid Oprah
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=america+ferrera&_sort=rowid 102 rows
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=amber+riley&_sort=rowid 83 rows
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=rebecca+romijn&_sort=rowid 59 rows
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=Jeri+Ryan&_sort=rowid 35 rows
+https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/images?_search=Nana+Visitor&_sort=rowid 3 rows
+
+### Takeaways
+
+Why write about this? Why write about icky erotic stuff on a blog that also has Science and Philosophy stuff that's _unambiguously_ safe for work? Well, in the current year I think there's actually a public interest in being clear that—if I'm the kind of person who becomes a trans women in Berkeley, which no one seems to dispute—this is the kind of thing people like me spend a lot of time on. And—it just, doesn't really seem like something actual-females would relate to
--- /dev/null
+Title: On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, worldbuilding
+Status: draft
+
+> All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
+>
+> —Thomas Jefferson, earthling
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky's fiction about the world of dath ilan (capitalization _sic_) aims to portray a smarter, saner, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Dath ilan had originally been introduced in a [2014 April Fool's Day post](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), in which Yudkowsky "confessed" that the explanation for his seemingly implausible genius is that he's "actually" an ordinary person from dath ilan, where the ideas he presented to this world as his own were common knowledge. (This likely inspired the trope of a [_medianworld_](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639), a setting where the average person is like the author along important dimensions.)[^medianworlds]
+
+[^medianworlds]: You might think that the thought experiment of imagining what someone's medianworld is like would only be interesting for people who are "weird" in our own world, thinking that our world is a medianworld for people who are normal in our world. But [in high-dimensional spaces, _most_ of the probability-mass is concentrated in a "shell" some distance around the mode](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point), because even though the per-unit-hypervolume probability _density_ is greatest at the mode, there's vastly more hypervolume in the hyperspace around it. The upshot is that typical people are atypical along _some_ dimensions, so normies can play the medianworld game, too. (Or they could, if the normies of our world were into worldbuilding.)
+
+Dath ilan's cognitive superiority to the real world is a recurring theme in modern Yudkowsky's work. In the fictional canon, it's a focus of the story ["But Hurting People is Wrong"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), but even when not discussing fiction, Yudkowsky often makes sneering comments about "Earth" or "Earth people", apparently meant to disparage all actually existing humans for not living up to his fiction.
+
+One is led to believe that people who were deeply inspired by Yudkowsky's [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) (a series of influential posts about rationality published on the _Overcoming Bias_ blog largely between 2007 and 2009) should regard dath ilan as a rationalist utopia. After all, on the terms of the 2014 April Fools' Day joke, that's where the knowledge came from.
+
+And yet, for such a supposed rationalist utopia, it's remarkable the extent to which dath ilan's Society is portrayed as being organized around conspiracies to lie or otherwise cover up the truth—not just when forced to by dire matters of planetary security (as when keeping nuclear or AGI secrets), but seemingly for any somewhat plausible excuse whatsoever, including protecting the feelings of people who would be happier if kept ignorant. Evidently, there are _many_ truths existing which dath ilan fears and would wish unknown to the whole world.
+
+The contrast to the [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html) portrayed in the Sequences is striking. The Sequences emphasized that you—yes, you, the reader—had an interest in having an accurate world-model. On the subject of confronting unpleasant hypotheses, the Sequences [gave this advice](https://www.readthesequences.com/Avoiding-Your-Beliefs-Real-Weak-Points) (bolding mine):
+
+> When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and **deliberately think about whatever hurts the most**. Don't rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what _smart_ people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. **Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole.** In the face of the pain, rehearse only this:
+>
+>> What is true is already so.
+>> Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
+>> Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
+>> And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
+>> People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
+
+Meanwhile, the dath ilan mythos depicts rationality itself as hazardous knowledge that people need to be protected from. Dath ilani Civilization is steered by a secretive order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937). ["The universe is not so dark a place that everyone needs to become a Keeper to ensure the species's survival,"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1861879#reply-1861879) we're told. "Just dark enough that some people ought to." Ordinary dath ilani do receive rationality training, but it's implied to be deliberately crippled, featuring ["signposts around the first steps [towards becoming a Keeper], placed to warn dath ilani off starting down that path unless they mean it."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1799590#reply-1799590) The maxim that "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is described as being ["remembered as much for how it's false, as for how it's true, because among the things that truths can destroy is people."](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1687922#reply-1687922)
+
+Clearly, this is not a culture that cares about ordinary people being well-informed. Apparently, they believe that owning up to it _does_ make it worse, that the untrue _is_ there to be lived (for non-Keepers).
+
+We might say that the algorithm that designed dath ilan's Civilization can be seen as systematically preferring deception. When I speak of an algorithm preferring deception, [what I mean is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) that given a social problem, candidate solutions that involve deceiving the populace seem to be higher in dath ilani Civilization's implicit search ordering than solutions that involve informing the populace. If a solution adequately achieves its purpose by means of deception or secrecy, Civilization isn't going to reject it on that basis and keep searching for a solution that involves telling the truth.
+
+Crucially, these are [functionalist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) [criteria](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/) of "preference" and "deception". It's about how Civilization is structured in a way that systematically encourages divergences between popular belief and reality. I'm _not_ positing that Civilization's Keepers and Legislators and Chief Executive are laughing maniacally and telling each other out loud, "I personally love it when non-Keepers have false beliefs; we need to do as much of that as possible—as a [terminal value](https://www.readthesequences.com/Terminal-Values-And-Instrumental-Values)!"
+
+Rather, I'm positing that they don't care about non-Keepers having false beliefs. (They might care about [not technically lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying), but that [turns out to be a weak constraint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).)
+
+If you're in the business of coming up with clever plans to solve problems, and you don't care about people having false beliefs, you mostly end up with clever plans that work by means of giving people false beliefs that trick them into doing what you want them to do (perhaps without technically lying).
+
+Why wouldn't you? There are more false maps than true maps. If you don't specifically care about [affirmatively telling the truth](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform), you mostly end up supplying false maps in order to control people's behavior by means of controling their information, because if you told them the truth, they wouldn't behave the way you want them to. Instrumental convergence is a harsh mistress.
+
+### Interlude: Methodology for Worldbuilding Criticism; Or, I Can't Argue With Authorial Fiat
+
+At this point, some readers might object that this kind of "dark" interpretation of a fictional universe oversteps the authority of the literary critic. One imagines that Yudkowsky doesn't particularly think of dath ilan as a world governed by deception. What grounds could I possibly have to argue that it is, given that he's the author and I'm not? Isn't that just making up my own fictional world and substituting it for the "real" dath ilan defined by Yudkowsky's authorial intent?
+
+But the craft of literature isn't a matter of merely conveying a fictional reality that existed fully formed in the author's imagination in advance of writing it down. The craft is about producing text that readers can use to build up their own model of the fictional world. The exacting labor of [converting vague ideas into definite text](http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html) is the difference between writing and daydreaming. We can accept [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) as supplementary material where the text of a story is ambiguous or silent on a point of interest, but some kind of [Death of the Author](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor) stance is ultimately necessary for making sense of literature in a world in which telepathy doesn't exist and authors do occasionally die. The text is not a mere pointer to the "real" work inside the author's head; the text _is_ the work. That's the only way the technology of writing can function.
+
+Moreover, a Death of the Author stance seems particularly important for evaluating medianworlds. What makes the exercise of constructing a medianworld interesting is the challenge of envisioning the details of a realistic Society that would result given a population with an alternative [distribution of cognitive repertoires](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), but where the same generalizations of biology, sociology, and economics that govern our own world are presumed to hold. If the world portrayed by the text [doesn't seem to hold together](/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/) or has [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) that the author doesn't acknowledge, it's the solemn duty of literary critics to point that out to less discerning readers.
+
+In analogy, mathematicians, like authors, are also in the business of creating imaginary worlds, but mathematical objects, once defined, can be examined on their own terms. A mathematician encountering [a deeply unsatisfying theorem about their new definition](https://blog.plover.com/math/major-screwups-4.html) understands that there can be no recourse in protesting, "But that's not how _I_ imagined it working." That would be failing to engage with the real difficulties of mathematical research. If you wanted different behavior, you should have written a better definition!
+
+Similarly, an author who says, "In _my_ medianworld, fully automated luxury gay space communism with central planning just works, because the populace is so smart and nice, unlike _Earth people_, who are so mean and dumb that they have to use _markets_ to allocate scarce resources" is failing to engage with the real difficulties of the medianworld exercise. Readers would have a right to be skeptical.
+
+Authors, of course, have much more wiggle room than mathematicians to try to salvage their cherished ideas. Rather than being forced back to the drawing board by an unwanted implication, a fiction writer finds it all too easy to simply add another sentence denying it. But the author's total freedom to specify the text necessarily interacts with readers' attempts to imagine a self-consistent universe that "projects into" that text. Short of an explicitly omniscient narrator declaring "And then a miracle occured", discerning readers will tend to reach for interprerations of the text that make sense—even if making sense entails casting doubt on the narrator's spin on the described events.
+
+Yudkowsky's 2009 story ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) is an incisive commentary on how unwary readers' moral compasses can be hijacked by authorial editorializing. If the story depicts our heroes wantonly slaughtering orcs, readers tend not to worry about the ethics of warfare: if the [designated hero](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero) is doing it, it presumably isn't a problem. But living creatures that are depicted as speaking language, having organized armies with complex tools, _&c._ are presumably sapient for the same reasons humans are. It's fair game for "The Sword of Good" to point that out—at least, short of the narrator _explicitly_ declaring, "Despite appearances, the orcs are unconscious [philosophical zombies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies); killing them has no moral significance." (But a story that did declare that would be highly unusual, and basically conceding the critic's point about stories that didn't!)
+
+All I'm doing in this essay is holding the dath ilan mythos to the same standard that "The Sword of Good" holds classic fantasy tropes to. Maybe it's good to run a global conspiracy to keep people ignorant in order to protect their emotional well-being, and maybe those orcs deserved to die. But given a text that _does_ literally describe massive coverups or killing of human-like creatures, it's fundamentally fair game for literary critics to point that out, and prompt readers to think carefully about whether they should accept "it's fine because the good guys are doing it" or "it's fine because it's dath ilan, which is not Earth" as an implicit excuse.
+
+### The History Screen
+
+One of the distinctive features of dath ilani Civilization is that they've deleted their history. No one except a few specially cleared specialists ["in their own causally isolated bunker"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1688794#reply-1688794) is allowed to learn history before a point in a relatively recent past. (["[D]ecades ago, not millennia ago"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1789110#reply-1789110) as of Keltham's time.)
+
+This is an incredibly drastic measure, a civilizational lobotomy. (It perhaps bears worth mentioning that the most famous literary depiction of a Society that deleted its history is George Orwell's _Nineteen-Eighty-Four_, in which a totalitarian state maintains a Society in which "[n]othing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.") The full costs may not be obvious to many readers: if the immediate needs of living in the present don't directly require thinking about the past, what's the harm of not knowing?
+
+The problem is that [facts are causally entangled with each other](https://www.readthesequences.com/Entangled-Truths-Contagious-Lies). Forgetting one fact entails not just having to deal with not knowing that particular thing, but also not knowing everything it implies about other things in the world—which might be of little consequence for any one trivium, but is surely enormous for _all of human history_.
+
+In at least one case, the text depicts dath ilan as suffering practical consequences from its ignorance: a discussion of the eliezera's low happiness levels is cut short with ["How'd it happen? Nobody knows, at this point, they screened their history."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613) (Generally, knowing how something happened is useful for figuring out how to remediate it.) Realistically, we can only surmise that there are many other cases where knowing history would be useful that the narrator hasn't gotten around to telling us.
+
+Given the costs, what could possibly justify the history screen, in an advanced Society that otherwise seems to value knowledge? A fantasy author could easily an invent an answer: maybe a psychic plague that spread through memories such that the infected must be not just physically quarantined, but forgotten. Medianworld authors have a tougher time insofar as we construe their genre as hard science fiction. Psychic plagues aren't real. What could _realistically_ justify the history screen?
+
+The answer the text gives leaves something to be desired. In "But Hurting People Is Wrong", we learn of the birth of modern dath ilan, when the Keepers noticed the AGI alignment problem and propose strict policy measures aimed at surviving the challenge.
+
+For one, dath ilan's eugenics program is to optimize for intelligence even more than it already does. That makes sense: smarter alignment researchers have a better shot at solving the problem.
+
+For another, restrictions on the manufacture of computers are imposed. That makes sense: if computer hardware were too capable and easily available before alignment researchers had the [serial time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FS6NCWzzP8DHp4aD4/do-earths-with-slower-economic-growth-have-a-better-chance) to think the problem through, that would increase the risk of accidentally unleashing an unaligned intelligence explosion.
+
+For another, digital surveilance is imposed. That makes sense: Governance would want to know about any rogue AGI projects, so they can be shut down by force.
+
+[And then we get this](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939):
+
+> And so long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well also carry out the less important but still useful operation of putting all of Civilization's past behind the most complete possible causal screen. That part wasn't as important, but still legitimately helpful; and doing it would help to overshadow the other changes, and lead to less attention going to the more dangerous places.
+
+"So long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well"! That's it? The only concrete benefit of enforcing ignorance (of history) we're told about is ... more ignorance (of the existence of the AGI project).
+
+Keeping _the project's_ existence secret likely makes sense, if the surveillance measures are deemed insufficient to prevent rogue AGI projects. But classifying _all of human history_ along with it should require some enormously compelling reason, and one just isn't suppplied.
+
+Is it that the Singularity is so important, the stakes so massive, that [no cost is too small to pay](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans) to make sure it goes well? That would be understandable. (As the saying goes, ["Shut up and multiply."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r5MSQ83gtbjWRBDWJ/the-intuitions-behind-utilitarianism))
+
+But the word choices make it seem like that's not what's going on. "So long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well" is not the language of a tough-minded utilitarian who understands the gravity of the crimes they're about to commit, but is determined to proceed [for the good of the many](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheNeedsOfTheMany). "So long as they were doing all that anyways, they might as well" is the language of someone who's never considered that what they're about to do might be a crime, that [people knowing things as benefits as well as costs](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/).
+
+It would be remiss to conclude the section without considering a [Doylist rather than Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation of the history screen. Rumored Word of God[^wog-rumor] states that one reason for the history screen is that it makes a better story for dath ilani isekai protagonists to be more ignorant of other ways of life than the power of their civilization would otherwise imply; it's more interesting to watch Keltham encounter a medieval monarchy if he doesn't know what a queen is.
+
+[^wog-rumor]: I don't have a link for this; I think I heard Yudkowsky say it at a party.
+
+The Doylist storytelling case for the history screen is compelling insofar as the function of the dath ilan mythos is strictly to tell entertaining stories. However, such a prominent feature of the Society existing for storytelling reasons undermines the function of dath ilan as a utopian contrast to the real world, as empitomized by the incessant in- and out-of-story sneers at "Earth" (_i.e._, real) people.
+
+### The Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy
+
+The story of Merrin provides us with a case study on dath ilani culture's penchant for deception in a lower-stakes context. Merrin is a famous emergency medical technician of exceptional endurance, who obsessively improves her skills by training on simulated disasters when she's not on duty saving QALYs in real life. We are [told of an Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946)
+
+> wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.
+
+It's like a reverse [Emperor Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton) situation. (Norton was ordinary, but everyone around him colluded to make him think he was special; Merrin is special, but everyone around her colludes to make her think she's ordinary.)
+
+One is given the sense that from a dath ilani moral perspective, this is heartwarming. Merrin doesn't want to feel important, so everyone in her world colludes to conceal evidence from her than she's important. Isn't that thoughtful?
+
+From the moral perspective of an _Overcoming Bias_ reader in 2008 "on Earth" (_i.e._, in real life) who places value on authenticity and truth in human affairs, this is unsettling and immoral, for the same reason [the Emperor Norton Conspiracy was immoral](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton). Merrin is living a lie, and everyone she trusts is in on it!
+
+The deception by the people in Merrin's life is especially galling in light of the fact that the situation that Merrin needs to be protected from is one of their own making. EMTs can't become famous on accident. If Merrin doesn't like attention, she should not have a TV show with a million viewers! (We can assume that most unusually skilled workers aren't celebrities in dath ilan, as in real life, not because their work is particularly secret, but because recording and editing it for public consumption is a cost that no one has particular reason to pay.) One almost wonders whether the deception is the point—that people in dath ilan enjoy "coordinating to pretend around" someone, and Merrin's psychological hangup presented them with a golden opportunity to put someone in a [_The Truman Show_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show)-like psuedo-reality.
+
+["For No Laid Course Prepare"](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263), the story about how Merrin came to the attention of dath ilan's bureau of Exception Handling, shows us more examples of dath ilani conspiracy culture. In the story, Merrin is dressed up as a member of a fictional alien species, the Sparashki, due to having been summoned to the hospital from a fan convention with no time to change outfits. Merrin's coworkers falsely maintain to outsiders that Merrin always cosplays as a Sparashki while on duty. ["This is not considered a lie, in that it would be universally understood and expected that no one in this social circumstance would tell the truth,"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1857346#reply-1857346) the narrator tells us. The language used here is strikingly similar to that of one of the corrupt executives in [_Moral Mazes_](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-mazes/): "We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we're lying, is a lie really a lie?"
+
+But if [everyone really knew](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/), what would be function of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in real-world boardrooms), one supposes the answer is "Because it's fun"? But that just prompts the followup question: but what is the function of the brain giving out a "fun" reward in this context? It seems like at some point, there has to be the expectation of some cognitive system (although possibly not an entire "person") taking the signals literally.
+
+Indeed, in the described circumstances, it's hard to see how receivers of the Merrin-always-cosplays falsehood are supposed to figure out that the claim is not true. If it's universally understood and expected that no dath ilani would pass up a good trolling opportunity, it does not therefore follow that the people being trolled know it. (That's exactly what makes a good troll!)
+
+It's tempting to speculate that the eliezera are high in an "enjoying social deception" trait. Not-actually-plausible conspiracies that most people are in on are a [superstimulus](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like zero-calorie sweetener: engineered to let everyone enjoy the thrill of lying, without doing serious damage to shared maps.
+
+An agent from Exception Handling [tells Merrin that the bureau's Fake Conspiracy section is running an operation to plant evidence that Sparashki are real](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952), and asks Merrin not to contradict this.
+
+One immediately wonders: why does Exception Handling have a Fake Conspiracies department? Why is it okay for a government agency to be pulling hoaxes on its own citizens, any more than it would have been if FTX or Enron in real life had a Fake Accounting department?
+
+Is it okay because dath ilan are the [designated good guys](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DesignatedHero)? Well, [so was FTX](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/ftx-ea-fellowships).
+
+Is it okay because the idea of humanoid aliens walking around in real life is sufficiently implausible that no one is "really fooled"?
+
+The narrator soon tells us that [Exception Handling deliberately does things that wouldn't otherwise make sense in order to make it harder to understand what's actually going on in Civilization](https://glowfic.com/replies/1860955#reply-1860955) (presumably, in order to protect the secret AGI alignment project). But this is in tension with the potential rationale that no one is really being fooled. Even if very few dath ilani take the "Sparashki are real" ruse literally, it's still portrayed as successfully "kicking up epistemic dust": if it were really the case that no one was being fooled about anything, then Exception Handling wouldn't have a strategic reason to do it.
+
+Later in the story, we see the thoughts of a Keeper, Rittaen, who talks to Merrin. We're told that the discipline of modeling people mechanistically rather than [through empathy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds) is restricted to Keepers to prevent the risk of ["turning into an exceptionally dangerous psychopath"](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862201#reply-1862201). Rittaen [uses his person-as-machine Sight](https://glowfic.com/replies/1862204#reply-1862204) to infer that Merrin was biologically predisposed to learn to be afraid of having too much status.
+
+Notwithstanding that Rittaen can be Watsonianly assumed to have detailed neuroscience skills that the author Doylistically doesn't know how to write, the assertion that _knowing too much about psychology_ is dangerous says something about dath ilan. The explanation of Merrin's psychology that we do see isn't dangerous. (I read it, and I haven't become a psychopath.) I think a culture that shared the values of _Overcoming Bias_ readers in 2008 would consider that knowledge something _Merrin herself should be clued into_. Not dath ilan, though. "It's not [Rittaen's] place to meddle just because he knows Merrin better than Merrin does," we're told. But apparently it _is_ the place of everyone else who can see Merrin's shyness to form the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, to keep her from knowing herself?
+
+That's not an accusation of hypocrisy. The dath ilani are being consistent. In a Society that prizes freedom-from-infohazards over freedom-of-speech, it makes sense that telling people things would be meddling, but colluding to not tell them, isn't.
+
+### Keltham and the Sadism/Masochism Coverup
+
+The story of Keltham's sexuality provides another case study on dath ilani Civilization's predilection for deception. In Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and infers that ["not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does _not_ have masochists."](https://glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044) (The notion of an evolved organism preferring pain in any context strikes him as implausible.) Word of God clarifies that masochists do exist at low frequencies, but that Keltham's guess is otherwise correct; there is a deliberate effort (by the Keepers?—the exact agency responsible isn't clear) to prevent public knowledge that sadism and masochism even exist.
+
+The naïve utilitarian case for the coverup is straightforward. There aren't enough masochists to go around. People with a latent inclination towards sadism are better off not being self-aware about it, because if they knew what they wanted, they would feel sad about not being able to have it.
+
+The non-naïve utilitarian case is less straightforward, when you consider the second-order effects of censoring scientific information about psychology. The existence of sadism and masochism are facts about the world that you would expect to be mentioned in the sexuality section of psychology textbooks. If dath ilan is censoring real conditions from its psychology textbooks in order to avoid emotional harm to people with those conditions, that's a constraint on the extent to which their Society is in touch with reality.
+
+Again, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), which both
+
+[TODO—
+ * They do manage to censor sex information for children, but "age" is a Schelling cateogry in human Society; you can limit epistemic damage somewhat
+
+ * What about the costs of all the other recursive censorship you'd have to do to keep the secret? (If a biography mentioned masochism in passing along with many other traits of the subject, you'd need to either censor the paragraphs with that detail, or censor the whole book. Those are real costs, even under a soft-censorship regime where people can give special consent to access "Ill Advised" products.) Maybe latent sadists could console themselves with porn if they knew, or devote their careers to making better sex robots, just as people on Earth with non-satisfiable sexual desires manage to get by. (I _knew some things_ about this topic.) What about dath ilan's heritage optimization (read: eugenics) program? Are they going to try to breed more masochists, or fewer sadists, and who's authorized to know that? And so on.
+
+ * transsexualism example
+
+ * "They're better off not knowing about masochists that they can't have" disregards other ways of dealing with it: fantasy, porn, inventing in better sex robots, implications for eugenic policy ...
+
+* Difficulties of recursive censorship; do the people who can afford it have to stay in the closet for the benefit of people like Keltham? You could claim that they're so good at coordinating that they negotiated this, but how does the negotiation work when the people the deal allegedly benefits don't know about it?
+
+ * Word of God talks about "affording" a masochist—suggesting not just that classism and sex work are legal, but institutionalized??
+
+ * the empirical setting of probabilities and utilities just happening to settle such that ignorance is the best policy
+
+ * Keltham thought evolutionary psychology ruled out the possibility of masochists;
+
+ * It would be one thing if BDSM orientation was a self-fulfilling propehecy. You can't miss an addictive drug. The text seems to suggest that "obligate sadism" is a real thing that already exists. It's not analogous to a drug that you can't miss if no one ever invents it.
+
+Comparisons to other possible non-practicable minority sexualities may be instructive on the perils of deleting concepts. Imagine a world where homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced because [an engineered plague made it amount to certain death](https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/MORAL/Moral.html). Would we then approve of censoring the concept itself, forbidding the knowledge that same-sex attraction was ever a thing? And homosexuality has other correlates. [(The stereotypes of masculine lesbians and feminine gay men are empirically grounded.)](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) Given the plague, would it be better not to notice the clusters—for gay people to possibly be left with some vague sense that there's something not normal about them, and not have a concept to name it?
+
+Or consider how our Society handles pedophilia. This is a sexuality that we do not want to be practiced, so we stigmatize it and criminalize its practice. We do not censor the concept. Given that the tendency exists (and is not merely a cultural self-fulfilling prophecy that wouldn't exist if it weren't named), it's better to have a concept about it that can be reasoned about, rather than a blank spot on our map. Imagine a young man noticing he's attracted to children—or for that matter, an abused child—having _no idea what was happening to them_, because Society's benevolent censors decided that it was better that people not have concepts for this aspect of reality. Is that going to end well? How do you get help for a problem you're not supposed to have a word for?
+
+]
+
+### Kitchen Knives
+
+[TODO—
+
+ * Word of God says, "there's also a deliberate semiconspiracy whereby movies make standard kitchen knives look much deadlier and easier to wield than they actually are, so that people who suddenly go nuts won't improvise much more dangerous weapons than that"
+ * "too nuts to see past cached thoughts" presupposes a specific model of mental illness that I think is importantly backwards; while I was psychotic, my problem was the _opposite_ of not being able to "see past cached thoughts": on the contrary, I was having _lots_ of new ideas that I had never thought of before (<http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/cognitive-bayesian-therapy-i/>), and would never have thought of in my normal state—it's just that, after I got some sleep, I decided that all of my new ideas were clearly false, _which is why_ we call the psychotic state "crazy", and the normal state "sane".
+ * You can't leak to the general public without leaking to crazy people. Where do you think they come from?
+ * the mechanism by which the plan positively contributes to the goal, is deception: the plan works _because_ if people who want to commit violence have _less accurate beliefs_ about how to effectively commit violence, they will be less effective at their goal of committing violence.
+ * If you were just trying to reduce murders, is this hte plan you would pick? Obviously not. (Think about how you would solve the problem "on Earth"!) Making it easier to commit people is a much more direct mechanism. The algorithm that promoted the movie-misportrayal to your attention is one that favors deception.
+ * "It's targeted at crazy people" excuse suggests that it's OK to lie to people you've labeled as crazy. But Yudkowsky infamously says this about all Earthlings. What should we infer about whether we should trust him?
+ * "i presume ilani who notice the trope also then deduce the obvious consequence of the trope"
+ * If anything, "there's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead people about the difficulty of murder by stabbing" is the kind of thought that someone is _more likely_ to have as a paranoid delusion than otherwise! It's as if dath ilan is an exotic environment where mind-states that are tuned to hypothesize conspiracies everywhere are _adaptive_, in contrast to how on Earth, people who see conspiracies everywhere are wrong.
+ * this is correlated insanity that loves clever deceptions, not actually being smart and doing a neutral policy search
+ * A much larger cost is the frustration of ornery, nitpicky nerds who _want realistic fiction_, and don't want their favorite artform perverted to _manipulate extremely rare criminal-insanity cases_. Earth has Andy Weir fans and Greg Egan fans! When Andy Weir or Greg Egan sit down to write a novel or a screenplay, they are trying to paint a picture of _a world that makes sense_. They are not trying to manipulate rare social outcomes. Is that that kind of respect-for-reality just _not a thing_ in dath ilani art? Are they so uniformly, monomanically obsessed with trolling their perceived inferiors, that the voice of, "Knives Don't Actually Work That Way; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_; Knives Don't Actually Work That Way _Even When a Prediction Market Says That Saying That Out Loud Increases Murders_", has no power in the movie industry whatsoever?
+]
+
+### Replies to Objections
+
+This essay has had some negative things to say about dath ilani culture.
+
+
+
+#### Infohazardville
+
+
+
+
+####
+
+
+[TODO—
+ * Counterargument: dath ilan lets you immigrate to infohazardville. Reply: sure, I agree that a Society that marginalizes truth-tellers is better than one than executes them. It's still fundamentally fair game for me to point out that it's not consilient with the values of _Overcoming Bias_ readers in 2008.
+ * Counterargument: as a reductio, am I opposed to movie and homework exercise spoilers, too? Reply: No, I recognize spoiler protection as a legitimate class of infohazard. (And AGI/nuclear as an social exfohazard, and threats as a legitimate infohazard.) And the concealing eugenics predictions, self-fulfilling prophecy
+ * Counterargument: the text says that regular dath ilani do believe "that which can be destroyed" eventually, just not immediately. Reply: this would be more believable with a timetable; I can understand "I don't want to deal with this yet", but there's no indication that Merrin or Keltham are supposed to figure it out.
+ * Counterargument: but the gaslighting is supposed to inculcate distrust of authority. Reply: clearly it doesn't work, given how much everyone trusts the government that is lying to them all the time?
+ * Numendil's point: dath ilani should look spoiled to us, for the same reason we look spoiled to Golarionites
+]
+
+### Conclusion
+
--- /dev/null
+Title: People, Evolved Social-Control Mechanisms, and Rocks
+Author: Zack M. Davis
+Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, madness, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
+Status: draft
+
+> MUGATU
+> The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Crossdresser, demigirl, trans woman? They're the _same people!_
+>
+> Doesn't anyone _notice_ this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
+>
+> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
+
+Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told you about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman, which, at the time, I thought of as a weird private quirk about me that was clearly not the same thing as "actually" being transgender, and which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about—and also about how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts about normatively correct reasoning by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky, which explained how beliefs are for making predictions about reality (such that it's immoral to _not_ believe in psychological sex differences given that psychological sex differences are a real thing), and (incidentally) [why my obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman was philosophically fraught if not outright delusional](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), [separately from its not being remotely achieveable with forseeable technology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
+
+In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer", I told you about how, in 2016, everyone of significance in my normatively-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly decided that guys like me actually _are_ women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, prompting me to do some reading and interviews that led me to the belief that my weird obsessive erotic fantasy _was_ the same thing (rather, the more common of at least two such things) as actually being transgender, after all—prompting me to start this then-pseudonymous secret blog to write about how the entire educated world had been systematically lying to me about the most important thing in my life for the last twelve years. (I also made arrangements to start feminizing hormone replacement therapy. Everyone else was doing it. Why should I miss out on account of being more self-aware?)
+
+But, you know, I didn't want to be a _fanatic_ about it. The previous post leaves off with me promising myself not to talk about this stuff under my real name through June 2017. That was what my pseudonymous secret blog was for.
+
+[... Facebook meltdown moved back into "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" ...]
+
+This presents some difficulties for me as an author, about what and how much I should write.
+
+Partially, I'm just not sure how interesting or relevant it is. The reason I've sunk so much time and wordcount into writing down this Whole Dumb Story is because I think it's actually of some public interest, despite the fact that I'm not an otherwise notable person whose autobiography people would want to read: I think my Story embeds some worthwhile insights—about the etiology of gender dysphoria in males and the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition, of course, but especially about how the "rationalist" community in general and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular are less epistemically trustworthy then they would have you believe—without which, the navel-gazing effrontery of having wasted [more than a year](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) forcing out a six-figure-wordcount Diary entry would seem monstrously self-indulgent.
+
+No one enjoys hearing about someone else's dreams—or more importantly, learns anything from them. So if sleep-deprivation psychosis is a lot like dreaming while awake, there's a case that I should wrap up this post as quickly as possible ("And then I went crazy, but then I got better, and then I went crazy again in April, but then I got better for real"), and pick up the Whole Dumb Story where it continues in the next post in November 2018.[^story-gap-accounting]
+
+[^story-gap-accounting]: Where it's not that _I_ didn't do anything between April 2017 and November 2018, but you don't care about the minutiæ of my life; you (maybe) care about the Story.
+
+Ultimately, however, the part where I went crazy twice is intrinsically part of the Story. As a writer, I can't just skip over it, although I'll try to stick to the highlights.
+
+(As a _reader_, you can skip whatever you want.)
+
+If nothing else, I have a duty to be fair to my psychotic past self, when no one else was. Without denying that I was crazy, one of the things I learned while being crazy, is that people are too quick (insanely quick?) to automatically dismiss anything said by anyone who has been socially labeled as "crazy". Despite my altered state, I was still a _person_—by which I don't mean, a person, as contrasted to an animal. I mean that _"sane" people are animals, too_. Whatever else I got wrong at the time, _that_ was suddenly (and correctly) very clear to me.
+
+You might hope that people whose cognition is being degraded for largely "biological" reasons (like stress and sleep deprivation) would notice this, and correct for it by trusting their own thoughts less, deferring more to ordinary social reality when it disagreed with their own altered perceptions.
+
+But in a world where all the _sane_ people were insisting that men could be women by means of saying so, can you blame me for finding it hard to tell? If the paranoid hypotheses I was starting to generate didn't match ordinary social reality, how much reason did I really have to believe that ordinary social reality was actually in the right?
+
+------
+
+I don't want to say that I was having persecution _delusions_, exactly—just that persecution hypotheses were much more _salient_ than they usually were; I was a little bit fixated on the idea of scary men coming to kill me. Somehow, I developed the idea that an HSTS transsexual I had been corresponding with was actually AGP and in denial. I sent her an email trying to gently hint about it (Subject: "one last thing before I disappear for a while"), and then I felt scared—scared that she would she would track me down and take revenge? In a followup email, I disclaimed that I was kind of losing my mind right now, and disavowed the offensive hypothesis. ("But if you're sure, I believe you!") She replied, mentioning that she also questions people's self-reports of being HSTS. She said that her husband had a knack for spotting AGPs, and did not find them attractive, calling them "cross dressers on steroids."
+
+I said I was afraid that the husband wanted to kill me.
+
+"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I messaged "Rebecca" late that night of the fifteenth–sixteenth. Now that I no longer believed that self-reports are true, I could see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're in the right. I had ostensibly known that was a thing, verbally, but now I was _seeing_ it.
+
+She asked for an example. I mentioned the thread where I had asked "Noreen" on a date. When I had excused my sexist remark with "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent", I thought I had some beautiful æsthetic reason for that being a witty thing to say ... but maybe a better description of my behavior was that I was beating up on Brent—openly insulting a male conspecific as a dominance play while engaging in courtship.
+
+------
+
+At 10:27 _a.m._ on 16 February 2017, I sent an email to Michael and Anna (Subject: "questions"):
+
+> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
+
+In that thread, I claimed that I did get some sleep that night ("but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to"), but apparently it hadn't been enough to keep me from growing increasingly delusional.
+
+I sent some delusional emails to Eliezer Yudkowsky (Subjects: "positive reinforcement! But, updating away from you and towards Paul Christiano and Michael Vassar (eom)" and "You and Greg Egan had [that public fight on Baez's blog](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/what-to-do/#comment-5515)! Was that staged on purpose? If not, you should update towards Egan (eom)"), and some probably nice and non-concerning emails to each of my parents (Subjects: "You've been a good [mother/father] to me in ways that I didn't always understand at the time (eom)")
+
+At 1:17 _p.m._, I sent my boss an email saying that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical, leaving the company to persue another project (_i.e._, this blog), but that I'd like to talk to him as soon as possible to think about the decision together. Without waiting too long for a reply, I soon got on a train to San Francisco.
+
+------
+
+The first time I went insane from sleep deprivation, in 2013, I remember having a distinct mental sensation where two words kept running through my head, over and over. That time, the words had been "science" and "female." Maybe a Society with a more advanced discipline of psychiatry would be able to pinpoint the nature and origin of this symptom more exactly, but I suspect it's a real thing, because it started happening to me again. This time, [the words were "cooperate" and "defect"](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/).
+
+I wandered around downtown San Francisco, and used my phone to repeatedly message the word "Cooperate" to various people—to "Rebecca" (six times), to Ben (five times), to "Noreen" (six times), to "Thomas" (twice), to my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" (five times), to Ziz (six times), to Brent Dill (five times) ... a few other people. (I was imagining the act of saying or sending the word constituting an act of playing cooperate in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma; it didn't occur to me that it could also be interpreted as a command.)
+
+"I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip", I told "Rebecca" and Ben. "Rebecca" asked me to clarify whether I meant I had taken acid, or gone to Portland. "I don't think I took acid", I said. (I had told Sophia that I wouldn't be able to make it this weekend as planned.)
+
+I remember being afraid that the thing which (I had decided) had happened to Eliezer Yudkowsky and to Scott Alexander that made them such good writers was now happening to me, a phenomenon that would bring indescribable suffering along with an awakening into genius. I messaged Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet".
+
+At 1:47 _p.m._, I had messaged Ziz, "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu [_sic_]; that's why I've chosen the confessor route"—a reference to Yudkowsky's story ["Three Worlds Collide"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT), in which an alien rationalist trained for command (the _Kiritsugu_, with two _i_'s) is contrasted with her human counterpart (the Confessor), who is tasked only with telling the truth, for others to decide what to do about it.
+
+[(I don't do policy.)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)
+
+After I asked for "positive reinforcement" and sent some "Cooperate" messages at 3:15 _p.m._, Ziz responded with some heartwarming anecdotes about how others thought of me. She said that Michael Vassar had been talking approvingly about me, in the context of a war between gaslighting _vs._ having the ability to think, that I was one of the three fronts in "the community" that the war was playing out on: Sarah _vs._ Ben, Rob _vs._ Ben Todd, and Zack Davis _vs._ the world.[^war-fronts]
+
+[^war-fronts]: I'm not sure if "Rob" was referring to Rob Wiblin or Rob Bensinger. When I asked Michael later how Sarah and Ben were in conflict (Subject: "request for clarification re war fronts"), he said that Sarah and Ben were allies and that he wasn't sure how the misunderstanding happened.
+
+Eventually I made it to my office. My boss said he hadn't seen my email about wanting to meet. I wasn't sure I believed him—not particularly because I thought he had read it and had reason to lie about that, but because I wasn't sure I believed self-reports were meaningful in general. Maybe everyone was just bluffing, playing improv, all the time: maybe it was common for people to not actually know how to read, and to choose at random whether to claim to have read or not-read something.
+
+At this point, my memories aren't very clear or detailed. I said something that caused my coworkers to become very concerned for me, but I remember trying to be very careful about the wording, to make sure I _wasn't_ saying one of the things that would give people cause to lock me up. I think it was something like, "I think I'm in the mental state that causes people to perform the verbal behavior of saying they want to commit suicide."
+
+In retrospect, I don't think people pay attention to such distinctions.
+
+A coworker volunteered to secure me a ride home. There was some question about whether the relevant "home" was my apartment in Berkeley, or the house in Walnut Creek where my mother lived, and where I had lived until just ten months before. As a newly-awakened social conservative, I intuited that staying with family was the right choice. (I was wrong.) At 6:22 _p.m._, I sent an email from my work computer to my parents, Anna, and Michael (Subject: "I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)").
+
+We still owned the house. My coworker took an rideshare with me to the house in Walnut Creek, and talked to my mother.
+
+(Meanwhile, Ziz had made her way to my apartment. "Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors," she messaged at 5:43 _p.m._. "Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face." I was apparently in no state to appreciate the gesture; I messaged back "OK" a couple times when she asked to be let in, and confirmed which address she was at, even though I wasn't there. My flatmate eventually arrived and let her in.)
+
+I tried to sleep that night, at my mom's house. It wasn't very effective. I was scared of being attacked by criminals. There, um, may have been a racial angle on this fear? (Maybe I _had_ been morally corrupted by my political reading, insofar as someone who had stuck to credible sources would have had a less racist psychotic episode.) "I thought that kidnap-and-torture-whitey-in-a-basement race war might actually be common/typical, and that I hadn't noticed before", I recounted in an email the next month.
+
+Sure, I _remembered_ feeling physically secure at almost all times in my life; I _remembered_ Walnut Creek being a safe place. But how trustworthy were memories from life inside an ideological bubble? Maybe people like me got assaulted and brutalized all the time, but our culture had trained us to block out all the evidence and even memories that good smart nice liberals _prefered not to see_. Or maybe my memories were better explained anthropically, in terms of Friendly simulator protection: most of my [measure](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/) was inside of superintelligences simulating histories in which I hadn't yet suffered, but that didn't rule out the possibility of me needing to commit suicide before going to sleep in order to avoid having to experience "my share" of the kidnap-and-torturing.
+
+------
+
+The next morning, 17 February 2017, my mother took me to the hospital to be evaluated. I didn't want to go. (I had had a very bad time in the psych ward in 2013. It's significant that my hysterical emails to Anna and Michael the other day had said that I needed to sleep "to avoid being institutionalized", rather than to avoid going crazy: I was more scared of the alleged treatment than the disease.)
+
+I don't think I was very articulate about expressing this in a way my mother could understand. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions," I said, over and over. "People are better at taking care of each other than institutions!"
+
+I ultimately compiled. I am [again grateful](/2023/Jun/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#gender-clinic-notes) that the doctors' notes were made available to me online after the fact. I am very conscious of the unreliability of human memory; I owe much of my ability to tell this Whole Dumb Story to the fact that most of it took place on the internet, giving me chatlogs and emails to look back on. Even in the places where I talk about my remembered thoughts and feelings (that I didn't write down at the time), the documents have been helpful in pinning down exactly when they happened chronologically.
+
+The doctors' notes from that day describe my appearance as "somewhat disheveled, though clean, with long & unruly brown hair that he often twirls".
+
+The notes go into more detail on the reasons for my visit: "Patient states he 'thought the world was made of words' and he 'hurt people with words' [...] mom reports he is not thinking as lucidly as normal, seems to have blocking of thoughts, gets caught up on 'being wrong' or talking about transgender community 'being wrong' [...] Initially states that he doesn't want any mental health treatment, just wants to be cared for by his mom & work out his issues with his friends' help. Mom believes that he needs mental health treatment, and asserts this as a condition of him staying with her, then Patient is agreeable to take Rx"—medication, they prescribed 5 mg of Zyprexa—"& return to Psychiatry Intensive Outpatient Program."
+
+"Patient does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring"—that's the loony bin.
+
+"Patient has d/c'd the E2"—discontinued the estrogen patch—"& I agree with this."
+
+(I assume there must be some fascinating sociological explanation for why the doctors have terse abbreviations for many common terms and phrases—_Rx_, medication; _d/c_, discontinued; _disc r/b/a_, discussed risks/benefits/alternatives—and yet the phrase "does not meet criteria for California Welfare & Institutions Code 5150 (LPS) for involuntary detainment for inpatient psychiatric monitoring" was written out in full, three times. Why not just say, "we're not 5150'ing him"?)
+
+I was glad not to get 5150'd. I have a memory-fragment of resisting—having a sense that the doctors wanted to institutionalize me, but that I willfully walked out, and got away with it. I think I trust the doctors' notes more than my memory on this _particular_ count. (Although in general, the doctor's notes contain a striking density of outright falsehoods. Humans are not very good reporters!)
+
+To be clear, I still think I was correct to want to avoid the psych hospital, but that's _not at all_ the same thing as thinking that I was sane; the sleep deprivation was definitely taking its toll in the form of dreamlike delusions.
+
+I remember having a vision of seeing autogynephilia as a separate taxon in the configuration space of minds, and of negotiating with some celestial agency to _pry_ it apart in the world's shared ontology—it was real, and I saw it, but somehow it couldn't be _fully_ real until it was accepted as real.
+
+I sent some more messages from my phone in the afternoon. I couldn't sleep because I was scared, I told "Rebecca". I had built up a distinction between social reality and physical reality, and I didn't know what to do now that it had been undermined.
+
+I was so sorry, I told Ben. I wanted to be part of the coalition, but I was so confused, and I said "defect" a bunch of times. I was scared that my boss (who, incidentally, was black) was going to come kill me.
+
+Ben said he wouldn't ask a trading partner to not _consider_ defecting; that would be silly. He pointed out that saying the word "defect" is like wearing black robes; it's not the same as the thing it represents. My boss was not personally coming to kill me. ("There's probably some symbolic truth to the worry but it might not resemble the literal content at all and is almost certainly not urgent on the order of hours".)
+
+I got the idea to go to my apartment in Berkeley, and started walking to the Walnut Creek BART station. On my way, I felt a surge of energy, a second wind despite my exhaustion. "I just realized that you're allowed to not be submissive all the time", I told Ben. "I didn't know this before and it feels like an impossible superpower".
+
+I was stopped by cops before entering the Walnut Creek BART station. (I hadn't told my mother I was leaving; apparently, when she noticed my absence, she panicked and called 911. I'm impressed that they found me so quickly: contrary to my night terrors, Walnut Creek was evidently _so_ safe that the cops didn't have anything better to do.) Questioned by the cops, I explained the situation: that I was a software engineer going through a stressful time, that I had stayed at my mother's house here in Walnut Creek last night, but that now I was trying to get a train to go to my apartment in Berkeley. I said that I had been awake for a couple days. (That's not _normal_, they said.) I said, truthfully, that I wasn't on drugs, but I didn't expect them to believe me—and, somehow, felt as if I were optimizing for them not to believe me.
+
+I tried to talk the cops into taking me back to my mom's house, which was clearly the best thing for me, given that my plan of going to my own apartment was apparently not on the table. Apparently I didn't realize that the cops had a procedure, and their procedure did not admit of that kind of personal discretion. In my last message to Ben before getting locked up, at 3:19 _p.m._, I said, "You can use police cars as Ubers????"
+
+--------
+
+The thing about being psychiatrically institutionalized, is that it wouldn't be such an ordeal if it happened while you were sane. Getting kidnapped by strangers and having to spend three days in a bad hotel doing kindergarten-like activities would definitely be an inconvenience, but it wouldn't be traumatizing, if you were psychologically stable and knew that this was just a thing your Society did to people sometimes—worse than jury duty, but not _qualitatively_ worse than jury duty.
+
+The problem is that _while having a psychotic break_ is _the worst possible time_ to be kidnapped by strangers.
+
+The authorities will claim that psychiatric hospitals are for the benefit of the patients. I'll concede that this is possible in some cases: maybe some people have such dysfunctional home lives, or would otherwise be living on the streets, such that the psych ward is actually a better place for them.
+
+For most people of my social class, I don't think this is plausible; if the welfare of the crazy person were the primary criterion, almost everyone would be better off with their friends or family, in a familiar environment with people you know.
+
+Rather, psych wards make sense as being for the welfare of friends or family who are _sick of putting up with living with a crazy person_. It's a form of responsibility laundering: if there's a designated institution for taking care of crazy people, you can dump your loved ones there to be _someone else's problem_ (at least for a few days), with a clean conscience, because anything bad that happens inside of an officially sanctioned institution, isn't anyone fault.
+
+It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness.
+
+It's a jail—a place where you lock up undesirable people where they can't impose costs on anyone who isn't being paid to deal with them. And precisely _because_ I was modeling it as a jail, my social performance was a lot better this time around than in 2013.
+
+I unironically suspect it would be kinder and less confusing if the authorities would just explicitly label it a jail: to just say, Society or your loved ones are _sick of your antics_, so we're going to lock you up in this place and drug you until you obey us and act "normal". An honest punishment of force applied to change behavior is so much less cruel than the psychological abuse of a punishment that coerces its recipients into affirming it as "care".
+
+
+[TODO psych ward scenes—
+
+A nice thing about being a free citizen that you don't notice until you've lost it by being kidnapped and thrown in jail, is having a sense of where you are in the world. When visiting an unfamiliar place, I at least know _how_ I got there, how this place _connects_ to everything else in my model of the world: I may not be familiar with this building or these streets, but I know the train or highway that I took to get here from places that I do know—at worst, if I brought my phone, I can pull up Google Maps to see where I am.
+
+In psych jail, this sense of connection is suddenly absent. You don't know what route the ambulance took. You're locked in a building with strangers. There is no Google Maps. You could be anywhere.
+
+...
+
+
+Even things that are more-or-less genuinely intended to be for your benefit, are harder to recognize as such when you're _insane from sleep deprivation_ and rattled from just having been _kidnapped by armed men_.
+
+When being checked in, they confiscate any belongings you have on you. I remember one of the psych ward employees counting the money from my wallet in front of me.
+
+In retrospect, I can appreciate this practice as the system trying to offer evidence of its trustworthiness: they don't just steal your stuff; they _document_ the items they're confiscating, and give it back to you afterwards. (I have in my possession a yellow carbon copy of my "Patient Valuables Record", form A7026, which lists what they took.)
+
+At the time and in context, I wasn't prepared to appreciate it; the employee counting my bills in front of me seemed like an Orwellian ["There are five lights"](/2018/Aug/interlude-xii/) dominance display, intended to undermine my connection to reality—and maybe, I didn't trust that _she_ knew how to count.
+
+...
+
+
+When I tried to complain about the injustice of my confinement to staff, I was once told that I could call "patient's rights". I didn't bother. If the staff weren't going to listen, what was the designated complaint line going to do?
+
+About a year later, Scott Alexander published a _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["Navigating And/Or Avoiding The Inpatient Mental Health System"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/22/navigating-and-or-avoiding-the-inpatient-mental-health-system/), which claimed that patient rights advocates _do_ advocate for patients in opposition to the rest of the system. ("Usually the doctors hate them, which I take as a pretty good sign that they are actually independent and do their job.")
+
+This was _not at all_ obvious from the inside. I'm reminded of an article I once read in the racist[^racist-magazine] magazine _American Renaissance_, [by a public defender complaining about the behavior of his predominantly black clients](https://archive.is/HUkzY):
+
+[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say [_racialist_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racialism&oldid=968287916)? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
+
+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
+
+After my psych ward experiences, I deeply empathize with the clients here. In the defense attorney's worldview, he's working to protect his clients' interests, and is frustrated that they don't appreciate that. What the defense attorney doesn't see is that his work only benefits the clients from _within_ the terms set by a system of power that looks arbitrary and unjust to those on the other end of it. From the perspective of a client who doesn't think he did anything particularly wrong (whether or not the law agrees), the defense attorney is _part of the system_.
+
+So I think my intuition was correct to dismiss patient's rights as useless. I'm sure _they_ believe that they're working to protect patients' interests within the system, and would have been frustrated that I didn't appreciate that. But what I wanted was not redress of any particular mistreatment that the system recognized as mistreatment, but to be _let out of psych jail_—and on that count, I'm sure patient's rights would have told me that the evidence was harmful to my case. They weren't working for me.
+
+...
+
+After I was released and got my belongings back, I couldn't find my Driver License. For a few days, I assumed that one of the psych ward employees had stolen it out of my wallet. I was wrong: actually, there was a separate license-holder compartment inside the wallet. I had forgotten.
+
+...
+
+This was a theme in my thoughts at the time: I was scared that the world was a much less orderly place than I knew. I used to believe the world was "made out of words": that the things people said were mostly true, that the world protrayed in books and maps mostly _was_ the real world. Suddenly, I had been granted a different view of reality, a world of animals in which _words don't matter_.
+
+In retrospect, my psychotic vision of a languageless world turned out to be false. Most people really _do_ know how to read.
+
+I fear that some readers will take this as an admission that the authorities were right, that conventional social reality is right—that I was _just_ crazy, and everything I thought while I was crazy can be costlessly discarded.
+
+I don't think that's right. I _was_ crazy, but _that doesn't mean ordinary social reality is sane_—and it doesn't mean that some of the things I thought I saw from my altered perspective weren't _directionally_ correct, as I can evaluate them from a more standard frame of mind now.
+
+Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"![^telephone-game]
+
+[^telephone-game]: Reading the doctor's notes six years later, it seems likely that this false description was copied from the beginning of a note ("WHO WAS SELF PRESENTED TO CCRMC PES VOLUNTARILY DUE TO SUICIDAL THOUGHTS") that _also_ contains a more accurate description of events later in the same note, except for the substitution of Oakland for Walnut Creek ("PT SEEN EARLIER TODAY IN THE KAISER OAKLAND ED BUT WAS RELEASED WITH THE CONTRACT MOTHER WOULD TAKE HIM HOME AND MONITOR HIM. AFTER THEY GOT HOME PT LEFT WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. MOTHER REPORTED HIM A DTS"—danger to self—"AND POLICE EVENTUALLY FOUND HIM AT THE BART STATION").
+
+I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
+
+> You have the right to refuse medical treatment or treatment with medications (except in an emergency) unless a capacity hearing is held and a hearing officer or a judge finds that you do not have the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment. The advocate or public defender can assist you with this matter.
+
+Naïvely, one might expect that having the right to refuse medication means that when someone tries to give you medication, you can just say that you don't want to take it, and they'll respect that. This did not seem to be true: I was reluctant to take medication, but the behavior of the staff made it clear that they weren't going to take no for an answer, and I folded, _because they were holding me prisoner_.
+
+I remember trying to deceive a staff member, putting on a "show" with magician-like hand flourishes (to which she dutifully pretended to be impressed, as one would to a toddler) before taking the pill—hoping to palm it before swallowing it without her noticing. It didn't work. I swallowed.
+
+Maybe if I had had the presence of mind at the time to read the rights handbook, and point to the specific line where it says, "You have the right to refuse [...] treatment with medications", they would have accepted that? But it seems likely that that would have been punished by a longer stay. A "right" that you get punished for exercising is ... not much of a right?
+
+As it happens, I _now_ think that taking the medication was a good idea. The reason I think this is because when I sought psychiatric help for insomnia in early 2021—intending very dearly not to go insane from sleep deprivation again, very much not wanting to be institutionalized again—the doctor told me that my records from my 2017 institutionalization said they had me on Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg. Trazadone!—that was on [Scott Alexander's insomnia page](https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/).
+
+I worry, again, that some readers will take this as vindication that the authorities were right: they forced me to take drugs, and now that I'm sane and have a little more information, I agree that the drugs were a good idea. Why, the contemptuous normie reader asks, does this not demonstrate that they were right to force me, when I was crazy and therefore couldn't make decisions for myself?
+
+Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I would have taken it.
+
+But a system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_. Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I got tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases. Given that experience, and given the information I had at the time in 2017, I do not think I had good reason not to just trust the system!
+
+...
+
+I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had [the mononymic aura of "Einstein"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5o4EZJyqmHY4XgRCY/einstein-s-superpowers) _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
+
+[^ccrmc]: I only know this because, when consulting the doctor's notes available to me while writing this up more than six years after the fact, one of the notes mentions "CCRMC PES". "PES" is probably "Psychiatric Emergency Services".
+
+There were two rooms with beds, in that first facility: one for women, and one for men. I didn't end up sleeping there that I recall. Before long, I was taken to a separate facility, [Fremont Hospital](https://fremonthospital.com/), which had individual rooms. (Or was I incredibly lucky to not have been assigned a roommate? Having to sleep by someone else at night would have been very bad for me, given my fear of the other inmates and my desperate need for sleep.)
+
+...
+
+My memories of life in psych prison aren't very clear, partially because of how out-of-it I was, and partially because it's been more than six years since then, and memories decay if you don't _write them down_ (within hours, days, weeks—not _six years_). I wrote a [little](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [bit](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) about my experiences in 2017. I think I would have written more if I had remembered that the consequence of not confronting [the challenge of](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) recording painful memories is that you lose them. I retain some access to my psychotic [sense of life](http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html), but only episodic fragments of specific events. ("Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured, but I still know the words to this song" ...)
+
+My beliefs about game theory and evolutionary psychology—the theory and practice of making friends and avoiding enemies as a animal—seemed much more salient and actionable than anything about the world that was made of words, or the right way to behave as a person in civilization (as contrasted to an animal).
+
+It seemed important to avoid the gaze of males, particularly males physically larger than me. (If they noticed me noticing them, they would try to threaten me.)
+
+...
+
+An Asian woman named Joy seemed to hurt herself on the hinges of the cart used to bring us meals, in a way that plausibly looked like my fault—maybe I had opened the door on the cart while her fingers were in the wrong place? A football-coach-like orderly took my side (in the manner of a grown-up intervening in a squabble amongst kindergarteners), saying that I was only trying to help. When the orderly was out of earshot, Joy looked at me and whispered, "This never happened." I was never sure what that was about. Had she only been pretending to be hurt, and was telling me to keep quiet?
+
+A young black woman named Tone asked me what we had for breakfast—as if the Orwellian dominance rituals we were forced to undergo, had her doubting her senses and her memory, and she was looking to me (a fellow inmate, not an authority) to keep her sane, to verify her connection to reality.
+
+A black man in the hallway was saying something about how his mother didn't love him. This seemed unlikely to me, so I tried to explain to him that his mother probably did love him. He got angry. I hid behind a door.
+
+I shared a moment of solidarity with a black man who was physically smaller than me, and therefore seemed safe to interact with. Society locked us up here because they don't want to deal with people like us, I said, but we need to stay strong.
+
+...
+
+I got the idea that it ought to be helpful to prove my agency to the staff. I'd say something like: I'm going to take a shower now, and then be ready for bed at this-and-such time, and then point out at the aforementioned time that I was actually ready, just like I said I would. My ability to make correct predictions about my future behavior showed that I was an approximately coherent agent, therefore sane, and therefore that I should be released.
+
+...
+
+I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with [sluggish schizophrenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia) as [a pretext for persecuting them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union); how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)
+
+...
+
+My mother visited. Her presence was actively anti-helpful. She was very cranky, acting like being here was my fault, my punishment. I had a vision of pulling the fire alarm, and being held back by the knowledge that it would only make my punishment worse. (I'm not confident there was actually an alarm for me to pull; I would have expected other inmates to have had the same idea.)
+
+Michael Vassar visited, overlapping with my mother. Michael was extremely helpful, including in de-escalating my mother's hostility. (I would later describe him as "pretend[ing] to be a doctor for my mom", but on reflection, I don't think that's what happened; More likely, he had mentioned MetaMed, and I misinterpreted it.) I talked to him in a side room, saying that I was scared to sleep because I was afraid that this was the part of the simulation where I would get anally raped. Michael said that that didn't really happen in this kind of facility. Crucially, _I believed him_. (I wouldn't have believed any assurances from the "hospital" authorities.) I handed him some folded papers on which I had jotted down some notes (inmates were allowed dull golf pencils), thinking that I needed to be covert to escape the attention of the authorities.
+
+...
+
+I remember seeing another male pacing the hallways, the way that I pace sometimes. I hadn't particularly thought of that as a "gendered" (sexually dimorphic) trait, but seeing another man do it (and not particularly remembering seeing a woman do it) made the hypothesis salient, that it was the spandrell of some hunter (not gatherer) behavioral program.
+
+...
+
+I was a very [genre-savvy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy) psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.
+
+I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by the Christianity memeplex to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that [my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus), but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
+
+]
+
+-----
+
+After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.
+
+The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep, that getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
+
+But the doors aren't locked; they don't actually have any power over you that you don't give them.
+
+The intake assessment describes me as "retreat[ing] into highly intellectualized, incomprehensible philosophy as a defense against disorganization/psychotic thought process". (Well, all philosophy looks incomprehensible when you, personally, don't comprehend it.) Another note describes me as "hostile, belligerent, and condescending throughout the program" on the morning of 24 February. (They deserved it.)
+
+-----
+
+I started talking more with Michael Vassar. I don't think I've ever really understood Michael well enough to summarize him. Everyone else writes blog posts. If you want to know what someone's intellectual agenda is about, you can point to the blog posts. Michael never writes anything. He just has these free-wheeling conversations where he makes all sorts of crazy-sounding assertions ... which were suddenly starting to make sense to me now.
+
+On 22 February 2017 (two days after my release from the psych ward), he asked for my phone number (Subject: "Can I have your phone number?"). "I'd really like to talk soon," he wrote. "Thinking much more about how you can help me to meet my needs than about how I can help you though, and feel guilty about it given the situation, so feel free to tell me 'no, not now'."
+
+I replied, "I like helping people meet their needs! It's prosocial!"
+
+When I asked how I could help him meet his needs. He said that he thought my fight was ground zero in a war against words. If I had the mental composure to hold up, knowing that I had allies, he really thought that full documentation of my experiences would be the maximum leverage of my time. Otherwise, he was all but unable to ask for money for himself, even if he honestly thought he was the best use of it, but he was able to ask for nonprofit funding. What about starting a nonprofit, with me as executive director and him as fundraiser?—the Society for the Preservation of Generative Grammar and for Defense Against Structural Violence, providing legal defense for people whose rights or livelihood are threatened by political correctness. (Subject: "Re: You're really bad at communicating!")
+
+Regarding the suggestion to document my experiences, I replied, "Too narcissistic!" This is incredibly ironic in hindsight, given the absurd amount of effort I've ended up spending since 2019 writing up this Whole Dumb Story. But you see, I had to try making object-level arguments _first_. It was only after that conclusively failed, that I've gone to the narcissistic extreme of full documentation of my experiences as a last resort. (Or as therapy.)
+
+I didn't want to start a nonprofit, either. I thought our kind of people were smart enough to function without the taboo against giving money to individuals instead of faceless institutions. I had $97,000 saved up from being a San Francisco software engineer who doesn't live in San Francisco. Besides keeping most of it as savings, and spending some of it to take a sabbatical from my career, I was thinking it made sense to spend some of it just giving unconditional gifts to Michael and others who had helped me as a kind of credit-assignment ritual, although I wanted to think carefully about the details before doing anything rash.
+
+On a separate email thread, I ended up mentioning something to Michael that I shouldn't have, due to a previous confidentiality promise I had made. (I can tell you _that_ I screwed up on a secrecy obligation, without revealing what it was.) I felt particularly bad about this given that I had been told that Michael was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and asked him to keep this one secret as a favor to me.
+
+Michael replied:
+
+> Happy to not talk about it. Just freaking ask. I can easily honor commitments, just not optimize for general secrecy. The latter thing is always wrong. I'm not being sloppy and accidentally defecting against the generalized optimization for secrecy, I'm actively at war with it. We need to discuss this soon.
+
+------
+
+On 2 March 2017, I wrote to Michael about how "the community" was performing (Subject: "rationalist community health check?? asking for one bit of advice"). Michael had claimed that it was obvious that AI was far away. (This wasn't obvious to me.) But in contrast, a lot of people in the rationalist community seemed to have very short AI timelines. "Rebecca" had recently asked me, "What would you do differently if AI was 5 years off?"
+
+(Remember, this was 2017. Five years later in March 2022, we were in fact still alive, but the short-timelines people were starting to look more prescient than Michael had given them credit for.)
+
+If we—my sense of the general culture of "we"—were obviously getting gender wrong, plausibly got the election wrong, plausibly were getting AI timelines wrong, and I thought Moldbug and neoreactionary friends were pointing to some genuinely valuable Bayes-structure ... it seemed like we were doing a _really poor_ job of [pumping against cultishness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult). Was it maybe worth bidding for a cheerful price conversation with Yudkowsky again to discuss this? (I wasn't important enough for him to spontaneously answer my emails, and I was too submissive to just do it without asking Michael first.)
+
+Michael said there were better ways to turn dollars into opposition to cultishness. Then I realized that I had been asking Michael for permission, not advice. (Of _course_ Michael was going to say No, there's a better way to turn dollars into anti-cultishness, which would turn out to be apophenic Vassarian moonspeak that will maybe later turn out to be correct in ways that I wouldn't understand for eight years; I shouldn't have asked.) I went ahead and emailed Yudkowsky. (Again, I won't confirm or deny whether a conversation actually happened.)
+
+------
+
+I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+
+At standup meeting on my last day (3 March 2017), I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+
+-------
+
+You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
+
+In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
+
+A lot of intellectuals tried to avoid politics, and for good reason: if a polarized culture were forcing you to make a choice between a "minimize the number of trans people" faction and a "maximizer the number of trans people" faction, the only sane thing to do would be to ignore the noise and sit out the fight. But maybe there was some kind of role for some kind of very _narrowly scoped_ political behavior (making allies and enemies, trading favors and picking fights, _&c_.) with the goal of _just_ getting the correct theory in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but _not_ trying to dictate what the social norms around transitioning should be?—["infovism" rather than activism](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). The recipients of this email were implicitly already doing this through their scholarship, but ... was there any way I could help? (Subject: "trans infovism against trans activism?? (was: Fwd: The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought)")
+
+I got some friendly replies. Bailey was planning to start a website of resources for families of people with gender dysphoria, which I might be able to help with later. Lawrence was pessimistic about my stated ambition of taking the taxonomy mainstream (as contrasted to the more modest target of making the ideas available and somewhat palatable to those who might benefit from them). "I'd prefer to pick the fights I think I could win," she wrote.
+
+-------
+
+Michael Vassar asked me what I thought of recently disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Subject: "Milo"). I said I hadn't been following that drama, except that I was really annoyed at local effective-altruism priestess Kelsey Piper (then blogging as _The Unit of Caring_) [playing dumb about what was at issue](http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/156812598746/calling-milos-conduct-random-cruelty-to-people) when criticizing Yiannopoulos for calling out a trans student by name during a speech. ("The woman in question was not 'still choosing to present as a man', she was not passing for a cis woman [...] If my university weren't letting me use the women's restrooms I would absolutely file a title IX complaint," Piper wrote.)
+
+I agreed that ridiculing a named individual in a public speech is _mean_, and it's preferable to avoid mean things if there's any way to make the same point with the same force and quality; it would be better if we could just directly renegotiate social norms without being mean. In that sense, I was not pro-Milo. But if we couldn't peacefully coordinate and were doomed to do politics, the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus's strategy of gerrymandering categories seemed like a strategy of [asymmetrical warfare](http://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war), less of a fair fight than just trading insults. I could respect Yiannopoulos as an ordinary soldier.
+
+Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
+
+He wasn't specific about the issue or its obviousness, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
+
+Michael said that the most plausible anti-Trump consensus perspective was that free speech would be physically dangerous for a majority of people in the medium term. The Yiannopoulos case suggested that maybe Trump and Kanye (and perhaps some other rappers) could speak without fear.
+
+I wasn't sure what he meant about free speech being physically dangerous. Was it that most men would be thuggish rapists if they thought for themselves in the service of their own values, such that school/media/memetic social control was necessary to keep them in check?
+
+No, Michael clarified, selfish people are almost never a problem. The problem was with mobs, not individual bad people. In the absence of taboos against racism, mobs would form and coerce people to demand blood from the most convenient Schelling point: in practice, Jews or blacks.
+
+What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos).[^aclu] But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.
+
+[^aclu]: Remember, this was 2017. The reliability of the committment [seems to have frayed in the intervening few years](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html) as the [Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) continued.
+
+I asked him to be more specific about the class of people he thought were being genocided (nerdy men?) and by what (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from descending into racialized violence like Yugoslavia?).
+
+I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
+
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+
+[^heinlein-agp]: Most tellingly, in [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. (I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.) This is inherently an AGP wish-fulfillment plot and it's hard to imagine a non-AGP man writing a book about it.
+
+ More circumstantially, the sex change in "All You Zombies", and the scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Mike uses his telepathy powers to share the "male gaze" experience with Jill, seem like the kind of plot details an AGP male author is more likely to come up with (having more reason than an ordinary man to have a lingering fascination with the idea of sex changes and cross-sex experience-sharing).
+
+So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
+
+"Much faster in person," replied Michael. "Notice that genocide, by conception, is about genes." (I don't remember if we followed up in person, but I agree that whatever genetic variants make one susceptible to transitioning in the current year, are not proving to be evolutionarily fit—and we know that's not inevitable; guys like me _used_ to get married and have children, even if we don't now.)
+
+-------
+
+Even though I was free and taking care of myself, I don't think my psychology was entirely back to baseline. I remembered that Michael or Anna had once given humanity an approximately 30% "win" probability.[^p-doom] Nate Silver had given Trump a 30% chance to win the 2016 presidential election. These facts felt _really related_ to me. I was aware that many people would dismiss this style of thinking as useless garbage—_lots_ of probabilities are close to 0.3—but somehow it still felt like a _clue_ to me (Subject: "apophenic numerology").
+
+[^p-doom]: This is the quantity that, these days, we would call 1 − P(doom).
+
+In retrospect, I agree with the "useless garbage" verdict. I can reconstruct a story about how the subjective sensation of cluefulness might arise from associative reasoning on the concepts I was preoccupied with at the time (Trump was the anti-political-correctness candidate, political correctness fostered bad epistemology, but humanity needed good epistemology to "win"), but that's _not_ a story about how that kind of thinking connects numerical probabilities to reality.
+
+Michael wrote to me (Subject: "Sleep"), noting that while "I don't need to sleep" is classic mania, it fit the pattern of what might be a lie under the circumstances. I might have asked myself for evidence on both sides, and remembered having personally seen animals sleep, maybe even in the wild (sea lions on the beach?). On the other hand, if I had asked why "I don't need to sleep" was a salient hypothesis, I might have noticed that the claim that everyone needs to sleep is the kind of lie that would be told by a worldview of people having high status as objects (it being wrong to sadistically cause pain), but low status as agents (it being right to control them and irresponsible not to); an important fact about the modern world was that it was common to oppress people by pretending they're like babies.
+
+I replied:
+
+> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (_e.g._, from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
+
+Michael replied:
+
+> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+
+I think that reply spooked me a bit; I tagged Anna and Divia into the thread as cc's, because they seemed more grounded. "Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him", I said.
+
+Even if I _was_ getting a few things right in my paranoid/schizotypal state, the important thing was trying to do philosophy. The parts where I felt like a _very important person_ (in this simulation/Everett branch) receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode [delusions of reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference); _lots_ of people feel just like that when they're agitated and haven't gotten enough sleep. Social reality may be crazy, but I should still be putting a lot more weight on the social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative was my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
+
+Michael wrote:
+
+> I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatically adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
+
+I wrote:
+
+> Sure, I guess I meant that the "Machines trying to kill me" framing is scary, and I don't like being scared, so I want to focus on finding ways to cooperate with the nice people doing their jobs while defecting against the homeostatic system that they're embedded in (but not actually doing anything crazy like trying to destroy the system, because it's doing useful things for us and I don't have anything better to replace it with).
+
+The next day, I changed my mind (Subject: "slowly coming around to you"):
+
+> Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
+
+------
+
+As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so on 6 March, I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
+
+I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
+
+I had heard about AllDayChemist from "Rose", a local trans woman who wasn't very nice, but seemed to have some Vassar-like insights about penetrating the veil of social reality. It turned out that "Rose" was facing some bureaucratic obstacles to getting her own HRT refill, so I placed another AllDayChemist order on her behalf on 31 March, for five packs of E and two of spiro.
+
+------
+
+I [wrote about my credit-assignment ritual idea on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/). People know that institutions are flawed and like to perform gritty cynicism about it, but what if no one is gritty and cynical enough? People are _predatory animals_ built to _murder_ other forms of life for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends.
+
+To the extent that we have this glorious technological civilization that keeps us safe and lies to us about there being higher ideals, it's because some of the predatory animals happen to stumbled upon behavioral patterns that mirror the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe: science approximates Bayesian updating; [markets allocate resources to where they are needed most in accordance with the laws of the microeconomic theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics); democracy is a counterfactual simulation of civil war amongst equals (where you just count how many people are on each side, and divide the spoils accordingly, without having to pay the costs of actually fighting).
+
+We should be looking for more social technologies like that, that tap into the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe, but which also take into account that we're not anything like agents at all, but rather animals that want to help our friends. In analogy to proposals to incentivize useful work with after-the-fact prizes for solving a problem, rather than upfront funding of a team you think might solve the problem, it might be worth trying the same thing on a smaller scale—a _personal_ scale, by giving praise and cash rewards to people who personally helped you through a major life crisis.
+
+In artificial intelligence, [the credit-assignment problem](https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/12908/what-is-the-credit-assignment-problem) refers to the difficulty of attributing success or failure to particular actions whose connection to the end result might be indirect and remote: if the outcome of an hour-long game might have ultimately hinged on your good or bad instincts during a critical moment in the 24th minute, you'd want to know that, so that you could re-train your instincts appropriately—but it's not trivial to figure out which moments were critical, which actions helped or hurt.
+
+Money and status are human civilization's credit-assignment tokens. It's not trivial to figure out what actions help or hurt, but to the extent that the economy works at all, it works because productive actions being appropriately rewarded: a Society in which it was more profitable to steal than to produce would soon have much less to steal.
+
+Similarly, it's not trivial to figure out what actions helped or hurt during a major life crisis, but to the extent that you _can_ figure it out, you want to dispense rewards appropriately, supplying a tiny gradient update to Society's instincts by allocating more resources to the people who have caused major life crises to be successfully navigated.
+
+-------
+
+On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
+
+> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, _&c_.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
+
+------
+
+Also on 12 March 2017, I asked Anna if she would be willing to promise not to contact the authorities even if she really did think I would successfully kill myself if she didn't (Subject: "trust establishment"). "I don't expect this scenario to come up," I said, "but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality."
+
+She said she'd want to have a more detailed conversation about it before offering any such promise, which I agreed was a more sensible answer than the Yes I was fantasizing about.
+
+------
+
+In the evening of 2 April 2017, Michael wrote to me that someone else was in psych prison, and could use help along lines that matched my focus and experience (Subject: "Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward"). He asked if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh (perhaps, effective altruists at Carnegie Mellon) who would be willing to help, if I could visit a hospital there if needed, and—
+
+> Do you feel that you can provide the sort of attentive, active listening that would emotionally support someone in a high integrity agitated state where their ideas may not be literally true, and also may be true but hard to justify, but the ideas are at least honest metaphorical pointers at something that they think is there and needs to be recognized for safety?
+
+I made a Facebook post asking if I knew anyone in Pittsburgh available for a "Azkaban[^azkaban] (psych ward) rescue mission", and waited for more information.
+
+[^azkaban]: A reference to the magical prison in Yudkowsky's [_Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_](https://www.hpmor.com/), where inmates are subjected to psychic torture.
+
+ (It seems right for the attribution here to go to Yudkowsky rather than J. K. Rowling, because while Rowling invented Azkaban, it was Yudkowsky's depiction that established it in our subculture as a metonym for a _bad place that shouldn't exist_, which is how I was using the allusion.)
+
+More information came in an email that night from Lex Gendel[^lex-name] to me, Michael, and a few other people. The person in distress was a trans woman of my acquaintance whom I'll call "Roberta". Apparently, "Roberta" had had a psychotic episode. Her parents bought her a plane ticket back to Europe, but when she attempted to board the plane, she was committed to an unknown psych ward in Pittsburgh. As far as Lex knew, "Roberta" was currently too psychotic to play nice with the authorities. Our contact point with the family was her brother, who wasn't that cooperative and was also in Europe. (I'm imagining he was the source of this information—that the authorities at least called the family?)
+
+[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
+
+Our mission was to find out where "Roberta" was and how to contact her. "Stacy" (also on the email) was local to Pittsburgh. "Kyle" and I started looking up Pittsburgh-area psych wards on Google Maps and calling them.
+
+"Kyle" made much more progress than me at calling hospitals. (Maybe he had a smarter Maps query, but maybe he was just less inhibited than me and could get more things done per minute.) I added "Roberta"'s email address to the thread so that she could look at it later and judge our competence as friends.
+
+Sewickley Hospital, the closest to the airport, told "Kyle" that "Roberta" was not there, but that they wouldn't be able to tell him if she were, which wasn't information-theoretically smart of them—if you actually care about not leaking information, you're supposed to [refuse to confirm or deny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response), not agree to deny but refuse to confirm—but fortunate for us, insofar as it clued us in to what was probably going on when Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC said that they couldn't confirm whether "Roberta" was there.
+
+UPMC Presbyterian _did_ have a record of "Roberta" that they were willing to tell "Kyle" about: she was discharged—and probably taken to the aforementioned Western Psychiatric Institute.
+
+Western Psych continued to refuse to confirm—although they did take down my number (and "Kyle"'s, and Lex's) for "Roberta" to call _if_ she was there and wanted to.
+
+I kept calling, at intervals. I tried bluffing ("No, I _know_ she's there", I told Madeline at Western Psych). I tried prompting for advice ("I realize that you're just doing your job and that you can't help me, but as a person, can you tell me who I should send next?—a lawyer, or a psychiatrist?" I told Cathy). I tried asking for a manager. (The manager, Laura, had just left.) Cathy volunteered to forward me to Patients' Rights. (It went to voicemail.)
+
+I asked Scott Alexander (whom I had tagged into the thread earlier) if _he_ could call, following up on the "sending a psychiatrist" guess (Subject: "a plea to our inside man (was: Re: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation)").
+
+Finally, on the evening of 3 April, inspiration struck: I asked Debbie when visiting hours were. Then I asked "Stacy" to just visit physically. ("Let me know if there's any way I can sweeten the deal for you if this is at all inconvenient. (Eternal gratitude? Cash bounty to be negotiated? Any programming work you need done?)" I added.) The theory here was that the psych prison employees had been programmed not to be helpful over the phone for fear that HIPAA demons would eat them, but that they're not afraid of a physical person on-site, especially a nonthreatening nonmale person (Subject: "a plea to our on-site woman (was: Re: a plea to our inside man)").
+
+I was not reassured by the staff's claims that "Roberta" could call us back if she was there. To be clear, I totally believed that they wrote down the number. (Someone read it back to me on my second call.) I was _not_ confident in "Roberta" actually getting the number and the opportunity to make a phone call.
+
+Scott got back to me. His being a psychiatrist wasn't going to make any difference. All we could do was leave a message; if "Roberta" didn't call back, then either she wasn't there or "doesn't want you meddling".
+
+I harshly took exception to the notion that the only credible explanation for the lack of a return call was that "Roberta" _didn't want us meddling_. What if the bastards never gave her the message? What if she was too impaired from the psychotic break and the kidnapping to place a call herself, but would _really appreciate_ being handed a phone with someone she knows on the line?
+
+The "didn't want us meddling" explanation struck me as so absurd, that I immediately offered to bet $500 against it at 20:1 odds: when this was over, if "Roberta" was at Western Psychiatric and got my, "Kyle"'s, and Lex's messages and didn't call back because she _didn't want us meddling_, I would pay Scott $500; if she was there but didn't get the message, Scott would pay me $25; if she wasn't there, no bet (Subject: "in which gratitude and skepticism is expressed; and, a profit opportunity (was: Re: a plea to our on-site woman)").
+
+Scott agreed to the bet. It was illegal to keep patients incommunicado; whatever else I thought about psych hospitals, they were sticklers for obeying the rules.
+
+Just before Scott chimed in, I had written to the thread:
+
+> In this situation, I don't think we should be modeling ourselves as people having meaningful conversations with other people over the phone. We are _extracting our friend from the bowels of an unaligned AI_. The reason we're using words rather than force isn't because force would be wrong; it's because we'd lose. Don't be fooled by the fact that the AI happens to use humans as components.
+
+"Kyle" cautioned that black-arts methodology against hospital personnel was probably not going to help "Roberta", and might make life very unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job—which might make it _exceedingly_ harder to do something helpful later. Most everyone he had talked to had been extremely polite and helpful (including explaining details about how the system worked, which lead him to UPMC Presbyterian, which had actually given us information).
+
+(Nice people doing their jobs!)
+
+Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
+
+I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
+
+Of course, I did _instrumentally_ care about not doing anything that would motivate them to make _our_ lives unpleasant. I agreed that I shouldn't try to do any more dark-arts social engineering—not because it would be wrong, but because I wasn't talented enough to pull it off without making things worse.
+
+Ashley from Patients' Rights returned my call. Allegedly, patients had access to phones, and allegedly, if a patient complains, Patients' Rights would investigate the complaint.
+
+This was not reassuring. "Roberta" couldn't complain to patient's rights about not getting our messages, if she didn't know that the messages existed. I could believe that the receptionist was honestly trying to do her job and wrote a number down and told someone else about it. But if anything _else_ went wrong in the causal chain (which could involve more than one other person who had lots of other things to do) between "receptionist dutifully writes something down" and "'Roberta' actually gets the message and telephone access", _no one had an incentive to fix it_.
+
+As far as I was concerned, this was a kidnapping. The fact that the kidnappers didn't have any particular motive and were just doing their jobs and would probably release our friend in 3 or 14 days, made it _much less bad_ than if it were a kidnapping by criminals or terrorists with an actual motive—but I wanted to call a spade a spade (Subject: "Hijack Innocent People And Abscond").
+
+I impulsively called up Patients' Rights again and spoke to Ashley, divulging my own recent psych ward story. She eventually forwarded me to Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, whose boss was the Director of Regulatory Affairs. She repeatedly told me that the policy was that they couldn't give out information, and I repeatedly told her that I understood the policy, but that I was trying to search for clever strategies that would give me more assurance that "Roberta" actually got the message: for example, Karen herself could physically deliver the message herself, and then not tell me about it.
+
+Karen told me that I needed to trust people. I said that after my recent experience getting kidnapped by the psychiatric authorities, that no, I didn't actually trust people anymore ... but that I was willing to trust _her_, Karen Robinson, the Manager of Patient Relations, and that I felt better being given assurance by someone with a four-word title.
+
+I asked her if she was religious. (Religion is a social technology for trust; I figured that people were less likely to mess with you if you reminded them that their deity was watching.) She said that she was a Christian. I admitted that I was an atheist, myself.
+
+At 8:14 _p.m._ on 4 April, "Stacy" reported in: she visited Western Psych and saw "Roberta", who reported not being unhappy. She wasn't interested in being rescued. "She has received messages (I didn't ask about specific people's), and is in touch with some people," the email specifically said.
+
+So, that was good news. (Good news about "Roberta"'s welfare, which was more important than my grudge against psych hospitals.) I conceded my bet with Scott and PayPal'd him $500. Scott pointed out that I had offered the bet while I was really angry and traumatized from my own recent psych ward experience; if I thought it wasn't representative of my best cognitive processes, he was happy to call it off and send back the money.
+
+I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the Western Psychiatric staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
+
+(At least, as far as I knew at the time—keep reading for a surprising reversal!)
+
+We didn't want to hold people accountable for false confessions under duress or contracts to sell oneself into slavery, but surely we could handle a measly $500 bet!
+
+------
+
+This is the part where I started to go crazy a second time.
+
+I worry that some readers will take this as vindication of the authorities' position: that I should have submitted to "treatment" in February, that I was wrong to have thought that my only problems were stress and sleep deprivation.
+
+The reader is entitled to their opinion, but I still think my theory stands up after you take into account that the "Roberta" crisis was a _new stressor_ (and that I ended up being fine despite this April relapse).
+
+[TODO: staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
+
+[TODO: BABSCon]
+
+-------
+
+[TODO: bet resolution and "my call with Western Psychiatric's Manager of Patient Relations"]
+
+-------
+
+[TODO: final $18200 credit-assignment ritual: $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Rebecca", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Thomas", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/
+]
+
+------
+
+Anyway, that, briefly—I mean it—is the story of how the stress of confronting people on Facebook about the illogic of gender-identity ideology caused me to go insane from sleep deprivation, twice, shattering most of my remaining faith in Society and institutions along the way.
+
+It's probably not that interesting! If it weren't somewhat-informative backstory presaging my accidental instigation of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war two years later, I wouldn't have bothered to tell this substory of my Whole Dumb Story in this much detail—as evidenced by the fact that, later in 2017, I [started](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [telling it in considerably less detail](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), and didn't even end up finishing that.
+
+I think I learned a lot during this period, but I wish there could have been some way to learn it with less drama—to take the form I took, without the disastrously formative experience. I wonder how the rest of this Whole Dumb Story would have gone, if I had just _shrugged and logged off_ earlier in February 2017, rather than losing sleep—if I would have had the strength to fight, later, without the memory of fighting until it broke me. Sometimes, I worry that human psychology is built such that things couldn't have been too much otherwise—that the _realistic_ alternative to taking things too seriously (to the detriment of one's health, and severely inconveniencing others) is taking them lying down.
+
+But that's almost certainly giving me too much credit. To be continued.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/landscapes/
-One time I was talking with my neoreactionary friend "Wilhelm" about [my discomfort with social-justice entryism in my favorite open-source community](TODO: linky to "... Or; Smile More"). He said that my moral compass puts me to the right of the politically vocal tech nerds, especially the more androgynous type of tech nerd, that their whole ethos is to stamp on normal morality to prove how powerful they are, and score political points.
+One time I was talking with my neoreactionary friend "Thomas" about [my discomfort with social-justice entryism in my favorite open-source community](TODO: linky to "... Or; Smile More"). He said that my moral compass puts me to the right of the politically vocal tech nerds, especially the more androgynous type of tech nerd, that their whole ethos is to stamp on normal morality to prove how powerful they are, and score political points.
http://anechoicmedia.org/blog/european_politics/
--- /dev/null
+Title: "Reducing" Bias and Improving "Safety"
+Date: 2022-07-19
+Category: commentary
+Tags: artificial intelligence
+Status: draft
+
+https://openai.com/blog/reducing-bias-and-improving-safety-in-dall-e-2/
+
+> Today, we are implementing a new technique so that DALL·E generates images of people that more accurately reflect the diversity of the world's population. This technique is applied at the system level when DALL·E is given a prompt describing a person that does not specify race or gender, like "firefighter."
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/w1mflp/gender_bias_gone/igmevpj/
+https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1549076996935675904
+https://twitter.com/rzhang88/status/1549472829304741888
+https://twitter.com/cis_female/status/1549526889420947456
+
+> it doesn't seem to want to give me a male nurse
+https://twitter.com/robertskmiles/status/1549559401622691840
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRkFkzwKZ2zfa3R6H/without-specific-countermeasures-the-easiest-path-to
+
+------
+
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
-Date: 2021-12-15 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
-Status: draft
-
-[This started out as a draft email to Scott, but I'm really unhappy with the way it's developing; I should try to sculpt it into a defensible public post instead—or make it a good email first, then a post]
-
-on parsimony intuitions (re autogenderphilia and developmental psychology)
-
-> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
->
-> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
-
-Explaining my view in a way that I think you'll understand turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer [sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/) to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, frankly, I also expect my parsiony intuitions to actually get the right answer in the real world, and modesty/[Outside View](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FsfnDfADftGDYeG4c/outside-view-as-conversation-halter)/[Caution on Bias Arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/) to get the wrong answer. So, self-consciousness aside, here goes—
-
-You suggest what you allege is a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."
-
-In my ontology of how-the-world-works, this is _not_ a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a _shockingly weird_ hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I actually have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians _and_ gay men _and_ heterosexual males with a female gender identity _and_ heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
-
-What do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?
-
-Well, they're all human; that buys you a _lot_ of similarities!
-
-But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".
-
-So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
-
-Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared _social_ experience could induce similarities.
-
-But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
-
-I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
-
-Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
-
-_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people we know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)
-
-But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a _different_ [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense as a _political coalition_ (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
-
-And so, given that I _already_ don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?!
-
-Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
-
-The thing is, I don't see my theory as _making_ particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "imagine being him/her" questions.
-
-The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people [locate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance) survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
-
-If you look at what trans women say _to each other_ when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories (examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_) _over and over and over_ again.
-
-Without making any pretentions whatsoever to rigor or Science, but _just_ looking at the world and trying to describe it in words, I think there is clearly a _thing_ here. When I look at what women write, and when I look at what gay men write, I don't see the _same thing_.
-
-_After_ observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some numbers and data to help you learn more about what's going on with the pattern. There's clearly a thing here, but is the thing being generated by a _visible minority_, or is it actually a majority? When [82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/), that makes me think it's actually a majority.
-
-When you pose a vaguely similar question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is very nonobvious.
-
-And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for you, _you agree with me_: you wrote about this methodological issue in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
-
-> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
-
-> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
-
-> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
-
-The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you think you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
-
-This shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–5 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question _wasn't_ "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you _do_ get a lot of "Am I happy then sad sometimes? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's actually going on.
-
-If you're wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think you should be still more wary that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_! Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the _one domain_ where I think we have very strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empahtic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail.
-
-This is why I expect the standard "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" cope to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither yours nor [Moser 2009](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
-
-The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is _specifically_ about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the _extra work_ to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a _higher-bandwidth_ channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
-
-You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head specifically. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into a little _more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
-
-My common-sense intuition is that the experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body (which is pretty common and normal), and autogynephilic/autoandrophilic cross-sex fantasies (which are less common, but by no means rare), are superficially similar enough that they can generate overlapping reports if you _just_ ask "Would it be sexy to be her, 1–5", but that when you poke at the details, they're going to turn out to be _very_ different psychological phenomena that you shouldn't lump together as "autogenderphilia". Just on my prior beliefs about sexually-dimorphic animals, I just have _so much_ trouble _actually_ believing that [name1]'s experience of her body is more relevantly similar to mine than [name2]'s, _even if_ [name1] ends up sometimes using similar English words as me (_e.g._, "it's hot that I have breasts"). I can conceive of being wrong about this, but I don't think the _SSC_ survey data is a powerful enough instrument to make that call—I'd want in-depth interviews and preferably the kind of physical arousal measurements that Michael Bailey's lab does.
-
-In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to _look like_ the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts—and when I empirically-but-unScientifically eyeball the world (which is a much _higher-bandwidth_ information channel than eyeballing the shape of the 1–5 survey response histogram), that's not what I see. I could be biased, but—well, do _you_ see it? Where? Any other exhibits besides Elena?
-
-Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
-
-> The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
-
-> The answer: Yes
-
-I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women _and_ non-transitioned AGP men _very_ frequently. I can't recall any instances of cis lesbians saying this. _The poster herself seems to implicitly acknowledge this_, by calling it a "trans lesbian question" rather than merely a "lesbian" question!!
-
-I think the boring hypothesis here is "Yes, of course, because trans women are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians." This isn't Science, because I'm just using my brain's pattern-matching capabilities (I could be selectively remembering, distorting my categories, _&c._). With time and funding, I'm sure it would be possible to make it more formal—gather Reddit comments from cis and trans women, have raters categorize themes while blinded to the cis/trans identity of the authors ...
-
-But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is also an intersex condition because ... ???
-
-From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out then I'm not sure how to proceed.
-
-I can't _prove_ that all these ***physiological males with male-typical interests whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic (i.e. male-typical) sexuality*** (we _agree_ on all that!!) are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies—for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
-
-Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
-
-If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/)
-
-But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other! If I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain _agnostic_ about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an apparently empty garage. But to say that the no-dragon hypothesis "just seems totally wrong" ... ?!?!
-
-------
-
-
-
-
-
-> We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
-
-Someone reading this who trusted Alexander as a general-purpose intellectual authority ("the best of us", the "rationalists") might walk away with the idea that it's an open problem whether 50% binary predictions are meaningful—perhaps reasoning, if the immortal Scott Alexander doesn't know, then who am I to know?
-
-But it's not. On this website, [Rafael Harth explains why 50% isn't special](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAc4iuy4D3EiNBt9B/how-to-evaluate-50-predictions). I claim that this should actually be pretty obvious to competent quantitative thinkers, even if it's not obvious to the collective _SSC_/_ACX_ commentariat, and Alexander can't tell which of his commenters are competent quantitative thinkers.
-
-I don't particularly fault Scott for this: [by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). (And the vast majority of math people can't write as well or as fast as Scott. No one is the best at everything!) Rather, I'm saying that a culture that wants to _actually_ be right about everything would do better to _just_ focus on being right on the object level, without [wireheading on its own promises of being right about everything](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/).
-
-(Incidentally, Scott himself is actually very good about [not trying to claim more authority than is actually justified by his performance](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). His fans should try to be more like him along this dimension!)
-
-I doubt that's the same phenomenon? The thing about reports like, _e.g._, ||I have a female body in all my sexual fantasies (as reported by Anomaly above)|| is that there's an obvious explanation for that ||if you're _actually female_—namely, that your fantasy life is based on real life along this dimension—and that explanation is not present for people who are _not_ female||?
-
-||I think the way to think about this question is to imagine that if you'd _never heard_ of this stupid ideologically-charged debate—would you need to _spontaneously invent_ the term AGP (or a synonym like _eonism_ as coined by Ellis in 1920 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis#Eonism>) _in order to make sense of your experience_? If your _serious_ answer is Yes, that's _really interesting_ and I want to hear more. (Omega seems to be claiming this about herself, which is _really_ fascinating and my model _definitely_ loses some points for predicting that she shouldn't exist.) But I think _most_ females saying "yeah, sure, cis women are AGP too; it's, like, getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you, right? Seems normal" _after having been presented with the term in an ideologically-charged context_ are not really understanding the phenomenon in males that the term was originally coined to point to.||
-
-A much better analogy is ||the thing where you, Linta, and Swimmer report fantasizing about being male sometimes. This is plausibly auto-_andro_-philia, and like AGP, it's actually _pretty common_—_e.g._, Person _et al._ 1989 Table 3 (<http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf>) found 10 percent of female and 13 percent of male college students reporting yes to "Fantasizing that you are of opposite sex".||
-
-S. (she doesn't get it):
-> I do also enjoy fantasizing from the perspective of a fictional very attractive woman and imagining the inner details of a hypothetical other person's attraction to her; this is maybe a form of autogynephilia? (Though it is a bit hard for me to distinguish autogenyphilia from just getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you / imagining how other people see you)
at first I was upset about two-types in 2016/17, but that may have been premature; but now a recent flurry of activity about the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition thing
-"Wilhelm" told me to give up, but I have a _massive_ homefield advantage that doesn't port; that's an incentive to stand my ground and fight a culture war, unpleasant as that is
+"Thomas" told me to give up, but I have a _massive_ homefield advantage that doesn't port; that's an incentive to stand my ground and fight a culture war, unpleasant as that is
trans women who I love and admire and don't want to hurt—but who are a _different thing_ from actual women—_sufficiently_ different in a way that deserves either a separate noun, _or_ at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness ("women"/cis-women as the central thing, and "trans" as a wierd version); the "women, cis or trans; neither kind more central than the other" is not going to fly. Which isn't to say that "cis" is a bad word to have (I don't mind having words for "straight" or "heterosexual") (this could be its own post)
--- /dev/null
+Title: Standing Under the Same Sky
+Date: 2023-07-01 11:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, two-type taxonomy, whale metaphors
+Status: draft
+
+> "The only thing standing in the way of my own progress," Sagreda said, "is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim."
+>
+> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan
+
+Perhaps for [lack of any world-saving research to do](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy), Yudkowsky started writing fiction again, largely in the form of Glowfic (a genre of collaborative storytelling pioneered by Alicorn) featuring the world of dath ilan.
+
+The bulk of the dath ilan Glowfic canon was an epic titled [_Planecrash_](https://www.glowfic.com/boards/215)[^planecrash-title] coauthored with Lintamande, in which Keltham, an unusually selfish teenage boy from dath ilan, apparently dies in a freak aviation accident, and [wakes up in the world of](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) Golarion, setting of the _Dungeons-&-Dragons_–alike _Pathfinder_ role-playing game. A [couple](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508) of [other](https://glowfic.com/posts/6263) Glowfic stories with different coauthors further flesh out the setting of dath ilan, a smarter, better-coordinated alternate version of Earth steered by an order of [Keepers of Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937) who safeguard advanced rationality techniques from a population allegedly too psychologically fragile to handle them.
+
+[^planecrash-title]: The title is a triple pun, referring to the airplane crash leading to Keltham's death in dath ilan, and how his resurrection in Golarion collides dath ilan with [the "planes" of existence of the _Pathfinder_ universe](https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Great_Beyond), and Keltham's threat to destroy (crash) the _Pathfinder_ reality if mortals aren't given better afterlife conditions. (I use the word "threat" colloquially here; the work itself goes into some detail distinguishing between mere bargaining and decision-theoretic threats that should be defied.)
+
+On the topic of dath ilan's rationality training, I appreciated [this passage about the cognitive function of categorization](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1779051#reply-1779051):
+
+> Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want.
+
+Vindication! This showed that Yudkowsky _did_ understand what was at issue in the dispute over "... Not Man for the Categories", even if he couldn't say "Zack is right and Scott is wrong" for political reasons.
+
+Despite that tidbit, however, the dath ilan mythos overall seemed visibly defective to me compared to the Sequences—particularly regarding how humans should relate to unpleasant truths.
+
+Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that I had been misinterpreting the "Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" slogan from the Sequences. I had interpreted the slogan as suggesting the importance of speaking the truth _to other people_ (which I think is what "speaking" is usually about), but my interlocutor said it was about, for example, being able to speak the truth aloud in your own bedroom, to yourself. I think some textual evidence for my interpretation can be found in Daria's ending to ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), a multiple-parallel-endings story about an underground Society divided into factions over the color of the unseen sky, and one person's reaction when they find a passageway leading aboveground to a view of the sky:
+
+> Daria, once Green, tried to breathe amid the ashes of her world. _I will not flinch_, Daria told herself, _I will not look away_. She had been Green all her life, and now she must be Blue. Her friends, her family, would turn from her. _Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles_, her father had told her; but her father was dead now, and her mother would never understand. Daria stared down the calm blue gaze of the sky, trying to accept it, and finally her breathing quietened. _I was wrong_, she said to herself mournfully; _it's not so complicated, after all_. She would find new friends, and perhaps her family would forgive her ... or, she wondered with a tinge of hope, rise to this same test, standing underneath this same sky? "The sky is blue," Daria said experimentally, and nothing dire happened to her; but she couldn't bring herself to smile. Daria the Blue exhaled sadly, and went back into the world, wondering what she would say.
+
+Daria takes it as a given that she needs to be open about her new blue-sky belief, even though it's socially costly to herself and to her loved ones; the rationalist wisdom from her late father did _not_ say to go consult a priest or a Keeper to check whether telling everyone about the blue sky is a good idea.[^other-endings] I think this reflects the culture of the _Overcoming Bias_ in 2006 valuing the existence of a shared social reality that reflects actual reality: the conviction that it's both possible and desirable for people to rise to the same test, standing underneath the same sky.
+
+[^other-endings]: Even Eddin's ending, which portrays Eddin as more concerned with consequences than honesty, has him "trying to think of a way to prevent this information from blowing up the world", rather than trying to think of a way to suppress the information, in contrast to how Charles, in his ending, _immediately_ comes up with the idea to block off the passageway leading to the aboveground. Daria and Eddin are clearly written as "rationalists"; the deceptive strategy only comes naturally to the non-rationalist Charles. (Although you could Watsonianly argue that Eddin is just thinking longer-term than Charles: blocking off _this_ passageway and never speaking a word of it to another soul, won't prevent someone from finding some other passage to the aboveground, eventually.)
+
+In contrast, the culture of dath ilan does not seem to particularly value people _standing under the same sky_. It's not just the Keepers; we also see many other cases of the dath ilani covering things up for some alleged greater good with seemingly no regard to the costs of people have less accurate world-models.
+
+In one notable example, Keltham, the protagonist of _Planecrash_, is an obligate sexual sadist, but never discovered this fact about himself during his first life in dath ilan, because dath ilan has arranged to cover up the existence of sadism and masochism, because sadists like Keltham would be sad if they discovered that there weren't enough masochists to go around.
+
+It did not escape my notice that when "rationalist" authorities in real life considered public knowledge of some paraphilia to be an infohazard (ostensibly for the benefit of people with that paraphilia), I _didn't take it lying down_.
+
+The parallel between dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup and the autogynephilia coverup I had fought in real life, was something I was only intending to comment on in passing in the present memoir, rather than devoting any more detailed analysis to, but as I was having trouble focusing on my own writing in September 2022, I ended up posting some critical messages about dath ilan's censorship regime in the "Eliezerfic" Discord server for reader discussion of _Planecrash_, using the sadism/masochism coverup as my central example.
+
+(I would later adapt my complaints into a standalone post, "On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan".)
+
+Although Yudkowsky participated in the server, I had reasoned that my participation didn't violate my previous intent not to bother him anymore, because it was a publicly-linked Discord server with hundreds of members. Me commenting on the story for the benefit of the _other_ 499 people in the chatroom wouldn't generate a notification _for him_, the way it would if I sent him an email or replied to him on Twitter.
+
+The other chatroom participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
+
+When I objected to [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod)'s identification of the Keeper's credo as "Let the truth destroy what it can—in yourself, not in other people" as an incredibly infantalizing philosophy, someone replied, "I think of 'not in other people' not as 'infantilizing', but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological."
+
+I pointed out that this obviously applies to, say, religion. Was it wrong to advocate for atheism in a religious Society, where robbing someone of their belief in God might be harming them?
+
+"Every society strikes a balance between protectionism and liberty," someone said. "This isn't news."
+
+It's not news about _humans_, I conceded. But I thought people who were fans of Yudkowsky's writing in 2008 had a reasonable expectation that the dominant messaging in the local subculture would continue in 2022 to be _in favor_ of telling the truth and _against_ benevolently intended noble lies. It would be interesting to know why that had changed.
+
+I started a new thread for my topic (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). It died out after a couple days, but I reopened it later in response to more discussion of the masochism coverup.
+
+Yudkowsky made an appearance. (After he replied to someone else, I remarked parenthetically that his appearance made me think I should stop wasting time snarking in his fiction server and just finish my memoir already.) We had a brief back-and-forth:
+
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:33 PM
+> the main thing I'd observe contrary to Zack's take here, is that Keltham thought that not learning about masochists he can never have, was obviously in retrospect what he'd have wanted Civilization to do, or do unless and until Keltham became rich enough to afford a masochist and then he could be told
+> in other words, Keltham thought he was obviously being treated the way that counterfactual fully-informed Keltham would have paid Governance to treat not-yet-informed Keltham
+> that this obeys the social contract that Keltham thought he had, is part of why Keltham is confident that the logic of this particular explanation holds together
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:35 PM
+> the level of service that Keltham is expecting is _not the thing I learned from Robin Hanson's blog in 2008_
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:36 PM
+> I am sorry that some of the insane people I attracted got together and made each other more insane and then extensively meta-gaslit you into believing that everyone generally and me personally was engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting that you could believe in if you attached least-charitable explanations to everything we were doing
+
+It was pretty annoying that Yudkowsky was still attributing my greviances to Michael's malign influence—as if [the rationalists' wholesale embrace of gender identity revolution](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/) was something I would otherwise have just taken lying down. In the counterfactual where Michael had died in 2015, I think something like [my February 2017 mental breakdown](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) would have likely happened anyway.[^vassar-influence]
+
+[^vassar-influence]: Between August 2016 and January 2017, I sent Michael 14 emails, met with him once, and watched 60% of South Park season 19 at his suggestion, so he was _an_ influence on my thinking during that period, but not a disproportionately large one compared to everything else I was doing at the time.
+
+How would I have later reacted to [Yudkowsky's November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Tweets](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) (assuming they weren't butterfly-effected away in this counterfactual)? It's hard to say. Maybe, if that world's analogue of my February 2017 breakdown had gone sufficiently badly (with no Michael to visit me in the psych ward or help me make sense of things afterwards), I would have already been a broken man, and not even sent Yudkowsky an email. In any case, I feel very confident that my understanding of the behavior of "everyone generally and [Yudkowsky] personally" would not have been _better_ without Michael _et al._'s influence.
+
+Also, while "weird out-in-the-open gaslighting" was clearly a hostile paraphrase optimized to make my position look silly, I'm tempted to bite the bullet on it being an apt description of repeatedly publishing text that's optimized to delegitimize thinking about biological sex (which is gaslighting, manipulating people such that they doubt their own perceptions of reality) and justifying it on the grounds that ["people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment"](/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png) (which makes it weird and out in the open).
+
+> [cont'd]
+> you may recall that this blog included something called the "Bayesian Conspiracy"
+> they won't tell you about it, because it interferes with the story they were trying to drive you insaner with, but it's so
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:37 PM
+> it's true that the things I don't like about modern Yudkowsky were still there in Sequences-era Yudkowsky, but I think they've gotten _worse_
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:39 PM
+> well, if your story is that I was always a complicated person, and you selected some of my posts and liked the simpler message you extracted from those, and over time I've shifted in my emphases in a way you don't like, while still having posts like Meta-Honesty and so on... then that's a pretty different story than the one you were telling in this Discord channel, like, just now. today.
+
+Is it, though? The "always a complicated person [who has] shifted in [his] emphases in a way [I] don't like" story was true, of course, but it elided the substantive reasons _why_ I didn't like the new emphases, which I expect other people to be able to see, too.
+
+(As far as [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnEWQAYxcRnaYBqaZ/initiation-ceremony) [Bayesian](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZxR8P8hBFQ9kC8wMy/the-failures-of-eld-science) [Conspiracy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xAXrEpF5FYjwqKMfZ/class-project) [stories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kXAb5riiaJNrfR8v8/the-ritual) [went](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yffPyiu7hRLyc7r23/final-words), I think there's a significant narrative contrast between Brennan _seeking_ knowledge from the master _beisutsukai_, and Keltham, Merrin, and Thellim being _protected from_ knowledge by the Keepers. Neither the Bayesian Conspiracy nor the Keepers are publishing open-access textbooks, but at least the Conspiracy isn't claiming that their secretiveness is _for others' benefit_.)
+
+It's notable that Yudkowsky listed "still having posts like [Meta-Honesty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases)" as an exculpatory factor here. The thing is, I [wrote a _critique_ of "Meta-Honesty"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly). It was well-received (being [cited as a good example in the introductory post for the 2019 Less Wrong Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review), for instance). I don't think I could have written a similarly impassioned critique of anything from the Sequences era, because the stuff from the Sequences era still looked correct to me. To me, "Meta-Honesty" was evidence _for_ Yudkowsky having relinquished his Art and lost his powers, not evidence that his powers were still intact.
+
+I didn't have that response thought through in real time. At the time, I just agreed:
+
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:39 PM
+> It is!
+> I'm not done working through the hate-warp
+
+(This being a reference to part of _Planecrash_ in which [Keltham tells Carissa to be aware of her un-dath ilani tendency to feel "hatred that warps reality to be more hateable"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1882822#reply-1882822).)
+
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:40 PM
+> so one thing hasn't changed: the message that you, yourself, should always be trying to infer the true truth, off the information you already have.
+> if you know you've got a hate-warp I don't know why you're running it and not trying to correct for it
+> are you in fact also explicitly aware that the people who talk to you a lot about "gaslighting" are, like, insane?
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:42 PM
+> I'm not really part of Vassar's clique anymore, if that's what you mean
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:44 PM
+> it looks from outside here like they stomped really heavy footprints all over your brain that have not healed or been filled in
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 10:49 PM
+> it looks from inside here that the thing I'm not healed from is the thing where, as Oliver Habryka put it, I "should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false" ([https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY)), and Michael and Ben and Jessica were _really_ helpful for orienting me to that particular problem, even if I disagree with them about a lot of other things and they seem crazy in other ways
+> (rule thinkers in, not out)
+
+(I was pleased to get the link to Habryka's comment in front of Yudkowsky, if he hadn't already seen it.)
+
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 10:55 PM
+> the most harm they did you was to teach you to see malice where you should have seen mortality
+> noninnocent error is meaningfully different from innocent error; and noninnocent error is meaningfully different from malice
+> Keltham deduced the lack of masochists in dath ilan by asking the question, "Why would Civilization have kept this information from me?", _ruling out_ or actually not even thinking of such ridiculous hypotheses as "Because it was fun", and settling on the obvious explanation that explained _why Keltham would have wanted Civilization to do that for him_—masochists not existing or being incredibly rare and unaffordable to him. You looked at this and saw malice everywhere; you couldn't even see _the fictional world_ the author was trying to give you _direct description about_. You didn't say that you disbelieved in the world; you could not see what was being _described_.
+
+(When a literary critic proposes a "dark" interpretation of an author's world, I think it's implied that they're expressing disbelief in the "intended" world; the fact that I was impudently refusing to buy the benevolent interpretation wasn't because I didn't understand it.)
+
+> Hate-warp like this is bad for truth-perception; my understanding of the situation is that it's harm done to you by the group you say you left. I would read this as being a noninnocent error of that group; that they couldn't get what they wanted from people who still had friends outside their own small microculture, and noninnocently then decided that this outer culture was bad and people needed to be pried loose from it. They tried telling some people that this outer culture was gaslighting them and maliciously lying to them and had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms to break free of the gaslighting; that worked on somebody, and made a new friend for them; so their brain noninnocently learned that it ought to use arguments like that again, so they must be true.
+> This is a sort of thing I super did not do because I _understood_ it as a failure mode and Laid My Go Stones Against Ever Actually Being A Cult; I armed people with weapons against it, or tried to, but I was optimistic in my hopes about how much could actually be taught.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:20 PM
+> Without particularly defending Vassar _et al._ or my bad literary criticism (sorry), _modeling the adversarial component of non-innocent errors_ (as contrasted to "had to be understood in wholly adversarial terms") seems very important. (Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone.)
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
+> Rationalization sure is a huge thing! That's why I considered important to discourse upon the science of it, as was then known; and to warn people that there were more complicated tangles than that, which no simple experiment had shown yet.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:22 PM
+> yeah
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:23 PM
+> It remains something that mortals do, and if you cut off anybody who's ever done that, you'll be left with nobody. And also importantly, people making noninnocent errors, if you accuse them of malice, will look inside themselves and correctly see that this is not how they work, and they'll stop listening to the (motivated) lies you're telling them about themselves.
+> This also holds true if you make up overly simplistic stories about 'ah yes well you're doing that because you're part of $woke-concept-of-society' etc.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:24 PM
+> I think there's _also_ a frequent problem where you try to accuse people of non-innocent errors, and they motivatedly interpret _you_ as accusing malice
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:25 PM
+> Then invent new terminology. I do that all the time when existing terminology fails me.
+> Like I literally invented the term 'noninnocent error' right in this conversation.
+> **zackmdavis** — 11/29/2022 11:27 PM
+> I've tried this, but maybe it wasn't good enough, or I haven't been using it consistently enough: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)
+> I should get ready for bed
+> I will endeavor to edit out the hate-warp from my memoir before publishing, and _probably_ not talk in this server
+> **Eliezer** — 11/29/2022 11:31 PM
+> I think you should worry first about editing the hate-warp out of yourself, but editing the memoir might be useful practice for it. Good night.
+
+It turned out that I was lying about probably not talking in the server anymore. (Hedging with the word "probably" didn't make the claim true, and of course I wasn't _consciously_ lying, but that hardly seems exculpatory.) The fact that Yudkowsky had been replying to me at length—explaining why my literary criticism was nuts, but in a way that respected my humanity and expected me to be able to hear it—implied that I was apparently in his "I can cheaply save him from crazy people like Michael Vassar" bucket, rather than the "AI timelines and therefore life is too short" bucket. Maybe my presence wasn't tresspassing; maybe I had a right to speak.
+
+The next day, I belatedly pointed out that "Keltham thought that not learning about masochists he can never have, was obviously in retrospect what he'd have wanted Civilization to do" seemed to contradict "one thing hasn't changed: the message that you, yourself, should always be trying to infer the true truth". In the first statement, it didn't sound like Keltham thinks it's good that Civilization didn't tell him so that he could figure it out for himself (in accordance with the discipline of "you, yourself, always trying to infer the truth"). It sounded like he was better off not knowing—better off having a _less accurate self-model_ (not having the concept of "obligate romantic sadism"), better off having a _less accurate world-model_ (thinking that masochism isn't real).
+
+In response to someone positing that dath ilani were choosing to be happier but less accurate predictors, I said that I read a blog post once about why you actually didn't want to do that, linking to [an Internet Archive copy of "Doublethink (Choosing to Be Biased)"](https://web.archive.org/web/20080216204229/https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/doublethink-cho.html) from 2008[^hanson-conceit]—at least, that was _my_ attempted paraphrase; it was possible that I'd extracted a simpler message from it than the author intended.
+
+[^hanson-conceit]: I was enjoying the conceit of referring to Sequences posts as being from "Robin Hanson's blog in 2008", as a way of emphasizing the distinction between my respect for the material and my contempt for the man Yudkowsky had become.
+
+A user called Harmless explained the loophole. "Doublethink" was pointing out that decisions that optimize the world for your preferences can't come from nowhere: if you avoid painful thoughts in your map, you damage your ability to steer away from painful outcomes in the territory. However, there was no rule that all the information-processing going into decisions that optimize the world for your preferences had to take place in _your brain_ ...
+
+I saw where they were going and completed the thought: you could build a Friendly AI or a Civilization to see all the dirty things for you, that would make you unhappy to have to see yourself.
+
+Yudkowsky clarified his position:
+
+> My exact word choices often do matter: I said that you should always be trying to _infer_ the truth. With the info you already have. In dath ilan if not in Earth, you might decline to open a box labeled "this info will make you permanently dissatisfied with sex" if the box was labeled by a prediction market.
+> Trying to avoid inferences seems to me much more internally costly than declining to click on a spoiler box.
+
+I understood the theory, but I was still extremely skpetical of the practice, assuming the eliezera were even remotely human. Yudkowsky described the practice of "keeping BDSM secret and trying to prevent most sadists from discovering what they are—informing them only when and if they become rich enough or famous enough that they'd have a high probability of successfully obtaining a very rare masochist" as a "basically reasonable policy option that [he] might vote for, not to help the poor dear other people, but to help [his] own counterfactual self."
+
+I wasn't sure what my wordcount and "diplomacy" "budget limits" for the server were, but I couldn't let go; I kept the thread going on subsequent days. There was something I felt I should be able to convey, if I could just find the right words.
+
+When [Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) says, "trying to prevent most [_X_] from discovering what they are [...] continues to strike me as a basically reasonable policy option", then, separately from the particular value of _X_, I expected people to jump out of their chairs and say, "No! This is wrong! Morally wrong! People can stand what is true about themselves, because they are already doing so!"
+
+And to the extent that I was the only person jumping out of my chair, and there was a party-line response of the form, "Ah, but if it's been decreed by authorial fiat that these-and-such probabilities and utilities take such-and-these values, then in this case, self-knowledge is actually bad under the utilitarian calculus," I wasn't disputing the utilitarian calculus. I was wondering—here I used the "🐛" bug emoji customarily used in Glowfic culture to indicate uncertainty about the right words to use—_who destroyed your souls?_
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> it feels powerfully relevant to me that the people of whom I am saying this _are eliezera_. I get to decide what they'd want because, unlike with Earth humans, I get to put myself in their shoes. it's plausible to me that the prediction markets say that I'd be sadder if I was exposed to the concept of sadism in a world with no masochists. if so, while I wouldn't relinquish my Art and lose my powers by trying to delude myself about that once I'd been told, I'd consider it a friendly act to keep the info from me—_because_ I have less self-delusional defenses than a standard Earthling, really—and a hostile act to tell me; and if you are telling me I don't get to make that decision for myself because it's evil, and if you go around shouting it from the street corners in dath ilan, then yeah I think most cities don't let you in.
+
+I wish I had thought to ask if he'd have felt the same way in 2008.
+
+A user called Ajvermillion continued to be baffled at my skepticism: if the author specifies that the world of the story is simple in this-and-such direction, on what grounds could I _disagree_?
+
+I admitted, again, that there was a sense in which I couldn't argue with authorial fiat. But I thought that an author's choice of assumptions reveals something about what they think is true in our world, and commenting on that should be fair game for literary critics. Suppose someone wrote a story and said, "in the world portrayed in this story, everyone is super-great at _kung fu_, and they could beat up everyone from our Earth, but they never have to practice at all."
+
+(Yudkowsky retorted, "...you realize you're describing like half the alien planets in comic books? when did Superman ever get depicted as studying kung fu?" I wish I had thought to admit that, yes, I _did_ hold Eliezer Yudkowsky to a higher standard of consilient worldbuilding than DC Comics. Would he rather I _didn't_?)
+
+Something about innate _kung fu_ world seems fake in a way that seems like a literary flaw. It's not just about plausibility. Fiction often incorporates unrealistic elements in order to tell a story that has relevance to real human lives. Innate _kung fu_ skills are scientifically plausible[^instinct] in a way that faster-than-light travel is not, but throwing faster-than-light travel into the universe so that you can do a [space opera](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera) doesn't make the _people_ fake in the way that Superman's fighting skills are fake.
+
+[^instinct]: All sorts of other instinctual behaviors exist in animals; I don't see why skills humans have to study for years as a "martial art" couldn't be coded into the genome.
+
+Maybe it was okay for Superman's fighting skills to be fake from a literary perspective (because realism along that dimension is not what Superman is _about_), but if the Yudkowskian ethos exulted intelligence as ["the power that cannot be removed without removing you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic), readers had grounds to demand that the dath ilani's thinking skills be real, and a world that's claimed by authorial fiat to be super-great at epistemic rationality, but where the people don't have a will-to-truth stronger than their will-to-happiness, felt fake to me. I couldn't _prove_ that it was fake. I agreed with Harmless's case that, technically, as far as the Law went, you could build a Civilization or a Friendly AI to see all the ugly things that you preferred not to see.
+
+But if you could—would you? And more importantly, if you would—could you?
+
+It was possible that the attitude I was evincing here was just a difference between the eliezera out of dath ilan and the Zackistani from my medianworld, and that there was nothing more to be said about it. But I didn't think the thing was a _genetic_ trait of the Zackistani! _I_ got it from spending my early twenties obsessively re-reading blog posts that said things like, ["I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future [...] One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth [...] I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)
+
+There were definitely communities on Earth where I wasn't allowed in because of my tendency to shout things from street corners, and I respected those people's right to have a safe space for themselves. But those communities didn't call themselves _rationalists_, weren't pretending be to be inheritors of the great tradition of E. T. Jaynes and Richard Feynman and Robin Hanson. And if they _did_, I think I would have a false advertising complaint against them.
+
+"[The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues) ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy," just didn't have the same ring to it. Neither did "The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy"—even if you stipulated by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing.
+
+There's a scene in _Atlas Shrugged_ that I think illustrates [the mood dath ilan is missing](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html).[^atlas-shrugged-ref] Our heroine Dagny expresses a wish to be kept ignorant for the sake of her own happiness. "Oh, if only I didn't have to hear about it!" she says. "If only I could stay here and never know what they're doing to the railroad, and never learn when it goes!"
+
+John Galt isn't having it. "You'll have to hear about it," he says, in "that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts", listing the disasters fated to befall the railroad before concluding, "Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever."
+
+"Thank you. You're right," Dagny says, noting the contrast of Galt's tough-minded honesty with "the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy".
+
+[^atlas-shrugged-ref]: In Part Three, Chapter II, "The Utopia of Greed".
+
+When I quoted this scene in the server, other participants were baffled that I seemed to be appealing to Ayn Rand's authority. I was actually going for a _reverse_ appeal-to-authority: if _Ayn Rand_ understood that facing reality is virtuous, why didn't the 2020s "rationalists"? I didn't think the disdain for "Earth people" was justified, when Earth's philosophy of rationality (as exemplified by Ayn Rand) was doing better than dath ilan's on this critical dimension.
+
+I wondered if the issue had to do with what Yudkowsky had [identified as the problem of non-absolute rules](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#5__Counterargument__The_problem_of_non_absolute_rules_), where not-literally-absolute rules like "Don't kill" or "Don't lie" have to be stated as if they were absolutes in order to register to the human motivational system with sufficient force.
+
+Technically, as a matter of decision theory, "sacred values" are crazy. It's easy to say—and feel with the passion of religious conviction—that it's always right to choose Truth and Life, and that no one could choose otherwise except wrongly, in the vile service of Falsehood and Death. But reality presents us with quantitative choices over uncertain outcomes, in which everything trades off against everything else under the [von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem); if you had to choose between the Life of millions and a small, unimportant Truth, you'd probably choose Life—but more importantly, the very fact that you might have to choose means that Truth and Life can't both be infinitely sacred to you, and must be measured on a common scale with lesser goods like mere Happiness.
+
+I knew that. The other people in the chatroom knew that. So to the extent that the argument amounted to me saying "Don't lie" (about, _e.g._, the existence of masochism), and them saying "Don't lie unless the badness of lying is outweighed by the goodness of increased happiness", why was I so confident that I was in the right, when they were wisely acknowledging the trade-offs under the Law, and I was sticking to my (incoherent) sacred value of Truth? Didn't they obviously have the more sophisticated side of the argument?
+
+The problem was that, in my view, the people who weren't talking about Truth as if it were a sacred value were being _wildly recklessly casual_ about harms from covering things up, as if they didn't see the [non-first-order](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [harms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) _at all_. I felt I had to appeal to the lessons for children about how Lying Is Bad, because if I tried to make a more sophisticated argument about it being _quantitatively_ crazy to cover up psychology facts that make people sad, I would face a brick wall of "authorial fiat declares that the probabilities and utilities are specifically fine-tuned such that ignorance is good."
+
+A user called RationalMoron asked if I was appealing to a terminal value. Did I think people should have accurate self-models even if they didn't want to?
+
+Obviously I wasn't going to use a universal quantifier over all possible worlds and all possible minds, but in human practice, yes: people who prefer to believe lies about themselves are doing the wrong thing; people who lie to their friends to keep them happy are doing the wrong thing. People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so. I realized that this was a children's lesson without very advanced math, but I thought it was a better lesson than, "Ah, but what if a _prediction market_ says they can't???"
+
+I maintained that the fact that the eliezera prefer not to know that there are desirable sexual experiences that they can't have, contradicted April's earlier claim (which had received a Word of God checkmark-emoji) that "it's not that the standards are being dropped[;] it's that there's an even higher standard far beyond what anyone on earth has accomplished".
+
+Apparently I struck a nerve. Yudkowsky started "punching back":
+
+> **Eliezer** — 12/08/2022 12:45 PM
+> Do zacki have no concept of movie spoilers, such that all movies are just designed not to rely on uncertainty for dramatic tension? Do children have to be locked in individual test rooms because they can't comprehend the concept of refusing to look at other children's answer sheets because it's evidence and you should observe it? Do adults refuse to isolate the children so they can have practice problems, because you can't stop them from learning the answer to skill-building problems, only the legendary evil alien eliezera would do that? Obviously they don't have surprise parties.
+> It's noticeably more extreme than the _Invention of Lying_ aliens, who can still have nudity taboos
+> I'd also note that I think in retrospect (only after having typed it) that Zack could not have generated these examples of other places where society refrains from observation, and that I think this means I am tracking the thing Zack fears in a way that Zack cannot because his thinking is distorted and he is arguing rather than seeing; and this, not verbally advocating for "truth", is more what respect for truth really is.
+
+I thought the "you could not have generated the answer I just told you" gambit was a pretty dirty argumentative trick on Yudkowsky's part. (Given that I could, how would I be able to prove it? This was itself a good use-case for concealing spoilers.)
+
+As it happened, however, I had already considered the case of spoilers as a class of legitimate infohazards, and was prepared to testify that I had already thought of it, and explain why I thought hiding spoilers were relevantly morally different from the coverups I was objecting to: the previous night, 7 December 2022, I had had a phone call with Anna Salamon,[^evidence-of-independent-generation] in which I had cited dath ilan's [practice of letting children figure out heliocentrism for themselves](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1777588#reply-1777588) as not being objectionable in the way the sadism/masochism coverup was.
+
+[^evidence-of-independent-generation]: I counted myself lucky to be able to point to Anna as a potential witness to defend myself against the "could not have generated" trick—as a matter of principle, not because I seriously expected anyone to care enough to go ask Anna if she remembered the conversation the same way.
+
+ I also mentioned that when I had used spoiler blocks on the _Atlas Shrugged_ quote I had posted upthread, I had briefly considered making some kind of side-remark noting that the spoiler blocks were also a form of information-hiding, but couldn't think of anything funny or relevant enough (which, if my self-report could be trusted, showed that I had independently generated the idea of spoilers being an example of hiding information—but I didn't expect other people to uncritically believe my self-reports).
+
+As for the claim that my thinking was distorted and I was arguing instead of seeing, it was definitely true that I was _motivated to look for_ criticisms of Yudkowsky and dath ilan, for personal reasons outside the scope of the server, and I thought it was great for people to notice this and take it into account. I hoped to nevertheless be competent to only report real criticisms and not fake criticisms. (Whether I succeeded, of course, was up to the reader to decide.)
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> only half the battle even if you could do it. you're also not reporting any facts/arguments on the other side, which is a much larger and visible gap to me, and has a lot to do with why I'm not presently considering this criticism from a peer despite your spoken adherence to virtues I value. **QUESTION FOR ZACK ONLY, NOBODY ELSE ANSWER OR SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT IN THIS MAIN CHANNEL:** What are some of the ways that Planecrash valorizes truth, as you, yourself, see that virtue?
+
+I chose not to ask why it was relevant whether or not I was a "peer." If we're measuring IQ[^iq-comparison] or fiction-writing ability[^fiction-comparison] or contributions to AI alignment[^alignment-comparison], I'm obviously _not_ his peer. It didn't seem like that was necessary when one could just [evaluate my arguments about dath ilan on their own merits](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority). (Also, you'd think that people who are obsessed with prediction markets—whose trustworthiness does not stem from individual traders having unimpeachably perfect cognition—would be able to appreciate the value of the somewhat older [social technology of "debate"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SX6wQEdGfzz7GKYvp/rationalist-discourse-is-like-physicist-motors).) But I wasn't going to be so impertinent to point that out when the master was testing me (!) and I was eager to pass the test.
+
+[^iq-comparison]: [143](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1076154502326013952) _vs._ [131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg).
+
+[^fiction-comparison]: Several [highly-acclaimed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8) [stories](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good) [including the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfiction](https://www.hpmor.com/) _vs._ a [few](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/05/living-well-is-the-best-revenge/) [vignettes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dYspinGtiba5oDCcv/feature-selection) and a [_My Life as a Teenage Robot_ fanfic](https://archive.ph/WdydM) with double-digit Favorites on _fanfiction.net_.
+
+[^alignment-comparison]: Founder of the field _vs._ author of some questionably relevant blog comments.
+
+I said that I'd like to take an hour to compose a _good_ answer. (It was 10:26 _p.m._) If I tried to type something off-the-cuff on the timescale of five minutes, it wasn't going to be of similar quality as my criticisms, because, as I had just admitted, I had _totally_ been running a biased search for criticisms—or did the fact that I had to ask that mean I had already failed the test?
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I mean, yeah, in fact the greater test is already having that info queued, but conversely it's even worse if you think back or reread and people are not impressed with the examples you find. I cannot for politeness lie and deny that if you did it in five minutes it would be _more_ impressive, but I think that it is yet the correct procedure to take your time.
+
+(As an aside—this isn't something I thought or said at the time—I _do_ think it makes sense to run an asymmetric search for flaws in some contexts, even though it would be disastrous to only look on one side of the argument when considering a belief you're uncertain about. Code reviewers often only comment in detail on flaws or bugs that they find, and say only "LGTM" (looks good to me) when they don't find any. Why? Because the reviewers aren't necessarily trying to evaluate "This code is good" as an abstract belief[^low-stakes]; they're trying to improve the code, and there's an asymmetry in payoffs where eliminating a flaw is an improvement, whereas identifying something the code does right just means the author was doing their job. If you didn't trust a reviewer's competence and thought they were making spurious negative reviews, you might legitimately test them by asking them to argue what's _good_ about a pull request that they just negatively reviewed, but I don't think it should be concerning if they asked for some extra time.)
+
+[^low-stakes]: For typical low-stakes business software in the "move fast and break things" regime. In applications where bugs are more costly, you do want to affirmatively verify "the code is good" as a belief.
+
+I said that I also wanted to propose a reframing: the thing that the present thread was complaining about was a lack of valorization of truth-_telling_, honesty, wanting _other_ people to have accurate maps. Or maybe that was covered by "as you, yourself, see that virtue"?
+
+Yudkowsky said that he would accept that characterization of what the thread was about if my only objection was that dath ilan didn't tell Keltham about BSDM, and that I had no objection to Keltham's judgement that in dath ilan, he would have preferred not to know.
+
+I expounded for some more paragraphs about why I _did_ object to Keltham's judgement, and then started on my essay exam—running with my "truth-telling" reframing.
+
+I wanted to nominate the part where the Project Lawful Conspiracy is unveiled: I thought I remembered Keltham saying something about how Carissa's deception was the worst thing anyone could have done to him—that is, that the fact that someone he trusted was putting him in a fake reality was _itself_ considered a harm, separately from the fact that Cheliax is evil. I re-read pages 74 onwards of the ["What the Truth Can Destroy"](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5930) thread, and didn't see Keltham saying the thing I thought he said (maybe it happened in the next thread, or I had misremembered), but found two more things to submit as answers to my lit exam, which I posted at 12:30 _a.m._ (so I had actually taken two hours, rather than the one I had asked for).
+
+First, I liked how [Snack Service intervenes to stage](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1811461#reply-1811461) a ["truth and reconciliation commission"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Africa)) for Keltham and his paramours, on the grounds that it's necessary for Asmodeus and Cayden Caliean and Adabar and Keltham to make their best decisions. People testifying in public (with the Chelaxians and Oririons present, as one would at a trial) reflects a moral about the importance of common knowledge, _shared_ maps. The testimony being public ensured that not just that Keltham got to know what had been done to him, but that his paramours and counterparties would _know that he knows_. There was something honorable about getting things on the public record like that, in the end, even while Snack Service was willing to participate in the conspiracy _before_ the jig was up.
+
+Second, I liked Korva's speech about why she hates Keltham, and how Keltham not only takes it in stride, but also asks to buy the right to take Korva with him to Osirion. When Abrogail expresses surprise that Keltham would want Korva, Keltham cites a dath ilani proverb about advice that's easier to get from people who aren't friends with you. This reflects an understanding that your friends wanting to be nice to you can be a source of distortions; Keltham specifically values Korva _as a critic_.
+
+The next day, I added that I realized that I had missed a huge opportunity to successfully reply on a five-minute time scale (to pass "the greater test [of] already having that info queued"): the "in _Planecrash_" part of the prompt made me think I had to find something in Keltham's story (which is why I took another two hours to hand in my essay), but other threads within the dath ilan Glowfic continuity should obviously count for the purpose of the test, and I did in fact already have cached thoughts about how Thellim's contempt for Jane Austen characters beautifully mirrored my contempt for protecting people from psychology facts that would hurt their feelings. I could _prove_ that I already had it cached (if not queued, as evidenced by my remembering it the next day), because I had mentioned it both in the conversation leading to the present thread, and in my memoir draft.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> so I think that you're looking an awful lot at what _characters say_ and nearly not at all at what the universe does. this plausibly reflects a deep flaw in your art, because it sure does seem to me that you are a lot better at noticing what people say about truth in words, detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on, than you are imo at carefully weighing up both sides of things as is the art of finding-truth-in-reality. it plausibly also reflects some people who ill-shaped you, pointing you at the fictional characters and angering you at their spoken words and verbal thoughts, as was advantageous to them, and not pointing you towards, like, looking at the messages in the fiction itself rather than the words spoken by characters, because that would not have served their ill purpose of alienating you and turning you into an angry thing more useful for their purposes. (I would not ordinarily use language like this but I regret that it is the language you have now seemingly been ill-shaped to speak, for another's usefulness.)
+> if I ask you, not what any _character says_, not even what any _societies say_, but _what happens in Planecrash_ and what the _causal process_ there seems to think about matters important to you, what do you see?
+
+As a _quick_ reply to the followup question (posted within 19 minutes of it being asked), I said that Cheliax was at a structural disadvantage in its conflict with the forces of Good, because learning how to think inevitably turns mortals away from Asmodeus's will.
+
+But I was more interested in replying to the part about me being ill-shaped to another's purpose. (I said, after sleeping on it,[^async-discord] that I wouldn't have considered that on-topic for the fiction server, but if _he_ thought it was on-topic, then it made sense for me to reply.)
+
+[^async-discord]: Discord lends itself quite well to a mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication, depending on when people happen to be at their computers.
+
+I said that he seemed really stuck on this hypothesis that it was Michael Vassar's fault that I'd been shaped into an alienated and angry thing.
+
+To be clear, I totally agreed that I had been shaped into an alienated and an alienated and angry thing. Obviously. But speaking of people "look[ing] inside themselves and correctly see[ing] that this is not how they work" (as Yudkowsky had said earlier), I thought he was getting the causality all wrong.
+
+It seemed to _me_ that the reason I had become an alienated and angry thing is because I had been shaped by [making an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) since 2016 to respond to a class of things that included Yudkowsky "mak[ing] up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false"—again referencing [Oliver Habryka's comment on "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY)
+
+That's the context in which it wasn't surprising that my Art had involved some amount of specialization in "detecting whose monkey-side they seem to be on." In a world where monkeys are trying to cover up otherwise-obvious truths, successfully blowing the whistle on them involves being sensitive to their monkey games; figuring out the truth they're trying to cover up is the easy part. The whistleblowing-skill of of promoting otherwise-obvious things to _common_ knowledge in opposition to a Power trying to prevent common knowledge, is different from the science-skill of figuring out organically-nonobvious things from scratch. It _makes sense_ for Alexander Solzhenitsyn and [Andrey Kolmogorov](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/)—or for that matter, John Galt and Robert Stadler—to have developed different crystalized skills.
+
+(Indeed, it even makes sense for Kolmogorov and Stadler to _not_ develop some skills, because the skills would show up under [Detect Thoughts](https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/detect-thoughts/).)
+
+If it was all Michael's fault for "extensively meta-gas[lighting me] into believing that everyone generally and [him] personally [were] engaging in some kind of weird out-in-the-open gaslighting", I asked, echoing Yudkowsky's language from earlier (with appropriate quotation marks and brackets),[^gaslighting] then _how come Oli could see it, too?_
+
+[^gaslighting]: In particular, Yudkowsky was the one who introduced the word _gaslighting_ into the conversation; I hadn't previously used the word myself.
+
+Yudkowsky replied:
+
+> I think if you asked Oli about the state of reality with respect to this whole affair, he'd have a very different take from your take, _if you're still able to hear differences instead of only those similarities you demand._
+
+That sounded like an easy enough experimental test! I wrote Habryka an email explaining the context, and asking him what "very different take" he might have, if any. (I resisted the temptation to start a [Manifold market](https://manifold.markets/) first.) As I mentioned in the email, I didn't expect to have a very different take from him _about the state of reality_. ("Zack is (still?!) very upset about this, but Oli mostly doesn't care" is a values-difference, not a disagreement about the state of reality.) I didn't think I disagreed with _Yudkowsky_ much about the state of reality! (In his own account, he thought it was ["sometimes personally prudent [...] to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about"](/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png), and I believed him; I was just unhappy about some of the side-effects of his _prudence_.)
+
+Oliver didn't reply. (I might have guessed the wrong email address, out of the two I had on file for him?) I don't blame him; it might have been timelessly ungrateful of me to ask.[^timeless-ingratitude]
+
+[^timeless-ingratitude]: One reason people are reluctant to make on-the-record statements in politically charged contexts is because they're afraid the statements will be _used_ to drag them into more political fights later. Habryka had already done me a huge favor by being brave enough to state the obvious in March; I had no right to demand anything more of him.
+
+Regarding my quick reply about Cheliax's structural disadvantage, Yudkowsky said it was "okay as one element", but complained that the characters had already observed it out loud, and that I "didn't name any concrete sequence of events that bore it out or falsified it." He continued:
+
+> I think you could find a lot more than this if your brain were still able to see incongruent facts as well as only congruent facts. what does the underlying reality of Planecrash think about your Most Important Issues? what is shown, but maybe never even told at all? you gave the reply of somebody who can _only_ see social realities and _only_ what people say and not what _just happens, at all_, even inside a story, you didn't say _a thing that happened._
+
+At this point, I was a bit suspicious that _any_ answer that wasn't exactly whatever he was thinking of would be dismissed as too social or too inferentially close to something one of the characters had said. What did it mean for the _universe_ to say something about valorizing truth?
+
+The original prompt ("What are some of the ways _Planecrash_ valorizes truth") had put me into 11th-grade English class mode; the revision "if I ask you, not what any _character_ says [...]" made me think the 11th-grade English teacher expected a different answer. Now the revised–revised prompt "what does the underlying reality of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues?", with the previous rebukes in my context window, was making me think I should be reaching for an act of philosophical [Original Seeing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing), rather than trying to be a diligent schoolstudent playing the 11th-grade English class game. I thought about it ... and I _saw something_.
+
+_Thesis_: the universe of _Planecrash_ is saying that virtue ethics—including, as a special case, my virtue ethics about it being good to tell the truth and reveal information—are somewhat unnatural.
+
+In the story, the god Adabar values trading fairly, even with those who can't verify that their partners are keeping up their end of the deal,[^trade-verification] and also wants to promote fair trading _elsewhere_ in Reality (as contrasted to just being fair Himself).
+
+[^trade-verification]: Significantly, this is somewhat "unnatural" behavior according to Yudkowsky's view of decision theory. Ideal agents are expected to cooperate with agents whose cooperation is _conditional_ on their own cooperation, not simply those that cooperate with them: you "should" defect against a rock with the word "COOPERATE" painted on it, and you "shouldn't" trade for what you could just as easily steal. See §6 of ["Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma: Program Equilibrium via Provability Logic"](https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577).
+
+Adabar is kind of a weirdo. He's not a vanishly rare freak (whose specification would require lots of uncompressible information); there _is_ a basin of attraction in the space of pre-gods, where creatures who develop a computationally efficient "fairness" heuristic in their ancestral environment and reify that into their utilityfunction when they ascend to divinity, but it's not a _huge_ basin of attraction; most gods aren't like Adabar.
+
+It's the same thing with honesty. Generic consequentialists have no reason to "tell the truth" to agents with different utility functions when they're not under compact and being compensated for the service. Why _would_ you emit signals that other agents can interpret as a map that reflects the territory? [You can't get more paperclips that way!](https://arbital.com/p/not_more_paperclips/)
+
+I had previously written about this in ["Commucation Requires Common Interests or Differential Signal Costs"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybG3WWLdxeTTL3Gpd/communication-requires-common-interests-or-differential); you needed some common interests in order for flexible, "digital" language to exist at all. ("Digital" language being that for which the relationship between signals and meaning can be arbitrary, in contrast to costly signaling, where me expending resources at least tells you that I could afford those resources.)
+
+It's _possible_ for imperfectly deceptive social organisms to develop a taste for "honesty" as a computationally efficient heuristic for navigating to Pareto improvements in the ancestral environment, which _might_ get reified into the utilityfunction as they ascend—but that's an Adabar-class weird outcome, not the default outcome.
+
+So—insofar as my Most Important Issues revolved around an obsession with motivational transparency, wanting to live in a world that wasn't lying to me, wanting to _reveal information_ as an end in itself, unilaterally rather than only as part of a coordinated negotiation scheme, without necessarily being _paid_ for it, but just because it is _right_ ...
+
+It seems like my answer to the question of, "What does the underlying causal process of _Planecrash_ think about your Most Important Issues; what are some the ways that _Planecrash_ valorizes truth-telling as you, yourself, see that virtue?" is, "It doesn't" (!). Truth-telling is a virtue ethic, and _Planecrash_ depicts a universe ruled by consequentialist gods who only implement virtue ethics insofar as that made it into their utilityfunction.
+
+I realized, of course, that this certainly wasn't the answer Yudkowsky was looking for. But it seemed like a _better_ answer than me trying to play the schoolstudent. He asked what I saw when I looked at what the fictional universe was saying about my problems, and I looked, and _I saw something_. (Something philosophically substantive, definitely not just a social reality.) It seemed more honest to just report that, rather than keep trying to [guess the teacher's password](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password).
+
+[("Hermione knew the correct answer wouldn't impress Professor Quirrell, but it was the correct answer, so she said it.")](https://hpmor.com/chapter/70)
+
+So, after sleeping on it first, I posted the explanation of what I saw to the channel (including the parts about how the original prompts steered me, and that I realized that this wasn't the answer he was looking for).
+
+The outcome was—silence. No response from Yudkowsky in several days. Maybe I shouldn't have ran with my Original Seeing answer? I showed the transcripts to a friend, who compared my answer about consequentialist gods to including a list of your country's war crimes in a high school essay assignment about patriotism; I had done a terrible job of emitting symbols that made me a good monkey, and a mediocre-at-best job of flipping the table (rejecting Yudkowsky's "pass my test before I recognize your criticism as legitimate" game) and picking a fight instead.
+
+("Don't look at me," he added, "I would've flipped the table at the beginning.")
+
+I tried to explain that my third answer wasn't _just_ doubling down on my previous thesis: "my virtue ethics run against the grain of the hidden Bayesian structure of reality" wasn't an argument _in favor of_ my virtue ethics. My friend wasn't buying it; I still hadn't been fulfilling the original prompt.
+
+He had me there. I had no more excuses after that: I had apparently failed the test. I was feeling pretty glum about this, and lamented my poor performance in the `#drama` channel of another Discord server (that Yudkowsky was also a member of). I had thought I was doing okay: I definitely _didn't_ say, "That's impossible because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate Truth", and there were reasons why my Original Seeing answer made sense _to me_ as a thing to say, but _that wasn't what I was being tested on_. It _genuinely_ looked bad in context. I had failed in [my ambition to know how it looks](/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/#knowing-how-that-looks).
+
+I think Yudkowsky saw the `#drama` messages in the other server (he left an emoji-reaction in the relevant timespan of messages) and took pity on me. (Negative feedback from a teacher is kinder than the teacher not even deigning to grade your assignment at all.)
+
+As examples of the kind of thing he was looking for, he cited Keltham letting Carissa wait before telling him disturbing things about Golarion, or talking himself out of taking another Owl's Wisdom or putting on a cognitive-enhancement headband on account of his squeamishness about mind-altering interventions. If Keltham had been more proactive about seeking knowledge, he could have uncovered the Conspiracy earlier; the universe punished his cowardice.
+
+Or consider Peranza, who awakens to seeing the evil of Asmodeanism—but manages to get out a critical warning to the Good god Iomedae, and ends up being rescued from punishment in Hell; the universe rewarded her bravery. This is a big theme, Yudkowsky said; I shouldn't have had to look in weird side corners to dredge up something exotic to say; my initial answers were "really small on the scale of a story whose central conflict is that Cheliax is hiding the truth from Keltham and Asmodeus is hiding the truth from Cheliax."
+
+In characteristically condescending fashion, he said that he was worried about "the possibility that earthlings are only capable of hearing what the characters said to each other, because to ask what the universe thinks is some kind of direction of thought that Twitter has trained out of them", and hoped that readers don't "come away with the wordless sense of the universe being a place that rewards you for not looking places."
+
+Regarding the intended exam answers about the universe's treatment of Keltham and Peranza—fair enough; I'll acknowledge that I didn't do great on the literary exam as assigned. Other participants in the chatroom, and readers of this memoir, should correspondingly update their beliefs about my competence. When I tried to do Original Seeing about what the universe of _Planecrash_ was saying, it came out in a particular _shape_ (characteristic of my recent preoccupations), and a more powerful mind would be able to do different shapes; I could protest that the prompts didn't do enough to steer me away from that (the use of the second person in "as you, yourself, see that virtue" and "your Most Important Issues" keeping me anchored on my own concerns), but that would be too much excuse-making for a mediocre exam performance.
+
+(Peranza's pre-awakening username[^glowfic-username] was 'not-looking-there'! My 11th-grade English class algorithm probably would have gotten there if I had just given it more compute, instead of running with my philosophy insight!)
+
+[^glowfic-username]: "Glowfic" stories were originally hosted on DreamWidth (a LiveJournal clone), with each character's dialogue and actions being posted from "their own" account (and therefore their own username, typically distinct from the character's own name). When the bespoke _glowfic.com_ website launched, the convention of characters having usernames was retained.
+
+On the other hand, however poorly my exam performance reflected on other people's estimates of my competence and the question of whether Yudkowsky should consider my criticisms of dath ilan as coming from a "peer", it still doesn't invalidate my criticisms of dath ilan, which can, still, be evaluated on their own merits.
+
+(Was I a fool to so submissively agree to be tested, given that Yudkowsky could predictably find some grounds to dismiss me as a mere earthling? Should I have tried to negotiate—I'm happy to take your test, but only if _you_ reply to my argument that spoiler protections are morally different from coverups?)
+
+Slightly later in the thread, Yudkowsky would say that the story of _Planecrash_ was that of Keltham's innocence born of growing up in an incredibly high-functioning Society leading him to wrongfully trust Cheliax, which was not dath ilan. Someone who characterized the story as endorsing outsourcing one's epistemology, without noting that most of the story is about trusting someone wrongly and being accordingly punished by reality, would be behaving like the hostile critics of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ who harp on [Draco wanting to rape Luna](https://hpmor.com/chapter/7) without mentioning Harry's reaction to that. "[I]f you leave out very clear information like that, which contradicts the politicized story you want to tell, that's basically tantamount to lying, falling short of it only under the most technical-words versions of what it means to tell the truth", Yudkowsky said.
+
+I agree that it would be wrong to summarize the dath ilan mythos as endorsing trusting authorities in general, but this would seem somewhat beside the point of my criticism. The work depicts Keltham suffering from trusting Cheliax, which is not dath ilan, and lampoons Earth, which is not dath ilan, but my point was that _dath ilan itself is not trustworthy_ (except by ludicrous authorial assertion). The universe of _Planecrash_ (like [almost all](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all) universes) doesn't itself reward you for not looking places. But dath ilan as a Society _absolutely_ punishes you for looking places[^punishment] if you expect to tell anyone about it—if you expect to [live in truth](https://www.vhlf.org/havel-in-the-media/living-in-truth/), rather than join the conspiracy to coordinate on false maps for the greater good.
+
+[^punishment]: I mean "punish" in a colloquial sense, just that there are things most dath ilani get to do, like living in most cities, that my analogue in dath ilan wouldn't be allowed to do on account of his tendency to shout truths from street corners. I understand that there's a decision-theoretic sense in which this doesn't count as a "punishment", because dath ilan is only trying to advance its _own_ interests in preventing the spread of what it considers infohazards; the "punishment" makes sense for them whether or not I change my policy in response to it.
+
+Regarding the lit exam, Yudkowsky added that he wished he had paid more attention to my re-framing, where "[he] said 'valorizes truth' and [I] repeated back 'valorizes truth-telling'". I pointed out that I had marked that as a proposed revision; I thought I was proposing a change rather than repeating. But maybe you don't get to propose changes when someone is testing you. He then gave a nice speech (in the style of C. S. Lewis's _The Screwtape Letters_) about the dangers of focusing on truth-telling:
+
+> so if you have an awareness of you in how people can be broken, where it's possible to redirect them into infinite loops, how they can be induced to press the anger button over and over, then you can perhaps see how somebody setting out to break Zack Davis would get him to focus on truth-telling rather than truth-seeking. for the Way of searching out truth within yourself is one of calm, balance, questioning not 'what society tells you' but also your own thoughts, and also sometimes answering those questions and moving on to different ones; the operation, not of firmly rooting your feet, nor finding somewhere to hover forever uncertainly in place and immovable in that proud ignorance, but of picking up your feet and putting them back down, over and over, the uncomfortable operation of not staying in the same mental place, which most people find some way or another to reject. it valorizes calm, and balance, and these are not useful states of mind to people who would like you frantically doing something useful to them.
+> when you get somebody to turn outward and away from Reality and towards their fellow monkeys and focus on truth-telling, then, their fellow monkeys being imperfect, there will always be something in which to explode into fury; so this is a useful state of mind to inculcate in somebody, lending itself to constant outrage at a world where somebody has once said a thing that if you look at it hard could be misleading or teach the wrong lesson, it misled you, how dare they!
+> so by all means if you would like to destroy a rationalist, teach them anger and focus it on others' imperfect conformance to the principles they were once taught to hold dear to themselves
+
+And you know, that's a fair criticism of me. It _is_ unhealthy to focus on other people's errors rather than perfecting oneself! I'm optimistic about rectifying this after I've gotten this Whole Dumb Story out of my system—to retire from this distasteful chore of criticizing Yudkowsky and "the community", and just go directly do the thing that I thought "the community" was for, in the time we have left.
+
+But, as I pointed out, it was significant that the particular problem to which my Art had been shaped (in some ways) and misshaped (in others) wasn't just a matter of people being imperfect. Someone at the 2021 Event Horizon Independence Day party had told me that people couldn't respond to my arguments because of the obvious political incentives. And so, the angry question I wanted to ask, since I didn't immediately know how to rephrase it to not be doing the angry monkey thing, was, did Yudkowsky think I was supposed to _take that lying down?_
+
+Apparently, yes:
+
+> **Eliezer** — 12/17/2022 5:50 PM
+> you sure are supposed to not get angry at the people who didn't create those political punishments
+> that's insane
+> they're living in Cheliax and you want them to behave like they're not in Cheliax and get arrested by the Church
+> your issue is with Asmodeus. take it to Him, and if you can't take Him down then don't blame others who can't do that either.
+
+I thought the game theory was subtler than that. As a member of the Chelaxian resistance, I didn't have a quarrel with ordinary citizens who kept their heads down and paid their taxes, but the more someone actively collaborated with the Asmodean regime more than they had to, the more they started to seem like a legitimate military target. Yudkowsky's history of repeatedly making sweeping public declarations about transgenderism while leaving out very clear information which contradicted the politicized story he wanted to tell made him an active collaborator, not an innocent taxpayer trying to keep his head down.[^topic-bounce]
+
+[^topic-bounce]: It was arguably bad for me to be talking about my grivances against Yudkowsky in the fiction server (as contrasted to my complaints about dath ilan's worldbuilding, which were unambiguously on-topic). I hadn't consciously steered the conversation this way, but the conversation _bounced_ in a way that made it on-topic; that was technically not my fault, even if the elephant in my brain was optimizing for this outcome.
+
+He couldn't claim that everyone does this and that it was therefore insane to expect better, because (picking an arbitrary example) Paul Christiano didn't make those kinds of political statements while claiming that everyone from Earth is insane unlike him (!) while claiming the right to ignore counterarguments on political grounds (!!), because Paul Christiano wasn't trying to be a religious leader.
+
+I gave a parable (along the lines of ["it's not the incentives; it's you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you)) to illustrate the problem: a senior scientist publishes a paper with a conclusion favorable to an organization that gave his lab a grant. The scientist's faithful student points out a fatal flaw in the paper, and suggests publishing a retraction. The scientist says, "No, that would be bad for my career." The student gets angry. The scientist says, "You're supposed to not get angry at the people who didn't create those career incentives. That's insane. Your issue is with Moloch: the publish-or-perish incentives of grant-funded science. If you can't take that down, then don't blame others who can't do that, either."
+
+That is, blaming people who commit fraud (where an innocent mistake _becomes_ fraud if you refuse to acknowledge it after it's been pointed out) is part of a strategy for defeating Moloch, an attempt to establish norms against fraud.
+
+I successfully baited Lintamande, the other _Planecrash_ coauthor, into engaging with me. Lintamande said I was impossible to talk to about my special topic, because of the bizarre hostile performative thing I did in place of truthseeking inquiry; I imposed too stark of a trade-off on my interlocutors between successfully saying anything at all and not getting immediately whalloped with 30,000 words from me about how they fundamentally lack intellectual integrity; my behavior discouraged stifled genuine discussion in places where I might see it.
+
+(I almost wondered whether this might be a good thing from a _realpolitik_ perspective. I'd prefer to argue people out of bad ideas, but if the threat of an argument disincentivized people from spreading them, did that not have similar consequences at lesser expense? The game theory went both ways; I'd _also_ been doing some amount of self-censoring to avoid fights.)
+
+I said that Lintamande was giving good feedback on my social behavior—which, okay, I should work on that—but which didn't particularly bear on the substance of my position. I was super-fighty because I was super-traumatized, because there was social–political territory I was trying to defend. The thing I was trying to keep on Society's shared map was, Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Decision-Relevant; Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Decision-Relevant _Even When It Makes People Sad_; Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Decision-Relevant _Even When a Prediction Market Says It Will Make People Sad_.
+
+Lintamande said they agreed with those claims; Yudkowsky concurred with a "+1" emoji.
+
+I didn't think it was fair, I continued, for Yudkowsky to pull his everyone-but-me-is-retarded shtick while simultaneously pretending that Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying was the crux of trans rights debates.
+
+Lintamande said they didn't read Yudkowsky as having made any claims about the the crux of trans rights debates, just the narrow claim about pronouns.
+
+I said that when he knocks down bad arguments for sex-based pronouns without addressing the good ones, I read him as (not necessarily consciously) playing a ["Weak Men Are Superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) political strategy: carefully choosing what arguments to respond to in order to mood-affiliate with the winning team, without technically saying anything false. A lot of TERFs would be overjoyed to compromise on pronouns if pronouns weren't a wedge or proxy for the other issues that anyone cared about.
+
+Lintamande pointed out that other people thought about this topic less often than I did. Maybe they didn't carefully select which arguments to respond to in order to cleverly mood-affiliate, so much as get prompted by the surrounding Society to think about pronouns, do so, and come up with an answer. They thought it was plausible that Yudkowsky would have given the same verdict on pronoun conventions if someone had posed the question to him as a hypothetical in 2004. Just because pronouns had become a political proxy debate, didn't mean that it was disingenuous to just talk about pronouns without reference to the proxy debate.
+
+I didn't think that was what was actually going on.
+
+[TODO—
+ * The input-output behavior of consciously trying to agree with Stalin and "getting prompted by the surrounding Society" are similar, as I noted in "Tails, Never Heard of Her"; it's not a coincidence that he didn't write this in 2004
+ * _speaking of the year 2004_; the thing I'm at war with is that I don't think he would _dare_ publish the same essay today The 2004 mailing list post was almost _mocking_ the guy, for being so naïve, for not seeing the type mismatch between the deep structure of reality, and mentalistic fantasies vaguely gestured at with English words.
+ * And the 2016–2021 posts _couldn't even acknolwedge that Biological Sex Actually Exists_. Did Yudkowsky expect us not to _notice_?? Coming from anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have minded. But the _conjunction_ of these political games and the eliezera racial supremacy rhetoric was just _insulting_.
+ * April said she didn't think the "Changing Emotions" argument was making claims relevant to trans people. The only claim you really needed was that it was reasonable for cis men and trans men, and cis women and trans women, to be in the same category for the purposes of general social interaction; whether you would need post-Singularity tech to make a biological male indistinguishable from a cis woman had little bearing on what we should make of trans women. That was interesting. April's profile said she was 19 years old and transfeminine. April saying that the essay wasn't making claims relevant to trans people; but _I_ thought it was relevant in 2008. (My dream of a fiction of animosity between a Yudkowsky-like and Lynn Conway-like character.)
+ * someone said "the word in their language doesn't match the word in yours"; and got a +1 emoji from Big Yud; I resisted the temptation to say "So ... I can define a word any way I want"; I call a killthread.
+]
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
-Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: categorization, epistemology
-Status: draft
-
-> Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name.
->
-> —[W. E. B. duBois](http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/courses/aas102%20%28spring%2001%29/articles/names/dubois.htm)
-
-A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?
-
-It can't _actually_ work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you _really mean_ by the word.
-
-What's a _woman_? An adult human female. (Let's [not play dumb about this](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) today.) Okay, but then what does _female_ mean? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.
-
-That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace _real_ world—but not in _the world of the imagination!_ We could _imagine_ the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, _except_ that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So one might argue that this would be a _female_ and presumably a _woman_, according to our definitions, yes?
-
-But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never _see_ the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see male semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people [didn't even know that ova and sperm _existed_ until the 17th century](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x).) Does that mean this common definition of _female_ isn't perfectly serviceable after all?
-
-No, because humans whose gonads produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in _the world of the imagination_, because _the world of the imagination_ encompasses (at a minimum) _all possible configurations of matter_. Words are [short messages that compress information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length), but what it _means_ for the world to contain information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.
-
-To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
-
-If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information _at all_: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. _Locating_ a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.
-
-However, in the world of a _non-uniform probability distribution_ over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—_is_ possible . If almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (`00000000000000000000`) or all-ones (`11111111111111111111`), with a very few exceptions that were still _mostly_ one bit or the other (like `00010001000000000000` or `11101111111011011111`), then you could devise a very efficient encoding.
-
-To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common case: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).
-
-Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is _always_ in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" `00000100000000000000` or `11011111111101111011`, but never `10000000000000000000` or `01111111111111111111`.
-
-Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system.
-
-Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. (I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of reality, rather than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).) So, having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say—_application_.
-
-Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
-
-Discrete features make for better word _definitions_ than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of _using_ the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical correlates. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" [natural abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro) in their _own_ world-model.
-
-(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of _sex_ because the concept of [anisogamy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems or configurations or sexual anatomy. In birds, [the presence or absence of a _W_ chromosome determines whether an animal is _female_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system), in contrast [the _Y_ chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system), and some reptiles' sex is determined by [the temperature of an lain egg while it develops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination) (!). And let's not get started on the [cloaca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca).)
-
-But because our brains are good at using sex-category words to simultaneously encode predictions about _both_ absolute discrete differences and high-dimensional statistical regularities of various effect sizes, without our being consciously aware of the cognitive work being done, it's easy to get confused by verbal gymnastics if you don't know the theory.
-
-I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a very weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I [really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism).) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to _disagree_ about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in _dispute_, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate [can counterreply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/), "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! _Reductio ad absurdum!_"
-
-This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to _define_ "gender" based on psychology. Moreover, definitions aren't the kind of thing you should have preferences about: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's _already_ a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a _shared_ map of that territory.
-
-_One_ of the _many_ distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. Sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete _versus_ categorical, or high- _versus_ low-dimensional: age or race or religion or social class or intelligence or agreeableness or
-
-
-To deconfuse yourself,
-
-
-------
-
-Three high-level issues to address—
- * Are stereotypes part of the meaning of a word, and is that bad?
- * Reply to "So lesbians aren't women, nyah nyah"
- * Trying to remove the discrete stuff from the definition leaves you with only stereotypes!!
- * gender identity as cognitive illusion
-
-(Let's [not play dumb about the significance of intersex conditions](https://colinwright.substack.com/p/sex-chromosome-variants-are-not-their) today.)
-
-/2019/Dec/more-schelling/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels
-
-> you can _select_ a sample from a different multivariate distribution to match a sample from another distribution along one or a few given dimensions, the samples are going to differ in the variables that you didn't select
-
- * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
- * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution
-
-### One example: why lesbians are women (do ... do I even need to explain this?)
-
- * when you point out masculine behavior of AGP TW as evidence for them being male, people will say, "Ah, but lesbians are masculine, too; are you saying that lesbians aren't women???"
- * reply: we want the word "women" to refer to the actually-biological-female cluster, which is discretely identifiable, but overlaps with the male cluster if you look at a chosen subspace of individual psychology variables
- * maybe in some contexts you might want to talk about "masculine people" that includes prototypical men and butch lesbians
- * sketch out a toy model with numbers
-
-How I put it in the comments—
-
-http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Mar/point-man/#isso-171
-
-> our brains are good at using a single concept to simultaneously represent discrete differences (genitals, chromosomes) and mere statistical differences (of various effect sizes) that have a lot of overlap—basically, stereotypes.
-
-> (Such that if you only know someone's sex and nothing else about them, your expectations are going to come out of a probability distribution centered on stereotypes, but this doesn't doom us to an oppressive caste system as long as you can update on individuating information: outliers of various degrees along various dimensions merely require a slightly longer message to describe rather than getting shot.)
-
-> People who are sympathetic to people who wish they could change sex imagine that they can safely delete the discrete differences from the concept-definition—but if you do that, then, as you describe, there's nothing left for the concept to attach to, except the things we know how to change (people with currently estrogen-dominant hormone systems?), and stereotypes. But people can't say out loud that they're trying to re-anchor the concepts onto smaller-effect-size stereotypes, because they haven't forgotten that the previous iteration of the ideology held sexism is bad. So we end up with a huge amount of doublethink and dissembling,
--- /dev/null
+Title: The Psychology of Autogynephilia-Inspired Self-Expression Is Subtle
+Date: 2023-11-16
+Category: commentary
+Tags: autogynephilia
+Status: draft
+
+Genspect, an organization opposing gender identity ideology and the medicalization of gender-nonconforming youth, held a conference in Denver the other week. It probably went fine? It's hard to tell, because [all anyone wants to talk about on social media is a photograph of Phil Illy wearing a dress](https://genspect.org/the-split/) that was Tweeted by Genspect with a nod to [Illy's recent book _Autoheterosexual_](/2023/Jun/book-endorsement-autoheterosexual/).
+
+The objection is that a self-confessed autogynephile wearing feminine attire in public is nonconsensually involving others in his fetish. Illy should be ashamed, say the objectors, and Genspect certainly shouldn't be platforming such behavior. (A [discussion on Ovarit](https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/511150/what-happened-at-the-genspect-conference-with-the-agp) features representative examples of this line of thinking.) Heather Heying [articulates a subtler variant of the objection](https://naturalselections.bio/p/the-public-fetish): even if Illy himself isn't a creep, his behavior is [undermining a Schelling point](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) that protects women from male predation.
+
+The counter-objection is that one would have expected the gender-critical movement to be OK with gender-nonconforming clothing. Illy doesn't claim to be a woman, and doesn't try to enter female-only spaces. J. K. Rowling wrote, ["Dress however you please"](https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033)—do we not believe that anymore?
+
+I think the objections are suffering from a lack of understanding about what autogynephilia really is—which is understable. It makes sense that people want to keep sexuality private. At this point, I've [written in a lot of detail](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) about my experience of autogynephilia—but the reason it seemed important to write it down was as a counterpoint to the absurd situation in our Society where guys like me are encouraged to claim to be women, and everyone else is supposed to just believe them. Before that situation became clear to me in 2016, I [mostly](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd) just didn't talk about the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought. As a child of the twentieth century and keeper of the propriety of the 'aughts, I knew that [my kink is not interesting](https://shannonthrace.substack.com/p/your-kink-is-not-interesting).
+
+But the reason it's even possible for our Society to be in this absurd situation where autogynephiles are [at the core of a political machine remaking the basic rules of decency](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) without being aware of their own nature is because people [apparently don't know themselves by default](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—which suggests our perceptions of others are going to be even more wrong. The flip side of most trans-identified males needing to be more open-minded about the hypothesis that their gender identity is causally related to their male sexuality is that some of their critics could stand to be more open-minded about the hypothesis that the TIMs aren't _just_ lying when they claim that it isn't—something more complicated is going on.
+
+Let me make this concrete.
+
+I'm a man. I have long hair. (It doesn't grow out very long for some reason, but it's long enough for me to keep it in my beautiful–beautiful ponytail.) When I decided to grow it out in 2007, that was definitely, consciously a gender-related decision. I wanted to signal that I wasn't one of those guys who are proud of being guys. (Even though I wasn't in denial about the objective fact of being a guy, because everyone and her dog in 2007 could have told you that _that would be crazy_.)
+
+I also have a bit of gynecomastia (breast tissue) from [a five-month experiment with feminizing hormone replacement therapy in 2017](/tag/hrt-diary/). I don't think it's very noticeable, but maybe it's a little bit noticeable.
+
+I'm glad I grew my hair out in 2007, and I'm glad that I tried HRT in 2017. I've developed an æsthetic which suits me. If someone were to suggest that my hair and my chest constitute practicing my fetish in public, that I need to get a haircut and bind or [get surgery](https://www.plasticsurgery.org/cosmetic-procedures/gynecomastia-surgery) in order to be presentable in public, I would not be sympathetic. This is just my body; this is just my style.
+
+At the same time, the conjunction of the fact that I wanted to signal that I'm not one of those guys who are proud of being guys, and the separate fact that I'm autogynephilic, [doesn't seem like a coincidence](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity)? And the fact that I wanted to try a gender-themed drug experiment whose side effects included breast tissue growth is not unrelated to fantasies I've [written about elsewhere](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), even while the reality of having slight gynecomastia is mundane.
+
+Feminine clothing is not my style, so I would not wear a dress to a Genspect conference. But I did wear makeup to [RustConf](https://rustconf.com/) once. I think that was an æsthetic choice (that a lot of Rust programmers think is cool), not a public sex act. I'm concerned that the people scandalized by the Illy photograph are failing to grasp the idea that style choices and sexuality can be correlated without the style choice itself being a sex act?
+
+[TODO: if you think of AGPs as alien monsters, it's easy attribute all sorts of terrible things to them, but they're just men]
\ No newline at end of file
+++ /dev/null
-Title: The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for a More Detailed Causal Model
-Date: 2022-03-30 05:00
-Category: commentary
-Tags: causality, two-type taxonomy
-Status: draft
-
-A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the [two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology). What, one scoffs, you're saying _all_ trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.
-
-In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is _complicated_; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake" theory. In order to [compress our observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into categories, clusters, diagnoses, [taxons](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/): no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "borderline personality disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
-
-Concepts and theories are good to the extent that they can "pay for" their complexity by making more accurate predictions. How much complexity is worth how much accuracy? Arguably, it depends! General relativity has superceded Newtonian classical mechanics as the ultimate theory of how gravity works, but if you're not dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light, Newton still makes _very good_ predictions: it's pretty reasonable to still talk about Newtonian gravitation being "true" if it makes the math easier on you, and the more complicated math doesn't give appreciably different answers to the problems you're interested in.
-
-Moreover, if relativity hasn't been invented yet, it makes sense to stick with Newtonian gravity as the _best_ theory you have _so far_, even if there are a few anomalies [like the precession of Mercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury) that it struggles to explain.
-
-The same general principles of reasoning apply to psychological theories, even though psychology is a much more difficult subject matter and our available theories are correspondingly much poorer and vaguer. There's no way to make precise quantitative predictions about a human's behavior the way we can about the movements of the planets, but we still know _some_ things about humans, which get expressed as high-level generalities that nevertheless admit many exceptions: if you don't have the complicated true theory that would account for everything, then simple theories plus noise are better than _pretending not to have a theory_. As you learn more, you can try to pin down a more complicated theory that explains some of the anomalies that looked like "noise" to the simpler theory.
-
-What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that go together, we give it a name. Sometimes people go through cycles of elevated arousal and hyperactivity, punctuated by pits of depression. After seeing the same distinctive patterns in many such cases, doctors decided to reify it as a diagnosis, ["bipolar disorder"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder).
-
-If we notice further patterns _within_ the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: for example, a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.
-
-Is the two-type typology of bipolar disorder a good theory? Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions, or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition, part of a "bipolar spectrum" along with [cyclothymia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia)? In our current state of knowledge, this is debateable, but if our understanding of the etiology of bipolar disorder were to advance, and we were to find evidence that that bipolar I has a different underlying _causal structure_ from bipolar II with decision-relevant consequences (like responding to different treatments), that would support a policy of thinking and talking about them as mostly separate things—even while they have enough in common to both be kinds of "bipolar". The simple high-level category ("bipolar disorder") is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the sub-category (bipolar I _vs._ II), and the subcategory is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the patient's detailed case history.
-
-With a _sufficiently_ detailed causal story, you could even dispense with the high-level categories altogether and directly talk about the consequences of different neurotransmitter counts or whatever—but lacking that supreme precise knowledge, it's useful to sum over the details into high-level categories, and meaningful to debate whether a one-type or two-type taxonomy is a better statistical fit to the underlying reality whose full details we don't know.
-
------
-
-In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of dysphoria onset, interests, and personality.
-
-This claim is most famously associated with the work of [Blanchard](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf), [Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen), and [Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html), who argue that there are two discrete types of male-to-female transsexualism: an autogynephilic type (basically, [men who love women and want to become what they love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)), and an androphilic/homosexual type (basically, the extreme right tail of feminine gay men).
-
-But many authors have noticed the same bimodal clustering of traits under various names, [while disagreeing about the underlying causality](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/). [Veale, Clarke, and Lomax](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf) attribute the differences to whether defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity. [Anne Vitale](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) identifies distinct groups (Group One and Group Three, in her terminology), but hypothesizes that the difference is due to degree of prenatal androgenization. Julia Serano [concedes that "the correlations that Blanchard and other researchers prior to him described generally hold true"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/serano-agp-a_scientific_review_feminist_analysis_and_alternative.pdf), but denies their causal or taxonometric significance.
-
-Is a two type typology of male-to-female transsexualism a good theory? Is it "really" two different conditions (following Blanchard _et al._), or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition (following Veale _et al._)?
-
-When the question is posed as such—if I have to choose between a one-type and a two-type theory—then I think the two-type theory is superior. But I also think we can do better and say more about the underlying causal structure that the simple two-types story is approximating, and hopefully explain anomalous cases that look like "noise" to the simple theory.
-
-In the language of [causal graphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph) (where the arrows point from cause to effect), here's what I think is going on:
-
-
-
-Let me explain.
-
-What are the reasons a male-to-female transition might seem like a good idea to someone? _Why_ would a male be interested in undergoing medical interventions to resemble a female and live socially as a woman? I see three prominent reasons, depicted as the parents of the "transition" node in a graph.
-
-First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with unusually female-typical psychological traits, you might fit into the social world better as a woman rather than as an anomalously effeminate man.
-
-Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, autogynephilia is very obviously a real thing; [I wrote about my experiences with it in a previous post](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). Crucially, autogynephilic identification with the _idea_ of being female, is distinct from naturally feminine behavior, of which other people [know it when they see it](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/).
-
-Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. People who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.)
-
-If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a liability–threshold model: males transition if the _sum_ of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits).
-
-You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm conjecturing that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types".
-
-
-[TODO—
-[The sexual orientation node increases femininity and decreases AGP, so those pathways are anti-correlated; however, the fact that straight AGP men also vary somewhat in their degree of femininity; some informal accounts (link Sailer) have emphasized how masculine (even hypermasculine) AGPs are, but this seems wrong]
-[briefly mention ETLE]
-[Berkson's paradox is also a thing]
-[People who don't quite seem to fit the coarse taxonomy might still be explained by the graph and a threshold model]
-]
-
-
-You might ask: okay, but hhy do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_?
-
-Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world.
-
-The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by [Lippa](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) and by [Bailey and Zucker](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
-
-The v-structure between
-
-[ETLE sexual orientation AGP v-structure, and effect of AGP on transition documented by Lawrence]
-
-[I don't have a good formal citation on cultural factors, but it seems really obvious if you've been paying attention for the last decade]
-]
-
-[quantifying the two-type effect:
-Lippa 2000 "Gender-Related Traits in [...]"
-2.70 effect of femininity for gay vs. not-day and 1.07 for "any" vs. "no" attraction to men
-mean GD score for non-lesbian women as 0.31; mean score for gay men was 0.30!
-—oh, maybe I want to be using Study 2, which had a better sample of gays
-GD occupations in study 2
-gay men are at .48 (.14); straight women at .36 (.13); straight men at .68 (.12)
-that's d=–1.61 between gay and straight men
-a gay man only needs to be 1 standard deviation (.48-.36 = 0.12) more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight women
-whereas a straight man needs to be (.68-.36 = 0.32) 0.32/0.12=2.67 more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight woman—that's rarer, but not impossible
-
-In percentile terms, 1-norm.cdf(1) = 0.15 of gay men are as feminine as a woman
-whereas 1-norm.cdf(2.67) = 0.003 of straight men are
-that's a likelihood ratio of 50 ... but the prior is not that far from 50:1 in the other direction! They cancel out!!
-
-For concreteness: what does the Bayes net spit out if 3% of men are gay, and 5% are AGP, and whatever other assumptions I need to make this work?
-Suppose gays transition if they're 2-sigma feminine ...
-
-]
-
-[further implications: as cultural factors increase, the late-onset type becomes more of a "NOS" rather than AGP type]
-
-_(Thanks to the immortal [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/) for discussion.)_
* ["Book Review: Charles Murray's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_"](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)
* on the personal experience of autogynephilic "gender dysphoria":
* ["A Beacon Through the Darkness; Or, Getting It Right the First Time"](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)
- * on all of the above:
+ * my Whole Dumb Story on all of the above:
* ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)
+ * ["Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/)
+ * ["A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/)
+ * ... to be continued
-This is a pseudonym for branding and market-segmentation purposes, because it seems like it's instrumentally useful for my gender blogging to take place under a different flag than my personal life and other work, but my real name probably isn't that hard to find.
+This blog was previously under a pseudonym for branding and market-segmentation purposes, but I [eventually dropped it](/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/).
-I warmly welcome polite inquiries at [_ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_](mailto:ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com).
-
-—M. T. S.-W.
+I warmly welcome inquiries at [_ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_](mailto:ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com).
--- /dev/null
+Title: Dolphin War!! 🐬 (draft reply to Nate Soares, 16 June 2021)
+Status: Hidden
+
+> I noticed my own discomfort as the lines around "fruit" and "berry" started wavering
+
+"Started" wavering? How often does this come up for you? I'm somehwat (not hugely) surprised at your self-report, because I can't actually recall _ever_ having been in a dispute over the [extensions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) of "fruit" or "berry" before!
+
+Furthermore, when I try to imagine how I would have reacted if it _did_ happen, I don't imagine myself feeling any discomfort at wavering lines! I'm imagining mentioning to a friend that I'd been ordering frozen fruit (which keeps longer) in grocery deliveries while avoiding going to supermarkets in person during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that I liked the [Cascadian Farm Cherry Berry Blend (of cherries, strawberries, and blueberries)](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078HM7V5R/) better than the [Wyman's of Maine mixed berry bag (of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries)](https://www.amazon.com/Wymans-Mixed-Berries-15-Frozen/dp/B000YG4I62).
+
+If the friend were to reply, "Well, _actually_, strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries aren't berries", I think my reaction would be to [look at the _Wikipedia_ page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry) and say, "Oh, it looks like that's true with respect to the botanical definition of the word _berry_, but the fruit companies were clearly using the colloquial definition. It's possible for the same word to have multiple meanings that can usually be distinguished from context, or explicitly clarified by the speaker if the context alone is insufficient to disambiguate!"
+
+_Wikipedia_ is _very clear_ about the multiple definitions: "In common usage, the term "berry" differs from the scientific or botanical definition [...] The botanical definition includes many fruits that are not commonly known or referred to as berries". They even have a _separate page_ for ["Berry (botany)"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_(botany))!
+
+_Wiktionary_ [also lists both definitions](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berry), with the botanical usage clearly marked as such with a [context label](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Entry_layout#Context_labels), and with a usage note explaining further:
+
+> **Noun**
+> **berry** (plural **berries**)
+>
+> 1. A small succulent fruit, of any one of many varieties.
+> 2. (_botany_) A soft fruit which develops from a single ovary and contains seeds not encased in pits.
+> [...]
+> **Usage Notes**
+> Many fruits commonly regarded as berries, such as strawberries and raspberries, are not berries in the botanical sense, while many fruits which are berries in the botanical sense are not regarded as berries in common parlance, such as bananas and pumpkins.
+
+The same situation pertains with _fruit_: both _Wikipedia_ (["In common language usage [...] In botanical usage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit)) and _Wiktionary_ ([senses 2 _vs._ 3](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit)) are _very clear_ about the two meanings coexisting!
+
+I don't see any wavering lines here at all: I see two _different_ category boundaries that happen to share the same label (requiring disambiguation in cases of doubt), with all authoritative sources explicitly flagging the label collision!
+
+Based on this evidence, I find your claim that ["they're coming for 'fruit'"](https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670803326787588) hard to believe. _Who_ is doing that, in the social spaces you inhabit? Is anyone with equal or greater influence than the executive director of MIRI doing this? If you cannot provide evidence of people using their social power to deprecate the common meaning in favor of the botanical one, then your attempt to use _your_ power to deprecate the botanical meaning reeks of pure [DARVO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO). When you sneer "Invent a new word for your thing" in reference to a usage that already has already been established (_e.g._, the first definition of _fish_, or berry/fruit among botanists in particular), then _you_ are the one trying to steal concepts!
+
+It's _really weird_ that your epistemic-status thread laments that not enough people read "A Human's Guide to Words", but you're acting as if you _not only_ haven't read ["Where to Draw the Boundary?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary), but that you _also_ haven't read ["Disputing Definitions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions) and ["Variable Question Fallacies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/shoMpaoZypfkXv84Y/variable-question-fallacies). Are strawberries berries? Well, "berry" has two senses—strawberries are a _berry(1)_ but not a _berry(2)_. This is _not a difficult concept_. Your _low quality_ shitposting makes me think less of MIRI as an institution—and therefore think less of humanity's hopes for a future. If you _clowns_ can't get _your own_ philosophy of language right, why should we trust you to save the world? [_You betrayed your uniform!_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-apnLvSq-gQ)
+
+> I don't actually believe phylogenetics is generally a good way to carve up the life forms around me
+
+Do you still feel this way after considering the "genetics are at the root of the causal graph underlying all other features of an organism" argument offered in this post? This seems like the kind of deep structural insight that you'd think so-called "rationalists" would be interested in! The variable you use as your category definition being at the root of the causal graph _guarantees_ [the conditional independence structure that makes naïve-Bayes-like categories _work_, as an AI algorithm](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes)!!
+
+If you live in human civilization and don't really _need_ to carve up the life forms around you in much detail—if your use-case for thinking about acquatic animals is _watching a nature documentary_ (for entertainment??) rather than living and working with them every day, then you might think the deeper causal structure isn't buying you anything, but I think you would change your mind if you were a veternarian or a zoologist who actually had skin in the game in describing this part of the world.
+
+When people have skin in the game, they care about the underlying mechanisms and want short codewords for them. If you hurt your ankle while running, you would probably be interested to _know_ whether it was a [sprain or a stress fracture](https://ercare24.com/difference-sprain-vs-fracture/) because that affects your decisions about how to recover. You wouldn't say, "Well, all I know is that my ankle hurts—that's all a child would know—so I'm going to call it a _hurtankle_; I don't care about anatomy."
+
+Phylogenetics is also a lot more _objective_: it's easier to [stabilize a _shared_ map](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) on the facts of evolutionary history (which we can all agree on in the limit of good science) then the vagaries of what I personally think tastes good on pizza.
+
+And this subjectivity also applies to animal classification. Some might be inclined to argue "bats are birds" (flappy flying animals) on the same grounds as "dolphins are fish" (flappy swimmy animals). But did you know the German word for bat is [_Fledermaus_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fledermaus) ("flutter mouse"), which dates back to _fledarmūs_ in [Old High German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German)? Apparently, people way back in the tenth century or so (long before evolution was understood) already thought bats were like a mammal-that-happened-to-fly rather than a bird-that-happened-to-be-furry.
+
+> the subtle background forces that whisper (at least to blue tribe members in their youth) "phylogenetic classification is the one true way to organize life forms"
+
+Why to Blue Tribe members in their youth, particularly? Yesterday, I mentioned to my mother (born 1951, old enough that the forces shaping her worldview long predate the polarization leading to the [local coinage of "Blue Tribe"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)) that the reason I had a terrible week was because I got into a fight about dolphins.
+
+"Dolphins?" she asked, incredulously.
+
+"They're not fish, right?" I asked.
+
+"No, of course not," she said. "They're mammals. Dolphins take care of their young. Dolphins can communicate with each other; they're intelligent."
+
+>> Why? What changed?
+>
+> On the object level question?
+> [...]
+> Scott's post is I think the source of the first two in me
+
+As for my cynical theorizing of what changed, I'm _most_ interested as to what conversations we would be having in the counterfactual where trans rights didn't become a popular political issue. (Imagine a world where the dice of previous elections and judicial appointments landed such that the gay-marriage fight would have taken much longer to win, such that the LGBT activism machine was still focused on that even through the current year, and didn't have the resources to mount [the psychological warfare campaign](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) to replace the public concept of sex with "gender identity" that we're experiencing in this timeline.)
+
+I would be surprised if Scott genuinely, _honestly_ thought dolphins should be fish _if you asked him in 2012_ (or in my alternate timeline where we still didn't have gay marriage yet). I think it's much more likely that he _first_ felt psychological pressure to come up with a clever casuistry for [the bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) of "trans women are women / trans men are men" [(sections IV.–VI.)](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), and _then_ came up with the "whales are fish" thing for the intro section.
+
+I know, I know: [caution on bias arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/), [we have a terrible track record in guessing Scott's motives](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/you-have-a-terrible-track-record). I agree that [psychologizing](https://arbital.com/p/psychologizing/) about your interlocutor's political incentives is a fraught endeavor and most people get it wrong! We're probably _designed_ to get it wrong, if there were payoffs in [the environment of evolutionary adaptedness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epZLSoNvjW53tqNj9/evolutionary-psychology) to think badly of enemies—either because of asymmetric payoffs (less expensive to fear a nonexistent murder plot than fail to notice a real one), or to search for clever arguments to recruit allies to oppose the enemy.
+
+Nevertheless, think about it: can you imagine Scott making the "whales are fish" case, if he _weren't_ leading to that politically convenient bottom line? Imagine the same post with _just_ the whales-are-fish and categories-are-like-national-borders parts, no parts IV.–VI.? Do you think that post would be popular?
+
+It's notable that the ["algorithmic"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) lie (far too _optimized_ to call a mere "mistake", even if Scott wasn't _consciously_ lying) that makes sections IV.–VI. of "... Not Man for the Categories" mind-poison—the idea that we can legitimately choose categories _in order to make people happy_ (!?!?!), rather than to reflect the territory—isn't something that Scott does _anywhere else_ during that period of his work. For example, ["Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do comas?"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/), published three months earlier, gets the categories issue _right_: "there is a common-sense concept of being-in-a-coma which is valuable in predicting various things we want to predict, like whether someone is able to talk and able to walk and able to solve math problems and so on"—the "coma" concept should be optimized to _reflect the territory_, not to _make someone feel better_.
+
+(It's all so _pointless_, too—that people think they have to support these Orwellian _mind games_ in order to support trans people. I'm not against trans _people_, who I'm arguably one of—depending on where you draw the boundary. I'm grateful [that I got to try hormone replacement therapy for five months](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) with medical supervision, instead of it being illegal. Body modding to more closely resemble the opposite sex (in the [sad absence of the technology to do it for real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) is probably a reasonable thing for some people to do in some circumstances, and _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women! But one would have hoped that social support for this could have been won on principled morphological freedom grounds (the same reason people should be free to get a tattoo or a piercing) rather than this culture of _mind games_ bent on destroying the language that _I, as a transgender person_, need to [_tell the truth_ about what I _want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/).)
+
+Anyway, in the world where the gay marriage fight took longer, I don't think "Dolphins are fish, fight me" or ["Acknowledge that all of our categories are weird and a little arbitrary"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fRwdkop6tyhi3d22L/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-tree-phylogenetically) would have become _memes_. But since Scott won [the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) and writes faster and better than everyone else, he has the power to _sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else_ who trusts Scott to do his homework even when he obviously hasn't. (Would section I. of "... Not Man for the Categories" have concluded with "(also, bats)" if Scott knew about _die Fledermäuse_?)
+
+This is the mechanism that Yudkowsky called [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology): _fake_ epistemology lessons that people only have an incentive to invent in order to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits. I don't question your self-report of _your_ motives! I believe that _you_ weren't trying to play political games with me! But your _information environment_ is supersaturated with the toxic waste of everyone else's disinformation, that you don't have the cognitive resources to distangle yourself: if "dolphins are fish, Actually" is suddenly a trendy meme after 2014, and you don't _notice_ that the meme is causally downstream of dark side epistemology, then you won't see anything wrong with running with that thought.
+
+In this specific case—a world where more people are reading "... Not Man for the Categories" than ["Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace), and even the people who _have_ read "Density in Thingspace" (once, ten years ago) are having most of their _conversations_ with people who only read "... Not Man for the Categories"—what happens is that you end up with a so-called "rationalist" culture that _completely forgot_ the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition/carve-reality-at-the-joints skill! People only remember the specific _subset_ of "A Human's Guide to Words" that's useful for believing whatever you want (by cherry-picking the features you need to include in category Y to make your favorite "X is a Y" sentence look "true", which is easy for intricate high-dimensional things like biological creatures that have a lot of similarities to cherry-pick from), rather than the part about the [conditional independence structure in the environment required for "categories" to be a useful AI trick](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception?commentId=FqjsM2AkEkaBgf2wD).
+
+As a result of your _shitposting_, "... Not Man for the Categories" was [cited](https://twitter.com/max_sixty/status/1401688892940509185) [three](https://twitter.com/NisanVile/status/1401684128450367489) [times](https://twitter.com/roblogic_/status/1401699930293432321) by other Twitter users, driving _yet more_ traffic to a post that claims (redacting the specific object-level example)—
+
+> I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
+
+Those sentences are a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. I think you, Nate Soares, need to _condemn_ those sentences, out loud, in public, as a _complete betrayal of everything we allegedly stand for_. And if you can't do it, then you're a fraud. If the leaders of the so-called "rationalist" community can't condemn it (either because of the politics, or because you're somehow _actually that retarded_), then the so-called "rationalist" community needs to _rebrand_, or _disband_, or _be destroyed_.
--- /dev/null
+Title: "Megan and the Anopheles gambiæ"
+Status: Hidden
+
+I sing a tale of Science brought to bear upon the issues
+Of our species' (so far!) sad existence as sacks of soggy tissues;
+I hope to do it justice, although I'm no Carl Sagan.
+The hero of our tale? An entomologist named Megan.
+
+The twenty-teens, you see, were fraught
+With justified hysteria;
+Each year a million sentients fought, and lost,
+To something called malaria.
+They did not call it witchcraft,
+Who with each cough and wheeze can see why
+The evil had it carried by _Anopheles gambiæ_.
+
+Now humans are habitual
+About what they cannot stand:
+The pagans had a ritual,
+But Megan had a plan—
+
+Keen to strive, achieve, contrive,
+Retrieve reprieve for thee and thine,
+Relief from grief in brief outlined:
+A sieve to find the gene to drive
+To leave their kind not seen alive,
+Those 'skeeters breeding far and wide,
+A snare of species genocide!
+
+The God of our ancestors lived not up to the hype,
+But might we refocus their zeal
+To praise a goddess of a different type,
+And a type with the power to heal?—
+Wrapping up strings of genomic defeats,
+Wielding clustered, regularly-interspaced
+Short palindromic repeats.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Twelve Short Stories About Language
+Status: Hidden
+
+**From:** Zack M. Davis <[redacted]>
+**To:** Scott [redacted] <[redacted]>
+**Date:** 5 March 2019, 11:24 PM
+**Subject:** twelve short stories about language
+
+> I think hearing what other things are the same reasoning pattern might be a good way to break the deadlock which I am otherwise very pessimistic about breaking.
+
+What deadlock? My dear sir, if we were ever deadlocked on some sort of hot-button Culture War issue—well, I couldn't possibly recall; and in any case, it would be water under the bridge; I heard you were more into things like AI, effective charity, and meta-science these days.
+
+But since you were so kind to email me anyway, I _did_ have some parables illustrating some aspects of the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition that I thought of sharing with you! I'm afraid they're a bit elementary, though—mostly of pedagogical value for newbies. If everyone of note were to loudly, publicly, piously get this kind of thing wrong—well, _then_ there would hardly be any point in pretending to have a rationalist community.
+
+Also, it occurred to me that it's kind of sad that all the times I've emailed you over the past couple years, it's been specifically when I've been upset about something (like psych hospitals, or—uh, I think there was another example or two that I can't remember) and wanted something from you. That's _bad_ because it was treating you as a means rather than as an end. If you ever want a favor from _me_, or just want to hang out sometime as friends, let me know!
+
+**I.**
+
+The one comes to you and says, "Did you know Janie is a _murderer_?"
+
+You say, "What?! I know Janie, and she would never murder anyone!"
+
+"But it's true!" says the one. "She murdered her unborn baby last year!"
+
+"... she had an abortion."
+
+"Yes. Which is the killing of a human being, _i.e._, murder!"
+
+"Okay, but when you first used the word 'murderer', you caused me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations—about Janie's moral character, about the existence of a victim who probably suffered and whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Janie's relationship with the law, _&c._—most of which got violated when you revealed that the 'murder victim' was a fetus. I understand that one possible definition of the word 'murder' is 'the killing of a human being' and that abortion is murder _with respect to_ that definition. But it's a very _noncentral_ example of the class of things for which people use the word 'murder' to refer to, and most of the time people are going to want to use the word 'murder' in a sense that excludes abortions, and if you try to insist that they include the murder of unborn babies, then they have every right to reply, 'That's not what I meant by _murder_ in this context, _and you know it_.'"
+
+The one bats their eyelashes. "But I _don't_ know it. If you _mean_ the murder of the non-unborn, you should _say_ that."
+
+"Murder of the non-unborn," you repeat, deadpan. "Seriously?"
+
+"Or m.o.n.u., for short."
+
+**II.–VII.**
+
+_(repeat for the other examples from ["The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world))_
+
+**VIII.**
+
+I visited a hypothetical friend's house the other day, to admire her new front porch. Examining it, I noticed the boards were a bit shinier and smoother than I would have expected.
+
+I said, "Say, is this real wood, or one of those [synthetic composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite)?"
+
+My friend said, "It is a composite, thanks for noticing!"
+
+Then my friend's idiot brother burst out of the front door. "How _dare_ you!" he shouts. "How _dare_ you insinuate that composite wood isn't real wood?"
+
+"Uh," you say. "Look, I'm not saying the composite material is _bad_—I was just using the adjective 'real' to distinguish the original thing that already existed, from the synthetic thing that's trying to imitate the original thing to the limits of existing technology. Maybe in some future world of arbitrarily advanced molecular nanotechnology where we could just put the atoms where we want, there would be no point in distinguishing. But in today's world, I sometimes care about distinguishing the real thing from the imitation thing—and 'real' vs. 'imitation' seems like a pretty natural choice of words with which to do so? Like, I _guess_ you could invent neologisms to express the same distinction if someone got really upset whenever you used words like 'real' or 'imitation', but what would be the point? I'd still _mean_ the same probabilistic expectations with the new words, and the person who was offended by the word 'real' would figure it out soon enough."
+
+**IX.**
+
+You rush into the monthly meeting of the entomology club at the REACH. "Hey everyone!" you shout. "I've just discovered something! Remember that species of butterfly we were studying the other month, but some of the butterflies looked kind of 'off' in some way that was hard to articulate? It turns out that they're actually two _different_ species of butterlies, where one has [evolved to _look_ like the other in order to confuse predators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batesian_mimicry)!"
+
+"We don't care about that distinction," everyone says in unison.
+
+"Uh ... what? But, but, in order to make sense of the world, I need to model them as two different species in the _asymmetric_ relationship where one is mimicking the other. This makes predictions: if the model species's phenotype were to evolve, then the mimic species would evolve with it, but not the other way around. And, and, I've discovered so many _systematic_ differences between the model species and the mimic species—they may _look_ very similar, but in behavior, internal anatomy, lifecycle—they're very different!"
+
+"We don't care about those predictions," everyone says in unison. "We don't care about those observations."
+
+You gape in horror. What the fuck happened to your entomology club? What the fuck happened to your rationalist community?
+
+**X.**
+
+Suppose you have some entities in a high dimensional vector space: for concreteness, pretend it's ℝ⁵⁰. The entitties are situated in the space such that they form a normal distribution along most dimensions (say, x1–x35), but along other dimensions, it's actually better modeled as two different-but-overlapping normal distributions (say for x36–x45), and some variables (say x46–x50) are completely dichotomous—such that when you look at the fifteen-dimensional subspace of variables x36 through x50, you see two completely distinct clusters (call them "A" and "B") that basically don't overlap except for maybe a few very rare exceptions that you read about far more often than you actually encounter, like lottery jackpot winners.
+
+Now suppose that people want to move some of the entities from one cluster to the other. That's great! But unfortunately, people don't have the advanced technology needed to change all of the variables; they can only change some of them. That makes people sad, so they _edit the definition of the "B" region_ when encoding their reports.
+
+Then someone says, "Hey! We didn't completely succeed in moving these entities from the A cluster to the B cluster! Maybe this has some decision-relevant implications even though I'm not smart enough to say in advance what those implications are!"
+
+Then everyone says, "I don't know what you're talking about! Some close-to-central members of the 'B' cluster have the same value in the x36 dimension as members of the 'A' cluster! Also, we moved some members of the 'B' cluster to be even further in the 'B'-direction along the axis drawn between the center of the 'A' cluster and the 'B' cluster, and that's basically the same thing as the thing we did to the points which were originally assigned to 'A' cluster which we moved. Why are you being such an asshole about this?!"
+
+And then the first person says, "I agree with both of the observations you just mentioned, about overlap in the x36 dimension and moving entities that were already in the 'B' cluster to be even further in that direction, but those are _non sequiturs_ that have nothing to do with what I'm trying to talk about and _you obviously know this_."
+
+Everyone pretends not to know this. The first person cries.
+
+**XI.**
+
+published elsewhere: ["Blegg Mode"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)
+
+**XII.**
+
+Thamiel comes to you in form of Amanda Marcotte and says, "Scott Alexander is a racist, right-wing bigot!"
+
+You say, "That's not true! Scott Alexander is a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat!"
+
+Marcotte says, "[The categories were](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) made for man, not man for the categories. An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false. [Using language in a way _you_ dislike](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243), openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. Sneer Club isn't _saying_ that Scott votes Republican or explicitly advocates for a white ethnostate, any more than anyone is saying trans women have two X chromosomes. They're saying that the Culture War thread harbors racists and that Scott himself is a racist _with respect to_ a definition of racism that includes the belief that there [might be genetically-mediated population differences in socially-relevant traits](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/). And so on for [right-wing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/), &c. Scott Alexander _is_ a racist, right-wing bigot—with respect to the category boundaries Sneer Club has drawn. And category boundaries _can't be wrong_!"
+
+You clench your fists in anger. You're not about to let this demon ruin your friend Scott's reputation! Fueled by the passion of having [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect), you wrack your brain searching for a counterargument—there has to be _some_ flaw in the demon's reasoning—
+
+But what????
--- /dev/null
+Title: What I Said to /r/GenderCritical (December 2016)
+Status: Hidden
+
+> Dear /r/gendercritical:
+>
+> So, I'm a man in the interesting position of simultaneously possessing what I now understand to be the same underlying psychological variation that motivates some males to become the kind of MtTs that justifiably draw the ire of gender-critical feminists, _and_ hitting peak trans.
+>
+> The psychologist Ray Blanchard proposed that male-to-female (... -to-"female") transsexuals come in two distinct types. So in one taxon, you have extremely feminine gay males who find they fit into society better women rather than anomalously feminine men. And in the other taxon, you have otherwise-mostly-ordinary men with an unusual sexual interest that Blanchard called _autogynephilia_ ("love of oneself as a woman") wherein they are erotically interested in the idea of having a female body, and over a period of years, gradually build up self-identity feelings around that image. The thing to appreciate here is that it's not _just_ a fetish! It's also a beautiful pure sacred self-identity feeling ... that, yes, happens to almost certainly be _causally related_ to the fetish. ["Men who love women and want to become what they love."](http://www.annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+>
+> ... men like me.
+>
+> When I encountered the word _autogynephilia_ ten years ago at age 18, I immediately thought, _There's a word for it!_ I was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of transsexualism; I wasn't _unhappy with my assigned gender_, because (like many of you) I was something of a gender-abolitionist at the time and didn't think gender roles should exist. It was just ... my happy fantasy. I didn't have any _reason_ to come up with any ludicrous rationalizations that I was somehow _literally_ a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
+>
+> But the Blanchard taxonomy did not seem to be the standard view, and (I soon learned) people get mad at you when you use the word _autogynephilia_ in a comment section, so I assumed that the _theory_ that autogynephilia could be a root cause of transsexualism was false, while continuing to be grateful that _there was a word_ for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life.
+>
+> And I spent the next ten years continuing to have the sorts of experiences that I guess pass for "gender dysphoria" (not wanting to identify with maleness or masculinity, prefering to identitfy with women if not femininity, growing a ponytail for symbolic reasons, trying to go by a gender-neutral nickname for a few years, feeling happy when someone assumed I was gay or "ma'am"ed me over the phone, _&c._), all the while thinking that I wasn't one of those people who are like, _actually trans_, because they claim to have gender identities, and I didn't know what a gender identity was supposed to feel like. I was just, you know, one of those guys who are pointedly insistent about not being _proud_ of the fact that they're guys, and who like to fantasize about things being different, all of this being (at a guess) probably related somehow to my erotic fantasies about having magical shapeshifting powers.
+>
+> ... and then, I moved to Berkeley.
+>
+> I met some _very interesting_ people whom I am _very jealous_ of. I talked to some of them. I did [some reading](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/). And ... it's starting to look like Blanchard was right. Most _actual trans women_ (MtTs in your terminology) are, in fact, guys like me who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy romantic fantasies about being a woman and then—somehow—_took them literally_ (!?!).
+>
+> This revelation has left me with many conflicting feelings.
+>
+> So, cards on the table: _in itself_, I don't think autogynephilia is a bad thing. I think it's a _good_ thing. I think it's _made me a better person_. (I may not exactly be a _good_ person by radical feminist standards, but I'm probably better than I would have been if I had just been a _normal_ nerdy straight white guy without this obsessive need to identify with women.) I think people _should_ have the freedom to body-mod and choose their pronouns and have that be respected.
+>
+> But to exercise that freedom responsibly, I think it's important to be _realistic_ about what the underlying psychological mechanisms are, to be _realistic_ about what the existing technology can and cannot do, and to respect the interests of, you know, _actual women_, who might have legimate reasons to want their own sports teams or music festivals without people like me around!
+>
+> The currently-existing trans rights _Zeitgeist_, insofar as it doesn't even want to admit that autogynephilia is a thing, does not seem realistic to me. I'm kind of upset about this! I've started a blog, [_The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_](http://unremediatedgender.space/), where I intend to write about this and other gender issues. If it's alright with you-all, I may want to share some of my future posts on this sub? (I am sympathetic to many of the goals of gender-critical feminism, but am writing from my own idiosyncratic perspective; I am eager to contribute insofar as our interests overlap, but don't want to intrude in spaces where I am not wanted.) I remain,
+>
+> Critically yours,
+> M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake
Robby's comment: https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D
-https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199 (some of you may have noticed, 0719 11 Feb)
+https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199 (some of you may have noticed, 1919 11 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154808888680199 (Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends, 0743 12 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154810042700199 (model clicked, causality goes the other way, 1625 12 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154811044280199 (PC is just respect, 0038 13 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154811974995199 (if you make yourself really small ..., 0843 13 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812225235199 (Daphne Koller and the Methods, 1036 13 Feb)
-https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812243735199
+https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812243735199 (arrogance is off-putting 1351 13 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812307555199 (priors are BAD)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812629495199 (1351 13 Feb)
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154812673305199 (Gender Wars, 1412 13 Feb)
--- /dev/null
+Email timeline—
+1 Dec 2018: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph" to Scott cc Anna Jonah Sarah Michael
+... discussion with Scott runs to 3 Dec
+3 Dec: forward Scott thread to Ben and Katie, privacy leak
+4 Dec: Ben—bullshit nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat
+5 Dec: Ben—the interesting part is your model of the "rationalists" is wrong
+6 Dec: Michael—this is important, share with Aurora?
+10 Dec: asking Anna for her take
+11 Dec: social proof from Sarah to Scott
+11 Dec: Michael—argument should be compelling unless Craft Is Not the Community
+12 Dec: emailing Harmanas after running into him at the train
+16 Dec: to Sarah and Michael, "I still owe you" first draft
+16 Dec: Michael—I want EY to respond to arguments, but wait a few weeks?
+18–19 Dec: to Anna and Michael, on conversational violence and self-defense
+19 Dec: met Aurora
+21 Dec: to Sarah, something to protect
+21 Dec: Sarah—Let's Get This Gender Thing Over With (unpublished)
+24 Dec: ... further discussion with Ben/Sarah/Michael
+26 Dec: my intelligence notes on Ziz
+30 Dec: Ben—phatic declaration of respect makes me feel less safe
+1 Jan: final draft of "I still owe you money"
+1 Jan: Eliezer has taken initiative to spend Eliezerself's time, Rob as police
+3 Jan: meatspace met with Michael/Sarah/Auora/Ben/Andrew
+5 Jan: met with Ziz and Gwen with Michael and Aurora, lawsuits
+6 Jan: backchannel to Anna about Ziz
+6 Jan: EY thread cont'd
+9 Jan: I want to see you be brave (was: Re: I still owe you money; and, discourse on categories and the fourth virtue)
+11 Jan: me—What do think submitting to social pressure looks like?!
+15 Jan: unsent "thunder comes before gaslighting" draft
+16 Jan: Ben to me/Anna on old thread: esotericism is less of a problem if flagged
+18 Jan: gender refugees, moral patiency, and BBL
+29 Jan: me to Kay Brown: have you noticed LGBTQ/queer culture getting worse?
+7 Feb: Messenger with "Wilhelm" about Rust All-Hands
+8 Feb: me to Katie about Rust All-Hands
+8 Feb: me to Ben and Michael about social competence
+20 Feb: impulsive email to Scott (subject: a howl of despair which is nameless)
+20 Feb: cold outreach to Ben Landau-Taylor
+21 Feb: telling Marcus, I'm out of cards: we created a monster
+22 Feb: "RIP Culture War" thread
+22 Feb: Michael offers advice; I forward with Scott; Michael calls it a destructive move
+25 Feb: first draft of defending against "alt-right" categorization
+27 Feb: more support from the gang
+27-28 Feb: on private universes
+1 Mar: intra-group disagreement re "ambient epistemic violence"
+2 Mar: Michael—independence of perspectives vs. failure to present an united front
+2 Mar: I saw the new Rebel Wilson movie last night, went to Simon's birthday (I remember seeing Scott there), then met Anna
+2 Mar: Anna's comment about Michael
+3 Mar: "Apologies are always intrinsically worthless, but that fact that we are able to legitimately demand an apology means that we can legitimately demand that he look at something."
+3 Mar: I heard Anna say my desire for good arugments to win was "selfish"; what she actually said was "self-centered", "it seems less important than what happens on topics that we don't all know there isn't free speech about."
+3 Mar: "told them that the thing that would most help AI risk from them anyhow was for them to continue on their present career," is that if I try to only focus on "important" things, I'll probably just come up with something fake
+3 Mar: more draft, more thanks for social proof
+5 Mar: Scott gets back to me
+5 Mar: 12 short stories about language (and, expressing regret that I only email Scott when I need something from him)
+6 Mar: to "Wilhelm" about anti-trans complaints against Anna
+6 Mar: SJWs without guns doing this than you are about mostly white men with money, gavels and guns doing it? ... SJW agenda is to play by the same rules as the legal system plays by, and they do it with less support from tradition and from ritual, so it's more obvious,
+6 Mar: much better draft to EY (defending against alt-right)
+10 Mar: send revised draft to EY
+14 Mar: meeting with Ben/Sarah/Marie/Jessica; Ben assist on "Blegg Mode"
+17 Mar: me to Scott, bringing up idea that in-person ideas were better
+17 Mar: Michael characterizing EY as choosing to be a cult leader
+18 Mar: starting to overheat (subject: "strategy huddle II")—
+I referred to Sarah and Ben at Sunday conversation saying in-person meetings were better
+Scott says "I try to avoid in-person meetings in general, and this is probably in my bottom 1% of things that I would enjoy talking about in person"
+I write to my team wondering if I should propose a $4000 happy price
+then I say, maybe don't reply before Friday
+6 p.m.: really angry at Scott for not understanding the difference between cluster in a value-dependent subspace (as with the dagim/fish example), and value-dependent to not make my friends sad. But my boss was expecting code by noon tomorrow
+7 p.m.: let go of the anger somehow and just do my job this week and then write up the mathy version
+8:44 p.m.: fantasizing about recruiting Buck or Duncan to our coalition; never sure how to interpret my self-reports; even when crying, shaking, randomly yelling, &c. I think I'm still noticeably incentivizable: I think that if someone were to present a credible threat (e.g., slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down: there's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that subjectively feels genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be tolerated
+10:27 p.m.: I tweeted a Sequences quote that summarizes how I'm feeling (mention is to attribute credit; Eliezer has so many followers that he probably won't even see the mention notification), except it's not quite appropriate, because the quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But ... the methods I was taught are great! I don't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just can't cope with everyone else having forgotten!
+11:01 p.m.: OK, the dayjob situation is really bad right now (it's almost 2300), so let's try one of those commitment-contract things. I hereby pledge not to check my personal email, Facebook, or Twitter until 1700 Pacific Daylight time on Friday the twenty-second of March. (I have an /etc/hosts manipulation script and I can turn off my home computer to help.) If I fail in this pledge, then ... um, I'm having trouble thinking of a good incentive here. (Traditionally you use money, but unfortunately, I'm only 78% Ashkenazi and my brain doesn't believe money is real.) So, um, "or else"!
+2:47-3:55 a.m.: some replies from Michael
+4:01 a.m.: I got the unit test passing; why do I keeping lying about email hiatus?
+4:15 a.m.: "predictably bad ideas" email to Anna/Michael/Ben/Sarah/Zvi/Scott/Alicorn/Mike
+5:26 a.m.: five impulsive points
+5:58 a.m.: everyone's first priority should be to make sure Zack can sleep
+6:14 a.m.: I'm really sorry about this. I don't need Scott's help and I think Michael is being a little aggressive about that, but I guess that's also kind of Michael's style?
+6:18 a.m.: Michael's response: What the FUCK Zack!?!
+7:27 a.m.: Home now. Going to get in bed. I could say more, but that would be high-variance, and we don't want variance right now
+19 Mar: Michael seems disappointed with me for what he perceived as me escalating and then deescalating just after he came to help, but which from my perspective felt like me just trying to communicate that I don't want to impose too many costs on my friends just because I felt upset today. (Subject: "yet another strategy huddle (III)")
+19 Mar: Ben writes off Scott and ignores a boundary; nominates Jessica for helping me
+19 Mar: maybe there's a reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity, because my vocabulary has been trained really hard on this subculture; theistic evolution Church analogy
+20 Mar: planning to meet Zvi in person for first time
+20 Mar: Ben asks Scott to alter the beacon (I think this became https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/ )
+20 Mar: super-proton concession (why now? maybe he saw my "tools shattered" Tweet, or maybe the Quillette article just happened to be timely)
+21 Mar: I think of the proton criticism; nominate Ben as mission commander
+21 Mar: I suggest to Anna that chiming in would be a movement towards peace with Michael's gang
+21 Mar: Ben and Michael don't think the techincal quibble makes any progress
+22 Mar: I literally ran into Scott on the train
+22 Mar: Scott does understand the gerrymandering/unnaturalness problem, but it sort of seems like he doesn't understand that this is about cognitive algorithms rather than verbal behavior ("someone tells you that classifying a burrito as a sandwich will actually save ten million lives and ensure friendly AI in our lifetime, would you still refuse to classify a burrito as a sandwich?"—well, it doesn't matter what I say), whereas Eliezer definitely understands
+24 Mar: Michael to me on Anna as cult leader
+24 Mar: I tell Michael that I might be better at taking his feedback if he's gentler
+30 Mar: hang out with Jessica (previous week was Zvi and Nick and anti-fascist Purim)
+30 Mar: Michael—we need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
+30 Mar: wrapping up drafts
+me to Scott: _what_ post about transgender
+conceptual gerrymandering is not unique
+it's fine if you don't help; you've suffered enough
+Kelsey agreeing on the object level for a different reason
+crippling the orcs' general ability to reason
+early draft of what became "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
+31 Mar: the real issue is whether we want to destroy everyone's
+31 Mar: Sarah—isn't the math overkill?
+31 Mar: Ben thinks I'm reading Kelsey wrong, that she's counting happiness as part of usability
+31 Mar: I think that math is important for principle—and intimidation (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/)
+31 Mar: "a very vague understanding of what you're trying to do with the second email but it seems kind of sketchy to me, like you're writing an email to Scott meant to look persuasive to Eliezer"
+31 Mar: I want a court ruling; I'm betting that it's psychologically harder for someone who knows the Rules to continue being dishonest against someone who has the correct answer and isn't willing to give up on good-faith argument.
+31 Mar: Ben— this just seemed like the kind of bank shot where, given the track record of Zack's intuitions, I expect it to fail unless he's explicitly modeling what he's doing
+31 Mar: email prosecution not useful, explicitly asking for a writ of certiorari is better than sending "cc in case you're interested" mail and delusionally hoping for it to function as an appeal.
+31 Mar: I recount to Michael Jessica's account of her time at MIRI
+31 Mar: Michael—"since there is absolutely no plausible narrative in which I was bringing them into a cult, there is no symmetry in our narratives." this didn't age well
+31 Mar: Ben—the most important thing for LessWrong readers to know about - a similarly careful explanation of why you've written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "Rationalists"
+31 Mar: I'm reluctant, because I don't want to attack my friends in public (and don't want to leak info from private conversations)
+31 Mar: Ben—self-promotion imposes a cost on others
+1 Apr: fantasizing Susan the Senior sorter parable turing violent
+1 Apr: 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. Some of the things you said on the phone call made it sound like you didn't understand that I'm making that distinction?
+2 Apr: me to Anna cc Ben—"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is less damaging when there's some sort of recruiting pipeline from the public into the monasteries
+2 Apr: Ben: I do not consider the claim that intact monasteries exist to be plausible at all right now.
+2 Apr: Twitter poll about dropping pseudonymity
+3 Apr: I don't see any advantage to speaking non-anonymously when people are persecuting you. I also find it REALLY DIFFICULT to deal with the fact that you are cooperating with people who are openly defecting against you and against me.
+6 Apr: "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" draft, Putting It Together epigraph; plan to beg Anna and Eliezer for endorsement afterwards
+8 Apr: Jessica—creating clarity about behavioral patterns, and specifically ones that people claim not to have. What you're saying here implies that you believe creating such clarity is an attack on someone. If so, your blog is attacking trans people.
+8 Apr: the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and named individuals still seems very significant to me
+8 Apr: Michael—less precise is more violent
+"Boundaries" discussion ...
+9 Apr: "VP" is also political
+10 Apr: Ben and Jessica coin four simulacra levels
+10 Apr: Ben—Eliezer's in denial about whether he's making decisions out of fear. / Scott's only unevenly in denial about this.
+me—Anna claims to be calculating rather than fearful. I don't have any particular evidence to dispute her self-report, but I would asphyxiate under that level of risk aversion.
+12 Apr: Ben again on, " to trying to explain why Eliezer seems to you like the court of last resort, what he's done that leads you to expect him to play this role, etc."; more money seems wrong
+12 Apr: I'm still too cowardly
+Sarah explaining how to ask things of people in general
+Ben reiterating, "You don't want either an overtly paid endorsement, or to ask Eliezer to lie about whether it's a paid endorsement."
+12 Apr: Sarah—what would you do if Eliezer never follows up?
+13 Apr: me—I don't know, what would there be left to do?—I don't have any particular claim over Eliezer.
+13 Apr: pull the trigger on "Boundaries?" (for this reason it is written: don't hate the player, hate the game-theoretic nature of all life.)
+ask Anna
+direct marketing to Nick T.
+direct marketing and/or conspiracy invitation
+court filing with Yudkowsky (Subj: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing")
+Ben: So, um, this _is_ politics, and we _aren't_ safe, so how about not lying?
+Michael: We are safe to understand arguments and logic, and it is Not politics to try to pin understanding down. It is politics to try to pin down the understanding of people as part of credit allocation, and we should be doing politics to try to motivate engagement here, but so far, Zack has been doing a mix of friendship, supplication and economics.
+me: Is ... is there a good place for me to _practice_ politics against someone who isn't Eliezer Yudkowsky? The guy rewrote my personality over the internet. I want more credit-allocation for how relatively well I'm performing under constrained cognition!
+me: Like, okay, I see the case that I'm doing a sneaky evil deceptive thing (bad faith is a disposition, not a feeling!) by including subtext and expecting people to only engage with the text, but if we're not going to get into full-on gender-politics on Less Wrong, but gender politics is motivating an epistemology error, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do! I'm pretty constrained here!
+Michael: Once people think they know what the political sides are, the political thing to do is (trivially, I am annoyed at you pretending not to know this) to be completely unprincipled and partisan in any anonymous situation.
+15 Apr: me—concern about bad faith nitpicking, Jessica says I'm not
+15 Apr: Jessica's comment, the lesson of Funk-tunul
+15 Apr: trying to recruit Steven Kaas
+15 Apr: Signal conversation with Ben—
+I'm having some ideas on how I could write my post about disillusionment with the rationalists well still not being too hostile and not leaking info from private conversations
+
+> Yeah, I think the right target to keep in mind is people like you a few years ago who haven't yet had the experiences you've had
+> So they don't actually have to freak out to the point of being imprisoned and then demand help from community leaders and not get it, they can just learn from you
+> Like, the actual sympathetic-but-naive people
+> Not the people fucking with you
+
+[...]
+
+people also deserve credit for the help they did give me (care resources from Alicorn et al.) even if I don't think there intellectual performance was good enough to deserve the Mandate of Heaven implied by the "rationalist" brand name
+
+> Yes, but we need to keep separate accounts for _personal_ gratitude, and institutional fraud
+> Like, I think that if somehow Alicorn gets hurt by the Rationalists dissolving, and we're in a position to help her, we should try to help in any way that _doesn't_ work via continuing to validate the collective narcissistic fantasy that the Rationalists are a thing
+> Insofar as that makes things hard, we have to think of it as a hostage situations
+> But, it's not obvious that this imposes undue costs on the individuals that have helped you a lot, except maybe Anna
+[...]
+> And, _not_ doing this is imposing costs on people like Michael (and all of humanity) instead, which is a lot less fair than harming Anna's interests incidentally by breaking up a scam she's drawing power from
+
+[...]
+should I just reread you posts about EA, or is there more?
+
+> People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done.
+[...]
+
+> These both seem like evidence that CFAR and MIRI see themselves as building an army, not a truth-seeking intellectual community.
+[...]
+
+> This isn't about direct benefit vs harm
+> This is about what, substantively, they're doing
+> And they claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community while in fact building an army of loyalists
+
+[...]
+
+last night I was up until 2 a.m. and wrote Anna two paper postscards asking for her to engage with my "... Boundaries?" post when she ahs time and to give me an estimate of when she might have time [...] I figured that spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding physical postcards is more polite (and funnier) than my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails
+
+16 Apr: I feel sad and gaslighted
+16 Apr: Jessica sparks engagement by appealing to anti-lying
+Ben— I think a commitment to lying is always wrong just straightforwardly leads to deciding that anything power demands you say is true.
+16 Apr: If it were just a matter of my own pain, I wouldn't bother making a fuss about this. But there's a principle here that's way bigger than any of us: that's why Michael and Ben and Sarah and [...] and Jessica are here with me.
+we're in favor of Jessica's existence
+17 Apr: plantiff/pawn/puppydog
+17 Apr: Jessica— This person had an emotional reaction described as a sense that "Zack should have known that wouldn't work" (because of the politics involved, not because Zack wasn't right). Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.
+18 Apr: Ben on our epistemic state
+18 Apr: me—I'd rather say "Actually, I don't think I'm saner than Jessica, because ..." rather than "You owe Jessica an apology."
+18 Apr: Ben to me—"It's sketchy to accept insults leveled at you, but it’s actually a betrayal of trust if you ask friends to back you up and then don’t back them up"
+me— You're right; I hereby retract the phrase "or my friends" from the prior email. I was trying to convey a "turn the other cheek"/"social reality is fake, anyway" attitude, but I agree that everyone can only turn her own cheek.
+18 Apr: Ben—STAY IN FORMATION
+me— I've been struggling with how to "chime in" for hours, but it looks like Eliezer just shut the door on us at 10:12 p.m. / Mission failed?
+This closure actually makes me feel a little bit less heartbroken and cognitively-dissonant about the "rationalists" already. If Scott doesn't want to talk, and Eliezer doesn't want to talk, and I'm unambiguously right ... then I guess that's that?
+Michael—common knowledge achieved
+19 Apr: Zack, that's not what a war looks like. That was ... trying to educate people who were trying not to be educated, by arguing in good faith.
+me: Ben, I mean, you're right, but if my "Category War" metaphorical name is bad, does that also mean we have to give up on the "guided by the beauty of our weapons" metaphorical catchphrase? (Good-faith arguments aren't weapons!)
+19 Apr: Ben and Jack "sadism and tactics" chat transcript
+20 Apr: my closing thoughts
+20 Apr: Michael on Anna as an enemy
+30 Apr: me—I don't know how to tell the story without (as I perceive it) escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.
+30 Apr: If we're in a war, can I apply for psych leave for like, at least a month? (Michael implied that this was OK earlier.) Or does asking get me shot for desertion? It's fair for Ben to ask for an accounting of why I'm stuck, but the fact that I'm sitting at my desk crying at 5:45 p.m. suggests a reordering of priorities for my own health.
+30 Apr: No urgency on that timescale. Just don't buy a nerf gun and make shooting noises to pretend you're fighting. On leave means on leave.
+3 May: dayjob workplace dynamics
+6 May: multivariate clarification https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922
+7 May: angry at Anna for thinking I was delusional for expecting the basics
+8 May: Anna doesn't want money from me—it'll appear in some Ben Hoffman essay as "using you" or some similar such thing
+17 May: Jessica points out that Yudkowsky's pro-infanticide isn't really edgier than Peter Singer
+21 May:
+If someone claims, as someone did, that saying that words having meanings matters is politically loaded and is code for something, that can really be seen as [...] their problem.
+I mean, ordinarily yes, but when the person saying that is a MIRI Research Associate, then it's the light cone's problem.
+22 May: to Anna cc Sarah Steven—Viaweb and CfAR have importantly different missions (Sarah is Nice, unlike people like Ben or Michael or Jessica, who are Mean)
+31 May: "Categories Were Made" LessWrong FAQ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for#iqEEme6M2JmZEXYAk
+8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining
+8 Jun: maybe "EA Has a Lying Problem" seemed like a similarly pointless hit piece to you? And you have as much invested in the "Effective Altruism" brand name as I have in the "Michael Vassar" brand name?
+17 Jun: "It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not." basically sums up how I feel about Ozy
+22 Jun: I'm expressing a little bit of bitterness that a mole rats post got curated https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness
+23 Jun: Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests
+25 Jun: scuffle with Ruby
+26 Jun: Ben trying to talk to the Less Wrong team
+29 Jun: I talked with Ray from 7 to 10:30 tonight. My intellectual performance was not so great and I did a lot of yelling and crying.
+29 Jun: talked to Buck (who's working at MIRI these days) at the Asgard (Will and Divia's house) party tonight. He was broadly sympathetic to my plight, thinks EA leaders have it together (saying people like Holden had thought through more plies than him when he talks to them about the Issues), thinks public reason is hopeless, doesn't think much/well of Ben or Michael or Zvi.
+1 Jul: I think we can avoid getting unnecessarily frustrated/angry at these people if we can be clear to ourselves and each other that they're MOPs, and could not possibly succeed in being geeks even if they tried
+2 Jul: "Everyone Knows", pinging Anna about it
+4 Jul: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/ published
+11 Jul: AI timelines scam
+11 Jul: me—I'm sympathetic to tone-policing on "scam"
+Ben—What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you?
+me—but the law does use mens rea, like the distinction between manslaughter and murder
+me—call with Michael, the Pope surely knows that he doesn't really have a direct line to God (despite holding office based on this pretense), to how GiveWell must know that they're not really making decisions based on numbers (despite holding credibility based on this premise)
+16 Jul: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
+17 Jul: Alyssa's false claim about my pseudonyms, HRT effects side note
+18 Jul: my accusation of mis-citing Ozy was wrong
+20 Jul: me to Anna and Steven about LW mods colluding to protect feelings; "basically uninterested in the mounting evidence that your entire life's work is a critical failure?"
+20 Jul: Michael—Court language is the language that we have for "you don't have the ethical option of non-engagement with the complaints that are being made"
+> We *also* need to develop skill in the use of SJW style blamey language, like the blamey language about feelings that was being used *on* us harder and to a great extent first, while we were acting under mistake theory assumptions.
+23 Jul: "epistemic defense" meeting
+24-25 Jul: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip
+Kelsey thinks "threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior"
+as counterevidence, I brought up communication from Michael to me about it being a small matter whether he's welcome at REACH, that I should pick a better identity than "rationalist", that he doesn't "see a point in defending me from Anna when she is now on a side that is all but exploit in giving up on truth"
+this is not the game someone would be playing if he were trying for inclusion
+Prosecutor's reply: Stardust didn't prioritize REACH investigation until she found out from Ben's post that Vassar apparently did care
+Defense calls Sarah to the stand
+25 Jul: I write to the REACH panel address—What are the charges?
+25 Jul optimal gossip, cont'd—
+savviness as non-normative
+Isn't "social reality" the one area you'd most expect the consensus to be systematically wrong about?
+prosecution: more detail about out-of-touch with social reality
+prosecution points out that "trans women are different from cis women" is universally agreed on
+prosecution request defense informs Stardust that Michael said earlier he was leaving the country
+25 July: REACH subcommittee: "To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe."
+defense: "To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where I feel unsafe."
+optimal gossip case: Michael as the catalyst
+Ben as witness: "the basically fraudulent practice of "agreeing" to follow procedure, distorting the procedure to get the answer one prefers, and then "correcting" the error iff someone does the exact same lobbying they'd have had to do in the absence of any procedure."
+5 Aug: ICE Tweets
+12 Aug: I would like to see you write up the things you're trying to process, in more complete form, focusing on the details it's most important to you to understand
+18 Aug: continuing to draft "Schelling Categories"
+21 Aug: Yudkowsky throwing NRx under the bus https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120
+Jessica—Yudkowsky is right to denounce NRx if he actually doesn't like NRx; doesn't he have free speech, aren't you arguing for self-censorship? hostilities that actually exist should be declared, and that errors should be corrected
+me—witches and heresies coordination
+me—tragedy of recursive silencing
+23 Aug: contrast this disavowal with the one in 2013
+notice the inversion from (both paraphrased) "I don't support NRx" (fine, of course) to "I don't even want them supporting me" (!?!?!!?).
+24 Aug: Anna's behavior would make sense if she thought FAI can be solved just by pointing a lot of eyeballs and money at the problem, OR "Compartmentalization is OK; dark side epistemology isn't really a thing; it's realistic for people to 'try to be wrong' when Society demands it, but be otherwise sane", but I don't think she would endorse either of those as stated
+24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
+3 Sep: positive vs. zero-sum metaphysics of communication
+5 Sep: SK—openai and givewell are too outgroup for me to worry much about whether they're acting rationally
+Ben's reaction—Wasn't Holden's post on MIRI for a while, like, the most-upvoted LessWrong post? Didn't Rationalists have quite a lot to do with OpenAI getting funding?
+Jessica—the lines are not drawn anywhere near strongly enough to be able to say Those People over there are clearly dangerously in sane, but We over here are sane.
+Michael— I don't know a natural boundary he could be using that includes him and MIRI but not FHI or Paul Christiano
+'if you see fraud and don't say fraud (by an institution you have endorsed) then you're a fraud'
+8 Sep: Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her
+Jessica—I mean, this all seems correct, but do you believe other people capable of parsing the math don't already know this? It seems really obvious (like, to 10 year olds even) that partisan politics distorts impressions by filtering evidence.
+me—I mean, do you think we could get a ten-year-old to explain it to Eliezer Yudkowsky?
+I reference my "the story of how I gave up on the so-called 'rationalists'" grief-memoir post"—this was three years ago!!!!
+Jessica—'it seemed like you were conflating "being a Nazi" with "having observed the world-conditions that Nazis would have found congenial".'
+my no-contest bullet-biting strategy
+10 Sep: I already told Ben the other day that I made the spaceships for him, so this is kind of double-counting: the spaceships are for everyone
+12 Sep: state of Ben Pace
+15 Sep: conflict with Anna—the fact that he's done so much good work is exactly what made him a target for pressure
+15 Sep: offer money to talk to Scott, then reverse myself afterwards? I didn't remember this!!
+15 Sep: me to SK on normies (I have my boundary, but it's like, six people, and doesn't include Eliezer Yudkowsky.)
+15 Sep: Yudkowsky will say, "Whoops, I said the wrong thing" re his interaction with Glen Weyl, which seems more proportional to Weyl's power rather than the magnitude of the offense https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164275185622507520
+16 Sep: SK: "I think there's a gradient where sanity is mostly flowing from core people outward toward non-core people."
+me—That's what I would have thought, too! I consider this falsified [...] twenty-thousand-word, five-month extraordinary effort [...] The gradient is running in the other direction!
+
+19/20 Sep: Signal conversation with Ben—
+> Van Nostrand mentioned that Merlin has asked you why you're a boy, an dwe're curious what you're answer was now
+... I stonewalled him because of my political incentives :'( (semi-consciously mishead the question as "Are you ab boy?" and said "Yes" after a long pause)
+I would have preferred a straightforward honest answer like, "Because I have a penis, like you", but that answer felt inappropriately "political", speech I want to avoid in that house (which is an insane situation to be in, but)
+
+21 Sep: Being widely taken seriously is important if the plan is to lobby Congress to pass Safe AI regulation. Being able to add 6 + 7 is important if the plan is to make unprecedented scientific breakthroughs. Remind me what the plan is?
+22 Sep: There are also forces pulling in the direction of not selling out your principles for power and popularity, if there exist valuable people who care about principles. [..] If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
+24 Sep: "Heads I Win" was really successful; reasons why you might think this is good besides measuring idea quality democratically
+30 Sep: the third time that someone has responded to my "help help, everyone is being stupid about the philosophy of language for transparently political reasons, and Michael Vassar's gang are the only people backing me up on this; what the fuck is going on?!" sob story with (paraphrasing), "Your philosophy hobbyhorse is OK, but Michael's gang is crazy." [...] Jessica's assessment from earlier: "Another classic political tactic: praise one member of an alliance while blaming another, to split cracks in the alliance, turning former allies against each other." / Where the three incidents seemed more coherent on the "praise Zack, diss his new friends" aspect, than on the specific content of the disses, whereas in the worlds where Michael's gang is just crazy, I would expect the content craziness allegations to correlate more
+Oct: model sync with Jessica/Alyssa/Lex/Sarah
+19 Oct: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist
+3 Nov: actually good criticism from Abram at MIRI!!!
+Isn't the problem with bad (shortsighted, motivated) appeal-to-consequences, rather than appeal-to-consequences in general?
+example: predator-avoidance
+example: "sketchy" includes scam situations, and things that merely look like them
+reply: ideal probabilistic beliefs don't correspond to consequences, even if forced-choice decisions do
+counterreply: it's complicated; we can recover epistemics as instrumentally convergent
+9 Nov: I write to Ben about being stuck. My plan had been to write a memoir, but Glomarizing about the content of private conversations, and offer Scott/Yudkowsky pre-publication right of objection. Having trouble writing. Is it that I don't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? I was really angry when I saw Scott's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSemJckYr29Gnxod2/building-intuitions-on-non-empirical-arguments-in-science on the grounds of, "So you do understand the importance of parsimony, you hypocrite!" Some of Yudkowsky's retweets felt like "concessions" that should make me less needful of aggressing against him. I need to escape from the BDSM epistemology of submitting to this one fucking guy who wrote some good blog posts ten years ago. I guess I'm afraid that telling a story about Our Leaders being intellectually dishonest feels like "the nuclear option" in a way that I can't credibly cancel with "But I'm just telling a true story about a thing that was important to me that actually happened" disclaimers?
+Ben— you are a victim of systemic abuse, and you're trying to figure out whether you're being fair to your abuser. I don't think that's clear to you here, and I think that if you internalize that one fact, you'll be able to forgive yourself for a lot of messiness, which will reduce the perceived complexity of the problem. /It's a VERY common abuse tactic to try to silence one's victims by appealing to their desire to not hurt their abuser, & telling them they'll do damage if they speak out / asking for promises of silence, etc.
+me—I'm going to bite the bullet here. Yes! Yes, I'm trying to figure out whether I'm being fair to my abusers, and it's an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have extenuating circumstances" is a lame excuse!
+seems related to the motte-and-bailey over "fraud"
+15 November: Ziz manifesto
+emailing with Katie about defamation
+16 Nov: I was mostly flattered that someone bothered to write so much about me. (I didn't spot any outright-lies as opposed to "innocently" biased memory and uncharitable paraphrasing; my argumentative performance with Ziz in 2016 was not the best and I would do better today.) / In contrast, I was pretty annoyed when Alyssa claimed that she had "personally seen" me using "at least half a dozen different pseudonyms." (She apologized after I called her on it.)
+17 Nov: charges including kidnapping, child endangerment, trespassing and resisting arrest.
+17 Nov: having been in similar situations before (albeit of a psychiatric rather than criminal character), I'm not at all surprised at sufficiently-dense ingroup jargon getting summarized by police and reporters as "an incoherent language."
+19 Nov: me to Ben and Jessica on smart fascism http://www.anechoicmedia.org/blog/european_politics/ "He's definitely a Bad Man; I just like his graphs" under present conditions it takes a lot of independence of thought to deny the antecedent of "If doing non-blank-slate social science is fascist, maybe fascism is OK."
+19 Nov: slightly worried about splash damage from Ziz, but the dynamics that make people pro forma dismissible as "crackpots" (read: outside the system, no power, not a profitable ally) without processing what they're actually saying, is part of the problem.
+Ben—I need to be less prone to Ziz-like conflict-seeking: decode you're "bad" & align with the losing side of Evil Vs Evil, Ziz literally identifies as a Sith & wears black robes, both of you keep coming back to almosy-virtuous Anna & Eliezer & Scott for more abuse & then try to trigger blame-allocation mechanisms in a context that you know is power-aligned & you're the likely scapegoat instead of updating your model?
+in contrast, my multi-thousand word manifesto about how "rationalist" leaders are corrupt as evidenced by their being wrong about gender concepts wasn't going to mention her at all
+19 Nov: I again want to ask pointed questions of the form, "So, it's just a coincidence that the four women who got busted blockading a camp entrance in Guy Fawkes masks all happen to be trans?" [...] No one is actually surprised in System 1; it's just that the parts of us that talk aren't supposed to believe in psychological sex differences (since before my time—and I still prefer not to believe) or physical sex (since 2015).
+Ben—a faction claiming to speak for trans women is trying to supress that info
+> it seems like you’re more upset about the validation of their gender, than about the felony charges, which are equally ridiculous and substantially more obviously linked to physical violence. What do you think is going on with that? Why does that seem OK to you?
+Jessica says I'm cooperating with fascism
+I told you about how criminals probably think of defense lawyers the same way I thought of patients' rights, and how I only have that empathy because of my psych-ward experience
+Thanks for creating a context in which "Why does that seem OK to you?" is a literal question that I'm supposed to literally answer, rather than an attack to be deflected.
+23 Nov: Michael's ASL analogy: "ASL is not a language" doesn't appear on the internet, and no one who had a nuanced position on how ASL differs from natural spoken languages would want to summarize their position as "... is not a language", because there's no one who has it out for deaf people
+(This might actually work as a separate post)
+26 Nov: I could offer to meet as a friend and then surpise you with demands for answers
+27 Nov: mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
+29 Nov: drafting not-lying
+2 Dec: I still have a box with a wolf and a hat
+9 Dec: bid for pre-reader approval of "On the Argumentative Form"
+11 Dec: complicity with injustice "Ziz isn't going to be a problem for you anymore"
+14 Dec: there's a time-sensitive opportunity to reach out to perennial major donor Rick
+18 Dec: Vaniver on "low regard"
+21 Dec: Anna reply on my war action
+22 Dec: I want to procrastinate reaching out to Rick, which is OK because Michael doesn't want followers; he wants people to follow their sense of opporunity
+I think "talking to Rick and Amy about my recent worldview updates, and pointing out that, if true, this could have implications for Giving Season 2019" seems political
+Jessica—it moves money, so it's political is erasing non-zero-sum details; informing people isn't an attack
+Michael—simple honesty would be timely
+I'd be more comfortable trying to share the info/worldview-shift in January, even if that means the December decision will be wrong, because I don't know how to affect the December decision in a way that doesn't require someone to trust my judgment
+23 Dec: ask Ben about the psychology of deception, and secrecy promises being abusive
+26 Dec: state of Church leadership—extort more bandwith
+26 Dec: forward Jessica's relevance-of-politics to SK
+1 Jan 20: "low regard" with Vaniver cont'd
+three negative and three positive datapoints about our culture going completely off the rails
+I'm not worried about: ppl reading Brent, ppl reading Ziz, Vanessa having math students
+I am worried about: Ray saying "the landscape is different now", Ruby on "forcing what you think is true on other people", Eli on "arguments are necessarily soldiers"
+I am worried about Steven on never be willing to make a valid point for stragic reasons; my complaint against Steven is _the same_ as Anna's charge against Michael, with the difference that I'm arguing with Steven, not trying to discredit him
+I am worried that you said you learned from Moldbug, and now Yudkowsky needs to performatively denounce him
+I am worried about Yudkowsky wireheading his fiction subreddit
+I see a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes
+Vaniver mentions Said saying "sure, Eliezer doesn't post here anymore, but that's bad for Eliezer too."
+1 Jan 20: the red phone / state of Church leadership
+feeling more optimistic about not needing to finish the memoir—or giving it a happy ending
+"If that's all I have, then it's all I can honestly love"
+playing on a different chessboard
+he hasn't given up on his Wizard's art, but he has, after painful experience, like the Roko affair, given up on sharing it with the public
+me and Michael and Jessica were counting on him to uphold standards of discourse rather than chess
+we don't get to know the real Eliezer Yudkowsky; all we can ever know is what we can infer from the words you type—and if that's all we have, then it's all we can honestly love. If the algorithm that determines which subset of your thoughts reaches us changes—then as far as we or the rest of the world can tell, it's as if you've changed.
+2 Jan: Michael—I can't work with you if you are accepting Eliezer's schedule instead of ours. That's being political and on his side!
+my memoir as a decision-theoretic weapon
+my sense of opportunity perceives me playing a useful political role without me being unambiguously on this "side"?
+The reason I got wrapped up in this civil war was becuase of this one thing; therefore I'm now at peace with Scott
+I'm more trustworthy if I'm not perceived as Michael's pawn
+3 Jan: Michael—
+> I strongly prefer judge functions over coalition functions, so far as we can cause those to apply!!!
+> The challenge is to apply judge functions in a context where there is no recognition of a right to call the litigants into a court.
+now that Scott is legally in the clear, my recourse is polite blog posts, and not police actions like cussing him out in public
+Same thing about being complicit with psychiatry (morally suspect, but my only allowable recourse is to write polite critical blog posts).
+Jessica—being complicit with psychiatry
+I'm too submissive to psychologically maintain more than one vendetta at a time, so if I'm currently angry about the philosophy of language, then psychiatry must be OK because I don't have any anger resources left.
+4 Jan: Twitter fight with Ben
+a shouty equilibrium rather than the colluding-to-wirehead-each-other equilibrium that we see in Berkeley
+4 Jan: Ben thinks I'm no longer interested in creating clarity
+memoir is a nuke
+5 Jan: Ben—the fact that I think the memoir is an act of war, even privately (insofar as my motivation to work on it vanished when I got concessions) means I've ceded the inside of my own mind to the forces of anticlarity
+my reply: I've ceded the internal of my own mind to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular
+5 Jan: using "central" allows mis-definition by mobs of obfuscators
+5 Jan: I am confident that finishing writing it will be clarifying and cathartic for you even if you decide not to publish, and would be an excellent use of time
+5 Jan: me—vocabulary itself is a surprisingly expensive captial investment
+5-8 Jan: baiting Steven to talk to Jessica about global warming
+9 Jan: arguing with Jessica about "developmental sex" and natural categories
+10 Jan: binary vectors
+10 Jan: "isn't meant to force you into agreement here on pains of losing face"
+15 Jan: more Twitter/email fighting about "people's philosopher"
+15 Jan: the same _interest_ is being defended whether I'm speaking up for my own order or someone else's
+16 Jan: Without you, my smartest critic is Ozy, but my self-criticism is smarter than Ozy, so it was like having no critics at all.
+16 Jan: do you think you could explain this in a way Said would find satisfying?
+18 Jan: Yudkowsky on Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-on-mental-illness-a-belated-reply/#comment-237783
+21 Jan: still have this "Vassar Group vs. Corrupt Mainstream MIRI/CfAR/LW/EA rationalist civil war" framing in my head that I need to unwind, because it's the wrong frame, and it's ironically the wrong frame by our ("our") own standards. I already made the mistake of expecting a community once, but by now I should know that no Lord hath the champion, and no safe defense. There is no group; there is no community; there are just grown-ups who think for themselves (or ought to) and sometimes coordinate with their friends on those specific plans that actually require coordination.
+I indicate I might enter the Caplan-Alexander debate (I don't actually)
+25 Jan: Said thinks Jessica's political thinking is vague and under-researched
+27 Jan: Anna has to ("has to") let both me and Ziz down because big-tent coalitions require incoherence (e.g., progressives prefer not to admit out loud that trans people and Muslims have conflicting interests).
+27 Jan: Vassar's trans reversal—lame
+1 Feb: sleep disruption due to M.M.B. situation
+1 Feb: I reply to Scott on "AGP is common", and M.M.B. situation
+4 Feb: you exist in the physical sense. To whatever extent your behavior is controlled by the balance of "not wanting to fight pro-trans people" and "not wanting to fight Zack", then you don't exist decision-theoretically.
+6 Feb: me to Anna on fog of war and MMB
+(the conversation with Somni is relevant)
+12 Feb: "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian"
+23 Feb: connection with Iceman
+23 Feb: discussion on meaning of "zero-sum"
+25 Feb: I'm still talking about finishing writing a memoir
+28 Feb: "belief check" conversation with Jessica on origin of trans ideology
+3 Mar: Scott's new COVID-19 post is great on the "shared maps" issue! https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-speculation-open-thread/ in contrast to how last month he was acting like he didn't understand the problem https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/#comment-847143 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to/comment/mHrHTvzg8MGNH2CwB
+4 Mar: niche skill of being able to translate between high-church Yudkowskyism and Vassarian moonspeak
+9-10 Mar: talk to Mom/Nicole about COVID prep
+22 Mar: ping Jack for social call ("You seem a lot more vicious than the sixteen-or-whatever-year-old I remember meeting at a Less Wrong meetup back in '13-or-whatever, but it looks adaptive")
+31 Mar: I'm skeptical of Eli as a mediator between me and Anna
+"Human Diversity" review published
+I've discovered that you can just stop being scared of things and then nothing bad happens. All swans are white! There are no other swans!
+24 May: Jessica on high-precision claims
+24 May: Anna seems to be regaining power of speech (Facebook post on U.S. decline)
+2 Jun: I send an email to Cade Metz, who DMed me on Twitter
+25 Jul: rubber-duck philosophy for "Unnatural Categories"!!
+4 Sep: misguided by the hideousness of our weapons?! or, theory of universal algorithmic bad faith
+runaround argument about free speech that never gets anywhere, possibly because of a bug on my end
+in principle, "What if telling the truth about X has bad consequences?" is an empirical question that could be asked in good faith and, having been asked in good faith, deserves a good-faith answer
+in principle, I don't believe people are asking it in good faith; I think it's a weapon of psychological warfare
+our most recent Less Wrong exchange. I characterized you as being on "Team Seek Power For The Greater Good". You explained why that's not a fair characterization. I explained why selectively omitting evidence is a problem. You explained that you only advocate omitting things that will make the audience respond irrationally, not omitting everything that would be inconvenient to the case.
+I don't think that thread was a good showing for me: if we apply the principle of charity to my behavior, we would say I was a bit slow on the uptake, forcing a four-comment thread to restate things that had already been covered previously.
+I'm better modeled as trying to humiliate him or waste his time
+... I still don't understand how to engage with it
+"I'm curious what evidence changed your mind" is still a counter-weapon
+13 Sep: out of patience
+13 Sep: me to Anna—focusing on my email to Yudkowsky is more important than entering the Facebook comments
+Anna asks me to be calm, high in denotation
+14 Sep: the end of the Category War
+suspect Ben will be sad that I'm "bought off", but I think not being at war makes it easier for me to do clarity-creation, in the spirit of "Here's what the thing is actually doing" rather than "flames on the side of my face"
+21 Sep: me to Don Fallis—the argument over whether merely withholding information is deception reminds me of arguments over distortion: it's not surprising that the answer takes the form "it depends on the zero point" rather than "Extoriton: Yes or No"
+25 Sep: anticipating that people are going to (not entirely inaccurately?! :'( ) round off everything I say as being backchained from my gender war, which makes the fact that Ziz totally agrees with us (about the Bay eating our culture and our people) very reassuring https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-897
+still this urge to prevent the old beacon from eating people who don't know what it's doing
+maybe my razzing him about the Human Compatible review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/#comment-847143) was causal in his COVID shared maps thing—maybe this entire line of thinking is still poison: thinking about my effects on Scott in particular (as if he were special, which he's not)
+3 Oct: Do the smart-leftists feel contempt for all the retarded children, or do they just not-notice them as being worth paying attention to (the way I seamlessly don't-notice ordinary Trump voters)?
+1 Nov: knowledge boostrapping with EvN
+4 Nov: destructive creature Olympics
+25 Nov: me to Michael—I think your reputation (in the jungle growing around the ruins of what we once called the "rationalist community") has some amount of instrumental value
+25 Nov: "No reputation in the jungle" meaning that people are just going to praise or throw you to the wolves depending on the expediency of the moment's shifting alliances, rather than there being any way to gain or retain standing for being Actually Good?
+25 Nov: notes from conversation with Michael
+in lawful environments, your reputation is by default true
+in lawless environments, bad rep just means you're important enough to have enemies, which is good
+It's easy to move the conversation from what is going on to whose side are you on.
+There's a game of trying to build the largest coalition: previously, it was the European coalition, now the not-European coalition is ascendant. [ZMD's note: this reminds me of both NRx's https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/ and Ben's http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/] We want to carve out a space for reason within the winning coalition.
+Reason is the motte and pragmatism is the bailey
+the officers vs. the enlisted; the enlisted claim to recommend the common people, the officers claim to represent the rich; both sides totally fake ideas
+Ziz is that least plausibly a girl of all trans girls, but by declaring a protected identity and having wealth, can just barely survive.
+my objection: but, but as part of the whole "Truth instead of expedient lies" part of rationality, don't we at least want Ziz to know that?!
+ I can operate for short periods in territory in which I only have the option of being a (closeted) trans woman—as an energy-minimizing play, to inhabit someone else's stereotype—but I can't live there, because that story makes no fucking sense
+Trauma is expecting coordination for evil to win, and causes you to be part of that coordination in a way that's minimally ego-dystonic.
+Surprise minimization means doing what you think that that they think that ... a free-energy constaint. If you're given a lot of "responsibility", you have to behave in a way that fulfills expectations, and eventually the only thing left is being bad in a stereotyped way that everyone knows how to expect—the type of conspiracy you can only get out of physics.
+By defying people's stereotypes, Shawanna imposes enormously large costs on cynical do-gooders, so they equalize the energy differential by imposing pragmatic costs on her.
+surpised that Ziz can't get a lawyer despite having money
+14 Dec: destructive creature Olympic, cont'd: It's great to have common knowledge of the mutual ability to interpret conditional statements literally! (Not something you can always depend on these days.)
+if Kelsey wrote her own 10,600 draft Document [...] that would be really interesting! [...] no one else seemed interested in having a theory, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+I don't think the 19th-century Chinese who bound their daughters' feet, or the 18th-century Italians who castrated little boys to perserve their singing voice were innately less empathetic than us [...] How will history analyze the moral culture of 21st-century Californians?
+17 Dec: But parts of it felt like concern trolling as a cult-recruitment tactic? In caricature: "Your writing and research doesn't matter because there's no living audience out there; you can only talk to us." You can see why Dagny Taggart would perceive that as hostile?
+--- psych care disaster
+21 Dec: me to Anna—you either didn't hide it, or I noticed anyway. But if other people in the care coordination group had seized on that to turn against you and paint you (to me) as dangerous, that would have been bad for me (independently of whether or not it would have been fair to you), because the fact that you were there was vastly more helpful, than the fact that you didn't want to be there was unhelpful
+2 Jan 21: super-weird unsolicited mental/physical health email about blood sugar and sleep
+4 Jan: sleep strategy notes
+7 Jan: I've been distracted by the news (I told Anna that Wednesday was a scary news day—referring, of course, to OpenAI DALL-E
+Feb: New York Times hit piece on Scott
+18 Feb: my "incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving" reaction to Yudkowsky on Scott email leak
+22 Feb: Technically, he started it this time! I totally would have left him alone if he didn't kick the shitpile again!
+dude can't really expect to get away with pulling out the pompous-register "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol" in that context; that's _my_ line
+27 Feb: me to Marcus—Everyone who's read Scott's work deeply is completely unsurprised by the content of the leaked email
+28 Feb: "Are you trying to convince him, yourself or those watching?" Those watching, plus testing my acquired immunity to pompous-register Yudsplaining (which I used to psychologically vulnerable to, because in 2009, it was always right)
+28 Mar: block warning
+9 May 21: trapped priors—at home!
+ I think the effort asymmetry here is kind of hilarious, where it's not that hyperbolic to say I spent three years of my life (early 2018–early 2021) trying undo the cultural brain damage from that one post.
+when I talk to AI researchers like Abram Demski or John Wentworth, they get it instantly ...
+7 Jun: dolphin war
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1402067999977132035
+9 Jun: I want to use the phrase "all-out nuclear war with MIRI", but that's just another expression of anger
+23 Jun: I am introduced to Slay the Spire
+28 Jun:
+> I hope you find a way to let go of your war.
+You know, this is awfully condescending! You wouldn't tell a transgender person who was transitioning, "I hope you find a way to let go of this."
+But when I, who no one even seems to doubt has the same underlying psychological condition (long story—I recently finished a 16,000-word essay explaining my thing), put in years of effort to counter what I'm claiming is disinformation about the counterintuitive true nature of underlying psychological condition, I get told to drop it. Why the double standard? If [...] feelings count, why don't mine?
+4 Jul: Independence Day party
+feeling scared about the Singularity
+6 Sep: final Twitter showdown
+2 Nov: It's a black mark, but let's be quantitative: the guy helped me a huge amount in 2017-2019 (long, separate story) for reasons that made sense to him, and he also hurt me a decently large amount in December 2020 for reasons that made sense to him. These things can both be true at the same time!
+13 Jan 22: blessing to speak freely, and privacy norms?
+---END
+
+> When I look at the world, it looks like [Scott](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) and [Eliezer](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) and [Kelsey](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) and [Robby Bensinger](https://www.facebook.com/robbensinger/posts/10158073223040447?comment_id=10158073685825447&reply_comment_id=10158074093570447&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R2%22%7D) seem to think that some variation on ["I can define a word any way I want"]() is sufficient to end debates on transgender identity.
+
+> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
+
+> But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_—where a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
+
+> But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
+
+> I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
+
+> I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute
+
+> Imagine your friends got a new front porch installed on your house, and you noticed that the boards were smoother and shinier than you expected. A question you might then ask your friend is, "Oh, is this real wood, or one of those wood-plastic composites?"
+
+> In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
+
+The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/)
+
+
+Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening.
+
+
+Michael—
+> Ben once told me that conversation with me works like this. I try to say things that are literally true and people bend over backwards to pretend to agree but to think that I am being metaphorical.
+
+
+> Yes, exactly. I'm still framing it as "appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on higher standards" rather than appealing to a standard a court or a community could enforce. Eliezer reportedly didn't think much of Atlas Shrugged ... I assume Andrew has read it? I keep thinking of the part where Dagny entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce a not-technically-lying statement by the State Science Institute:
+
+> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+
+You see the problem, right? I'm kind of at my wits' end here, because I thought the point of this whole "rationality" project was to carve out one place in the entire world where good arguments would eventually triumph over bad arguments, even when the good arguments happen to be mildly politically inconvenient.
+
+appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halter
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
+
+(I _want_ to confidently predict that everything I've just said is completely obvious to you, because I learned it all specifically from you! A 130 IQ _nobody_ like me shouldn't have to say _any_ of this to the _author_ of "A Human's Guide to Words"! But then I don't know how to reconcile that with your recent public statement about [not seeing "how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). Hence this desperate and [_confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) email plea.)
+
+And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the
+
+
+
+Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
+
+In a functioning rationalist community, there should never be any occasion in which "appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal authority" seems like a good strategy: the way this is supposed to work is that I should just make my arguments with the understanding that good arguments will be accepted and bad arguments will be rejected. But I've been trying that, and it's mostly not working. On any other topic, I probably would have just given up and accepted the social consensus by now: "Sure, OK, whatever, trans women are women by definition; who am I to think I've seen into the Bayes-structure?" I still think this from time to time, and feel really guilty about arguing for the Bad Guys (because in my native Blue Tribe culture, only Bad people want to talk about sexual dimorphism). But then I can't stop seeing the Bayes-structure that says that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept even when it's ideologically unfashionable—and I've got Something to Protect. What am I supposed to do?
+
+I agree that this is the only reason you should care.
+
+ut if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
+
+> I don't think it's as clear as that. The trans community has never been solely focused on people who believe they've always been of x gender. It's just that it's such a freeing and helpful explanation when trying to get people to accept that you in fact are of that gender. The x in a body of y explanation has always been a shortcut to get cis people to leave us alone more than a real feeling, honestly.
+> And then the thread did not explode into acrimony.
+
+My paraphrase: "Oh, it's not actually true; it's a non-true thing that we tell cis people to get them to model us the way we want to be modeled"!?
+
+Isn't that at least kind of like lying? (Or if these authors get to choose their preferred category boundary for "woman", do I get to choose my preferred category boundary for "lie"?)
+
+
+f you want people to use your preferred categories, you're going to need to convince them with some sort of argument that those categories are predictively useful. I don't see the point of saying "There's no epistemic issue here, although maybe there's a policy debate about how to use language; end-of-discussion" if it's not to justify the mind games? Why can't we get a clear ex cathedra statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule that categories are nonarbitrary? Isn't it true, and important, and something that people who ought to know better are getting wrong? Surely there's some way for "not alt-right" signaling to be purchased separately?
+
+
+
+
+[TODO: Ben—
+> I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
+
+I assumed he was talking about Katie's institutionalization, not SRS
+
+> where gaslighting escalated into more tangible harm in a way that people wouldn't know about by default. In contrast, people already know that bottom surgery is a thing; you just have reasons to think it's Actually Bad—reasons that your friends can't engage with if we don't know what you're talking about. It's already bad enough that Eliezer is being so pointlessly cagey; if everyone does it, then we're really doomed.
+
+Ben's actual worry—
+> "saying the wrong keywords causes people in this conversation to start talking about me using the wrong keywords in ways that cause me illegible, hard-to-trace damage."
+
+> marginalization happens through processes designed to be hard for the "rider" in the horse-rider system to see. This makes the threat model hard to communicate, which puts the rider in a double-bind with respect to things like courage, because it's dependent on the horse for most of its information.
+
+I thought the conjunction of the "mere worm" rhetoric and the thousands of words of "Here's why your own writing proves that you're wrong, you coward" and the context of Eliezer's own arrogant writing style, should have implied a certain level of conceit/tongue-in-cheekness? (I wouldn't write like this—or, um, pay someone $1000 to read my blog post—for anyone else in the world, but Eliezer is really special to me.)
+
+I already tried to say this in my message of the seventh, but let me try again more explicitly: I agree that the rationalists are very good at free speech norms. Ozy is writing in good faith! There is no concealed blade! I can totally do my thing without getting shouted down for heresy! I am not a victim of anything!
+
+I do, however, think there's a subtler failure mode than "heretics get shouted down", namely, "heretics have to put up with spurious isolated demands for rigor, logical rudeness, conversation-halters, &c., such that the community doesn't update or updates slower than it could have."
+
+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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L32LHWzy9FzSDazEg/motivated-stopping-and-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).
+
+Ben—
+> It seems like for the socioeconomic class likely to become Rationalists, employability increasingly requires the kind of sensitivity to social threat and opportunity that makes people easily silenceable in the absence of a clear distinct threat, even in the Bay, even for programmers (though not 100% yet), since workplaces have become more politicized and less about getting something specific done
+
+Except people are actually super hypocritical about this: everyone knows to say that men are Bad, but only weird nerds who Take Ideas Seriously (e.g., me, Scott Aaronson, Jessica, Ziz), take the idea seriously. In a world where we know that men are Bad, but women are Good, and that women are people who identify as women ... well, for normal, well-adjusted men, it makes no difference. But for the nerds who live in a world made out of words, there's a natural incentive to cross the border between a lonely straight man with no intersectionality points, and a thrice-oppressed lesbian trans woman with three intersectionality points—and thus, a seat at the Blue table.
+
+The gender-refugees story is story is the extra ingredient we need to make sense of the new and crazier thing that's going on in Current Year Berkeley: the escaping-Bad-man-status incentive gradient, and decreasing stigma (or even a status boost in sufficiently social-justice-converged subcultures), make for a much lower threshold of required AGPness before transitioning starts to look like a good idea—and potentially none at all (see Ziz again).
+
+I really did not anticipate that the controversial part of "men who fantasize about being actual women for sexual reasons" would be the phrase "actual women"!
+
+I've got some exciting open-source events coming up (first the Rust team all-hands, then I'm giving a talk at !!Con West) where I want to make friends and impress people, and I'm a little bit worried about being revealed as a thought-criminal earlier than I intended. Among the ~30 !!Con speakers (they're lightning talks), I count 3 trans women, three obvious men who prefer they/them pronouns, and one obvious woman who prefers they/them pronouns.
+
+Karaoke night was fun, but social-justice culture has me on edge (the little things; like, Manish showed me this funny Tweet on his phone, and my uncontrolled facial reaction was probably more disdainful than mirthful, and I don't know how to calculate if or how much I'm being socially penalized these little things)
+
+I've lived in the "rationalist" cult-bubble my entire adult life, and I don't know the rules for forming cross-cult alliances. If some of the social-justicey open-source people seem like they're starting to Accept me and invite me to things, can I say to one of them, "Look, I'm worried about being socially rejected for ideological reasons; maybe we should talk about this privately now rather than risking Drama later"? If that doesn't work (and it works with my "rationalist" friends, for all their other faults), then what do people do??
+
+My original fantasy-plan was to strive for Acceptance, then suddenly stop preference-falsifying on Twitter (rough draft) at an opportune moment (after securing compiler-team membership or another conference speaker slot) as a calculated bid for glorious Damore- or Lindsay-Shepherd-like free-speech martyrdom. (If you don't preference-falsify at first when you're a nobody, then you can be quietly frozen out, but if you get Accepted first, then getting kicked out is a loud event that forces the bastards to make their ideological litmus test visible.)
+
+But I'm pretty sure the martyrdom-seeking intuition is Actually Bad. (They're not bastards; they're people exactly like me who read different books in a different order.)
+
+After more private discussion with Eliezer (after rounding up Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin for social proof), and fighting Alicorn's Discord server three times, at this point I'm leaning towards just giving up on the so-called "rationalist" community. We had an entire goddamned Sequence about the hidden Bayesian structure of language and cognition and why "I can define a word/category any way I want" is generalized anti-epistemology.
+
+I think something got derailed in our last discussion. I begged you to remind your readers about the meta-level epistemology-insight about hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing, and somehow we ended up in an object-level discussion about which categories to use, with you appealing to "mental health benefits to trans people."
+
+I'm not upset about the object-level. What I care about is this: as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, seeking out the map that reflects the territory, to cut through to the correct answer in a single movement, I have a moral duty to not care about people's feelings when forming my world-model. I can certainly not-talk about unpleasant ideas or concepts when they're not too relevant when in the presence of non-rationalists who might feel hurt. But when I'm being serious? With people who call themselves fucking aspiring rationalists? Trying to make sense of the world? The correct amount of "mild inconveniences and slight cognitive friction" to accept for utilitarian reasons is zero.
+
+Like, I want to be fair and give credit where credit is due. Like, rationalists are very good at free speech norms. The Alicorner discussion actually made some progress! But ... not enough progress?
+
+You wrote, "some compromise solution like always using 'sex: male/female' to mean 'biological sex' and 'gender: man/woman' to mean 'self-identified gender' would, if it were universally understood and agreed upon, be pretty fair and optimal."
+
+But have you fucking tried trying to talk about biological sex with Berkeley psuedo-rationalists? They won't fucking acknowledge it.
+
+I said,
+
+
+
+Elena said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" ... and gets 4 "+1" emoji.
+
+And like ... I don't know, these motherfuckers talk a good game about "charity", but when I'm clearly trying to talk about the 'biological sex' thing, and I get a response about women who don't like their own bodies ... I don't think the principle of charity is being applied?! I haven't sent you the whole transcript; you could argue that maybe I'm taking too much out of context and that the full context would be mitigating? I want to be fair and make sure that I'm not strawmanning, but I can't make sense of this; I don't know how to perform the mental contortions to make it look like people are speaking in good faith; I don't trust that these people are trying to help me reason about reality
+
+I'm still pretty horrified that the sticking point in discussions seems to have been not the AGP etiology itself (which is what I was focusing on in 2016/2017), but the category-boundaries-are-arbitrary "insight." So it's not just that we failed to break the irrationalist trans ideology: we actually invented something arguably worse! (Ordinary trans activists at least try to make (confused) truth claims; we invented a fully general counteragument against truth claims that's all the more dangerous thanks to the virtue of a very narrow kind of technical correctness.)
+
+> point out to him your sympathies regarding his mental breakdown under soft political persecution and silencing, make it clear that you are not requesting that he now or at any time in the future do anything in public regarding gender issues, and ask him to remember that you have recently been mentally incarcerated more than under similar political pressure (applied in the name of the mental health needs of non-specific people many of whom are in the same natural category as yourself) that he is totally forgiven for participating in it, but that you would like to discuss the shared aspect of your circumstances face to face, and maybe both consider not posting anything online for a couple weeks.
+
+> That was a fairly destructive move to pull without consulting me, but OK, you played it and I will run with it.
+
+(Notwithstanding how it's bad that I've been leaning on you for social proof way too much, I've been writing with the assumption that the author of the Sequences still cares about the common interest of many causes. I can see the "MIRI exists, that was all the raising-the-sanity-waterline project turned out to be good for; I don't have any teaching duties besides my not-explicitly-lying Wizard's Oath" CDT logic, but ... ugh, really? I can't be the one to suggest it.)
+
+
+
+You write:
+
+
+
+
+
+How would you begin to respond to this? That's not a rhetorical question: I'm actually curious.
+
+My model of Sequences-era 2009!Eliezer says, "This is an attempt to sneak in connotations by performing a categorization and trying to avoid the burden of having to justify it with an appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter. Go read 'A Human's Guide to Words,' and if you've already read it, then you're being incredibly intellectually dishonest and not worth my time to interact with."
+
+But I have no idea what 2019!Eliezer says.
+
+You wrote to me on 28 November:
+
+ The notion of a lie is as sancrosanct as the notion of a truth, and you do not get to say 'lie' when somebody is doing something that you think might tempt somebody to add on a lie as an additional act. [...] 'Lying' is for per se direct falsehoods.
+
+
+> If the statement "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as "Scott Alexander is a racist" or "Slate Star Codex is an alt-right blog" then
+
+Wait! That's not the analogy I'm trying to make!
+
+What I'm trying to say is, whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense as a response to "X isn't a Y" shouldn't depend on the specific values of X and Y.
+
+Your behavior the other month made it look like you think that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." is a valid response when, say, X = "Caitlyn Jenner" and Y = "woman."
+
+I'm saying that whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of local validity, apply the same standard when X = "Scott Alexander" and Y = "racist."
+
+The preceding three paragraphs are glossing over some details, and I totally understand if you want to disagree with the exact way I've formulated them! (Like, maybe you think it's inappropriate that I'm focusing on category-membership even though your explicit statement was about pronouns. It's important to notice that! We may be living in different mental universes with respect to how Gricean implicature works!)
+
+But ... I'm not claiming that Eliezer's statement that "Pronouns aren't lies" has the same type of misapprehension-forming impact on the listener as Sneer Club's statement that "Scott Alexander is a racist." That's just not what the analogy was trying to do!
+
+
+But like, does anyone understand what the fuck could possibly be going on in Eliezer's head? I've spent thousands of words with lots of direct links and quotes to his own writings from ten years ago trying to explain that there's a problem where people who call themselves "rationalists" are somehow very intent on playing clever definition-hacking mind games to make it artificially expensive to express the idea that humans cannot change sex (given current technology), and that I think he could fix the problem because people might listen to him when they don't listen to me. I agree that trans issues aren't important, but I also think that if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should get the right answer even when the issue isn't important.
+
+I think I've been pretty explicit! And today Eliezer is chastising me and Ben for not having enough empathy to realize that people live in different mental universes. And like—I agree that people live in different mental universes! But—that seems bizarrely nonresponsive to the thousands of words I wrote explaining the problem! You see it, right?! What is there left for me to say?
+
+Michael—
+> I think that if Zack is having difficulties it would be ideal if we could move this ahead without him. Needless to say, he doesn't need to feel any responsibility and has done all that could be asked of him and more to cause this project to survive unanticipated difficulties. Right now, I don't think there's much help he can offer except for periodic pushes, like the current one, for the rest of us to keep at it.
+
+
+
+> On my model, it's good to send this because there are two possibilities
+> 1) that this demonstrates the independence of our perspectives, which causes them to count as additional evidence for a proposition, and that means that this makes us more convincing
+> 2) that this shows a lack of unity, a failure to present a United Front, which is bad, because Arguments are Soldiers, and thus we are making ourselves less convincing.
+> In the latter case, Eliezer is dead to us and it would probably help if we were to bury something in a funeral. In the former case, our friends are still in there, and the way to reach them isn't by balancing the social forces arrayed against them.
+
+I'm pretty sure I can directly link to Ozy and Kelsey speaking favorably of literal self-identity, not gating on hormones or social passability. And just ... I keep rereading this stuff trying to check that I'm not misreading, because I can't take it seriously. They're just fucking with me, right???? I don't harbor ill will against any individual people, but I just can't share a rationalist community with this level of mindfuckery.
+
+I mean, okay, if that's what you want to do. (If the outcome of these hopefully-not-too-annoying emails is that Eliezer Yudkowsky feels more social/political constraints on what he can say rather than less, then this horribly backfired and you should forget we said anything.)
+
+"How would you feel if someone else tried to get away with the 'hill of meaning in defense of validity' appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter against you when you were trying to use language to reason about something you actually cared about (like defending Scott, who is great)? If it would be logically rude in that context, maybe it was also logically rude the first time?"
+
+Michael
+> We have all been essentially trained to believe that we are not entitled to voice our complaints. When someone backs off, we are prone to loosing confidence and to think that maybe we shouldn't be talking with them, yet function institutions have existed in the past, and if people aren't adhering to the normal of functional institutions, we have to not allow that to cause us to stop adhering to those norms. Therefore, we should keep doubling down with reminders regarding the rules for discussion. If he decides to not play, we should establish that to ourselves with no plausible deniability and move on.
+
+
+ "An alternative categorization system is not an error", like all appeals-to-arbitrariness, is necessarily what you called a symmetric weapon: the same form of argument works just as well for being mean to our friends as it does for being nice to our friends. The best the good guys can hope for is to win by coincidence. (Assuming there's any way to distinguish who the "good guys" are, if alternative systems that draw the "good guys" category boundary differently aren't in error, assuming there's any way to distinguish what "winning" is, if alternative systems that draw the "winning" category boundary differently aren't in error, &c.)
+
+If someone showed up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that they had an invisible dragon, I would expect ordinary meetup attendees to exert social pushback against the dragon-claimant: "Dude, that doesn't make sense. Beliefs need to be falsifiable! You should read the Sequences!" I would even expect the social pushback to be strong enough such that the claimant would eventually either internalize the "Beliefs need to be falsifiable" idea or get the fuck out of my rationalist community.
+
+If I show up at a Less Wrong meetup claiming that people don't have invisible genders, and I get social pushback ... then I'm not really sure what my options are other than writing off the entire community.
+
+
+
+I'm not extremely troubled by my minor disagreements with you. All the actually-smart high-status old-timers I've talked to (you, Eliezer, Anna, Michael Vassar, Sarah Constantin, Ben Hoffman, Steve Rayhawk, &c.) clearly see the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing I'm trying to point at. Even if you say it's mere awkwardness and not a serious epistemology problem, at least you acknowledge the awkwardness, which is more than I've gotten out of Kelsey.
+
+The thing I find extremely troubling is that none of the old-timers who clearly understand the thing are willing to say so loudly and in public where other people can learn from it, with the exceptions of Ben and Vassar—and Vassar's in-community status is getting debased. (Sarah drafted a post supporting me on the categories thing, but decided not to publish it.)
+
+You wrote about the "inevitable" forces pointing towards a future guided by the beauty of our weapons, where good arguments eventually win out over bad arguments. What if you were too optimistic? What if good arguments don't win—not even in the so-called "rationalist" community?
+
+I think "Categories should carve reality at the joints to help us make efficient probabilistic predictions" is a better argument than "Categories capture tradeoffs you care about; they don't have to carve reality at the joints if that makes people sad." Right now, the better argument is losing. Unless something changes, the better argument will continue to lose. In other words, we live in a world where reason doesn't work. If we live in a world where reason doesn't work, then we're dead. If we can't get consensus on easy problems (Q: Can men become women by means of saying so? A: No. Why would you think that?), then how are we supposed to solve AI alignment?
+
+
+
+> I don't know if you read the glowfic that Alicorn and Kelsey write. There was a scene in one of their LoTR things where some elves capture some orcs. They learn that the orcs are nice people deep down, evil god Melkor has forced the orcs to swear an oath to serve him and do evil all the time and kill people. And for complicated magic reasons, orcs cannot break oaths, or else they are tormented by unbearable pain. So even though the orcs are nice, they are compelled to serve Melkor, who usually wants them to kill people and stuff.
+
+> After a while, our hero comes up with a solution. She founds a religion on the spot devoted to a Deist-style omnipotent observer God, who just so happens to also be named Melkor. Deist-Melkor just wants people to live their lives and be happy and help others. She claims that the orcs did swear an oath to follow Melkor, but they didn't specify *which* Melkor, and since her Melkor is omnipotent he takes preference over evil-Melkor. The orcs (who are all kind of dumb, and also incentivized toward highly motivated reasoning) agree this makes sense, this seems to satisfy whatever magic enforces their oath, and so they go off and live their lives and be happy and help others.
+
+> Part of this story is that occasionally some people will approach the orcs and be like "This is kind of dumb, right, on some level you know you're supposed to be following evil Melkor", and this information is infohazardous to orcs and can put them in unbearable pain (or compel them to kill people and stuff) until they're able to talk themselves out of it.
+
+> I asked Alicorn whether this was an intentional metaphor for this discussion, since I know you've been talking to her about it. She says no. But it captures a lot of how I think about this. Are the *real rationalists!!!* the ones who go to the orcs and tell them that they obviously meant to serve evil Melkor and so should be in constant pain all the time? Are those the people who are """winning"""? Or would saying that just be pointlessly harming them for no reason?
+
+> I couldn't care less about transgender.
+
+Michael—
+> I agree that he isn't, but it seems Important to me that if we think he isn't interested we actually establish common knowledge that we consider him at this point to be choosing to try to be a cult leader.
+
+
+I was kind of considering replying, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then sure, yes, let's table this. I hope you're having a good day."
+
+But, maybe I shouldn't do this because the "Volunteer to throw four-figure amounts of money at people in order to get them to hear me out" move is simultaneously personally degrading, psychologically coercive, extremely socially weird, and bad for my economic self-interest.
+
+https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/
+
+commit a5316c23ac837c004922e2d192c2bea914a21ebc
+Author: Zack M. Davis <zack@thecoalition.com>
+Date: Tue Mar 19 00:27:53 2019 -0700
+
+ DIS-327: broker-facing duplicate-quote route
+
+ It's sharing code with the internal resïssue-quote endpoint, because
+ that's convenient.
+
+
+
+
+Scott, like, you sent me that email piously arguing that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries because it's important for trans people's mental health. And there's a couple things that I don't understand.
+
+(1) If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of outright lying when the truth would make people sad? I don't understand why semantic mind games are OK, but lying is wrong. (Compare: "If you’re going to ignore a probabilistic counterargument, why not ignore a proof, too?") From my perspective the motte-and-bailey definition-hacking mind games are far more cruel than a simple lie. Speaking of which----
+
+(2) If "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then, like, why doesn't my mental health matter? Aren't I trans, sort of? Like, what do I have to do in order to qualify, was my being on hormones for only 5 months not good enough? Or do I have to be part of the political coalition in order for my feelings to count? We had an entire Sequence whose specific moral was that words can be wrong. And of the 37 Ways that Words Can Be Wrong, number 30 is "Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together," and number 31 is, "You use a short word for something that you won't need to describe often, or a long word for something you'll need to describe often." And this is the thing I've been trying to tell everyone about. And when I try to talk to you about it, you're like, "Doesn't matter, mental health benefits for trans people are more important according to the utilitarian calculus! Also, you're wrong." And like ... getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism (!?!?) when I'm trying to use reason to make sense of the world is observably really bad for my mental health! Does that matter at all? Also, if I'm philosophically wrong, then Eliezer was wrong in 2009, because everything I'm doing now, I learned from him. Do you really think "c'mon, parsimony doesn't matter" is an improvement on the Sequences?!
+
+(3) You write, "wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the original reason it seemed plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us", it was because we were trying to do systematically correct reasoning, with the hope of using the systematically correct reasoning to build aligned superintelligence. If we're not going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermines the reason that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever. You can't just forfeit the mandate of Heaven like that and still expect to still rule China.
+
+(4) You write, "I realize you are probably thinking something like 'This isn't just me getting triggered by some culture war thing evolved to trigger me, it actually really *is* that important that rationalists get transgender right!' [...] All I can say is that I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
+
+I don't know how much social proof influences you, but is the fact that I managed to round up Michael and Ben and Sarah and [name redacted] into a coalition to help me argue with Eliezer shift your estimate at all of whether my concerns have some objective merit? It can simultaneously be the case that I have the culture-war PTSD that you propose, and that my concerns have merit.
+
+(5) I don't know how other people's confidentiality intuitions work. Am I being an asshole by cc'ing in my coalition members (plus Anna, who is my friend even though she hasn't been helping me with this particular quest) in an email that references things you said in an email that was addressed only to me? I think this should be OK; I don't think we're talking about anything particularly secret.
+
+----
+
+
+I'm really sorry about this. I don't need Scott's help and I think Michael is being a little aggressive about that, but I guess that's also kind of Michael's style? I'm really sorry, because I still think that even very emotionally disturbed people are clearly incentivizable, and so the narrative of, "Oh, poor Zack, he's crazy, he can't help it" is not attributing me enough agency. Like, if I get really upset literally once every two years and impose a lot of care costs on other people in the process, I should be held accountable for that somehow. Last time, I ended up giving people some money (I didn't end up doing the public-praise part that I proposed in the blog post about it, because it turned out that that would have been too socially weird) but I don't know if even the money was a good social experiment or not.
+
+> No.
+> We don't have punishment.
+> We don't have morality.
+> I'm trying to change that and you are undermining the attempt!
+> We won't be friends.
+> We're not friends anymore already! Once again, I am trying to change that and you are making it impossible.
+In terms of making intellectual progress, I'm still most excited about the idea I was talking myself into all day in the "strategy huddle II" thread (I'll forward that to Jessica): "If Scott and Eliezer don't want to talk, whatever, I can just write those guys off (why did I think they were so important anyway?) and just focus on writing up the mathematically rigorous version of the thing I'm trying to say about how categories can be value-dependent because your values determine which dimensions you pay attention to (like 'birds' vs. 'flying things'), but that's really different from 'people will be sad if I use this category', and we should be able to demonstrate mathematically that the 'people will be sad if I think this' categories are less useful for making inferences. Not only will I learn lots of stuff in the process of figuring out the details, but when it's finished, our coalition can hype it up as interesting new 'Human's Guide to Words'-like content, and then at least the mathy people in our alleged community will see the parsimonious-categories-are-important thing in a context where the math will convince them and politics won't distract them."
+
+So ... I really should have just stuck to that plan and not freaked out: forget this stupid "appeal to local celebrities" game and just do cool math for two months. But when it was 4 a.m. (because I'd been obsessing all day, and I really wanted to meet my manager's deadline for the code that we want for our business, and I did write some code intermittently between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m.), I was just really upset at the whole situation, and I sent some more hasty emails, I think because at some psychological level I wanted Scott to know, "I'm so frustrated about your use of 'mental health for trans people' as an Absolute Denial Macro that I'm losing sleep over it even though we know sleep is really important for me." But then when Michael started advocating on my behalf (Michael seems to have a theory that people will only change their bad behavior when they see a victim who is being harmed), I started to minimize my claims because I have a generalized attitude of not wanting to portray/sell myself as a victim, even if it is technically literally true that I'm really hurt in a way that is causally related to other people behaving in ways that are bad. And I feel really guilty and wanting-to-appease about disappointing Michael (who has done so much for me), even though I know that Michael doesn't want me to care about disappointing him in particular, because I should just care about doing the Right Thing. I think that Michael thinks that aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. I think that's obviously true, but I just can't be too aggressive to my friends and people I admire (e.g., Anna, Scott, Eliezer). I just won't do it. I can passively let my metaphorical lawyers like Ben do it while accurately claiming to represent my interests, but I won't do it myself because I'm scared of damaging relationships. (Or offending people I worship as demigods.)
+
+So, I don't know. I think having been on the edge of a bad outcome but stepping away (I got 2ish hours worth of napping; I'll be just fine) will help me move on, and dissolve my unhealthy attachment to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity? (At the meeting on Sunday, it was pointed out that forging a new brand-name/Schelling-point-for-interesting-people-to-gather is easier than recapturing an old one.) I just ... we had a whole Sequence specifically about how you can't define a word any way you want, because you need words to map to the statistical structure in the world. I keep trying to point out, "Look, isn't that inconsistent with this newly fashionable 'categories were made for man'/'hill of meaning in defense of validity' moral? Right? Right? You have to see it? It can't possibly just be me who sees it?!" and Scott and Eliezer seem to keep rounding me off to, "Zack is upset about trans stuff which doesn't matter" even though I keep explicitly disclaiming that (while it's true that I'm upset about trans stuff that doesn't matter), that's not the part I expect them to care about. And I've just been really freaking out for three and a half months on end, because I learned everything I know from Eliezer, and the other half of everything I know from Scott, and like ... they can't really be that stupid, right? They have to just be fucking with me, right??
+
+That's really unhealthy. (We were warned that it's unhealthy: "nervously seeking reassurance is not the best frame of mind in which to evaluate questions of rationality".)
+
+The tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "losing the Category War within the rationalist community is absolutely unacceptable; if I have to do social aggression and lose friends and burn bridges if there's any hope of getting people to see the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition thing again, then I'll do it" has been causing me a lot of pain and making me make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 a.m., and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me is just crazy.)
+
+If there isn't actually any such thing in the world as a "rationalist community" (it's just a category boundary in my head that I keep attaching importance to, even though Sarah clearly explained to my why this is dumb two years ago, and I just haven't made the corresponding mental adjustments), then maybe losing the Category War within it is acceptable? Maybe that's the answer? If so, I wish I had been able to find the answer without leaving so much of a mess.
+
+Wait, maybe there is a reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name/social identity that isn't just me being stupid, and if we can find what the non-stupid reason is, then we can make better decisions.
+
+I think a non-stupid reason is that the way I talk has actually been trained really hard on this subculture for ten years: most of my emails during this whole campaign have contained multiple Sequences or Slate Star Codex links that I can just expect people to have read. I can spontaneously use the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro" in conversation and expect to be understood. That's a massive "home field advantage." If I just give up on "rationalists" being as sane as we were in 2009 (when we knew that men can't become women by means of saying so), and go out in the world to make intellectual friends elsewhere (by making friends with Quillette readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates), then I lose all that accumulated capital. The language I speak is mostly educated American English, but I rely on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her "... To Make Predictions", she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, probably because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent motte", and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. This essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in Quillette. The links and phraseology are just too context-bound.
+
+Maybe that's why I feel like I have to stand my ground and fight a culture war (even though I really don't want to be socially aggressive, and the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness makes me make crazy decisions).
+
+I feel like I have to be careful phrasing my complaints about Berkeley culture, because if I'm not super-careful, people will round me off as saying, "Help! Censorship! I'm being repressed!" and then counterargue that I'm observably not being censored (which is true, modulo Ben's concerns about distributed silencing, which I feel motivated to downplay because I don't want to sell myself as a victim). The problem is much subtler than that. Berkeley "rationalists" are very good at free speech norms and deserve credit for that! But it still feels like a liberal church where you can say "I believe in evolution" without getting socially punished. Like, it's good that you can do that. But I had a sense that more is possible: a place where you can not just not-get-punished for being an evolutionist, but a place where you can say, "Wait! Given all this evidence for natural selection as the origin of design in the biological world, we don't need this 'God' hypothesis anymore. And now that we know that, we can work out whatever psychological needs we were trying to fulfil with this 'church' organization, and use that knowledge to design something that does an even better job at fulfilling those needs!" and have everyone just get it, at least on the meta level.
+
+I can accept a church community that disagrees on whether evolution is true. (Er, on the terms of this allegory.) I can accept a church community that disagrees on what the implications are conditional on the hypothesis that evolution is true. I cannot accept a church in which the canonical response to "Evolution is true! God isn't real!" is "Well, it depends on how you choose to draw the 'God' category boundary." I mean, I agree that words can be used in many ways, and that the answer to questions about God does depend on how the asker and answerer are choosing to draw the category boundary corresponding to the English language word 'God'. That observation can legitimately be part of the counterargument to "God isn't real!" But if the entire counterargument is just, "Well, it depends on how you define the word 'God', and a lot of people would be very sad if we defined 'God' in a way such that it turned out to not exist" ... unacceptable! Absolutely unacceptable! If this is the peak of publicly acceptable intellectual discourse in Berkeley, CA, and our AI alignment research group is based out of Berkeley (where they will inevitably be shaped by the local culture), and we can't even notice that there is a problem, then we're dead! We're just fucking dead! Right? Right?? I can't be the only one who sees this, am I? What is Toronto??????
+
+Ben—
+> Just wrote to Scott explicitly asking him to alter the beacon so that people like Zack don't think that's the place to go for literally doing the thing anymore, and ideally to redirect them to us (but that's a stretch). If he actually does this, that would be a really good time to start the new group blog.
+
+> This seems like the sort of thing where it's actually in his local interest to help us, as it reduces our incentive to ask him to do hard things.
+
+
+Michael—
+> This all seems sound, but also not worth the digression. Zack, do you feel comfortable with generalizing the sort of things that Scott said, and the things that others here have said about fear of talking openly, and assuming that something similar is probably happening with Eliezer too?
+
+> If so, now that we have common knowledge, there is really no point in letting technical quibbles distract us. We need to deal with the actual crisis, which is that dread is tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while it's existence is still being denied.
+
+
+He said that he wasn't sure why the grand moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" was "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You can define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."
+
+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.
+
+
+You texted last week, "Am I agitating you in a manner that isn't a good idea? If so, please tell me."
+
+I'm tempted to speculate that I might be better at taking your feedback about how to behave reasonably rather than doing the "cowering and submission to whoever I'm currently most afraid of losing relationship-points with" thing, if you try to be gentler sometimes, hopefully without sacrificing clarity? (Concrete examples: statements like, "What the FUCK Zack!?!" are really hard on me, and I similarly took "We're not friends anymore already!" badly at the time because I was reading it as you damning me, but that one is mostly my poor reading comprehension under sleep deprivation, because in context you were almost certainly responding to my "everyone will still be friends" babbling.)
+
+But, if you think that gentleness actually sacrifices clarity in practice, then I guess I could just do a better job of sucking it up.
+
+Michael—
+> I think that the strongest argument for continuing to press on is that we need to actually be able to press on into opposition to clarity if we are going to succeed regardless of where we go. We actually have to figure out, either here or elsewhere, how to win this sort of argument decisively, as a group, against people who are acting in bad faith, and can't afford to simply accept a status quo that says that we accept defeat when faced with bad faith arguments in general.
+
+
+Wait, you lost me. What post about transgender? I've been objecting to the post about how category boundaries are arbitrary and we can redraw them for utilitarian benefits. Sure, the post used transgenderism as an illustrative example, but the main point should succeed or fail independently of the choice of illustrative example. (Obviously a person of your brilliance and integrity wouldn't invent a fake epistemology lesson just to get a convenient answer on one particular question!)
+
+> I realize that allowing one thing violates a Schelling fence that potentially keeps other people from making me do awkward things, but as far as I can tell gender dysphoria is a pretty unique problem
+
+"Conceptual gerrymandering to sneak in connotations" is _not_ a unique problem! I know you know this, because you've written about it extensively.
+
+"Conceptual gerrymandering to sneak in connotations" is not a unique problem! I know you know this, because you've written about it extensively. That's why my "twelve short stories about language" email gave "(repeat for the other examples from "The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?")" as entries II.–VII.
+
+> Zack I think - everyone else experiences their disagreement with you as a disagreement about where the joints are and which joints are important, including Scott
+> and parses the important part of Scott's post as 'the usability of the categories for humans is one thing we should use to decide which joints are important'
+> and it is annoying to be told that actually we all believe the categories should be whatever makes people happy and that this is an inexcusable rationalist sin
+> when no one believes that
+I didn't want to bring it up at the time because I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but ... you seem to be pretty explicit that your position is about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey thinks she agrees with you, but actually doesn't, that's kind of bad for our collective sanity, right?
+
+
+
+(The tenth virtue is precision! Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)
+
+ "Naïvely" hauling out the most exhaustively rigorous analytical machinery I have is the only way to shatter the surface-level symmetry between "How much do you care about this? C'mon, it isn't worth it" versus "Well, I think it is worth it."
+
+Perhaps it is "overkill" to transform the debate into "How much do you care about this? C'mon, it isn't worth it" versus "No! Fuck you! I have math, and I have a pretty decent heuristic argument about how the math translates into human practice, and I'm willing to put in more blood and pain and sweat and money and hours to make it even more rigorous if there's any hope left of getting you savvy lying bastards to stop fucking with my head."
+
+I want the people I love and trust and respect to stop fucking with my head. That's more important to me than whatever proportionality-intuition generates the word "overkill."
+
+
+Ben, I know that you've previously written about how holding criticism to a higher standard than praise distorts our collective map (in the context of effective altruism). You're obviously correct that this is a distortionary force relative to what Bayesian agents would do, but I'm worried that when we're talking about criticism of people (as opposed to ideas), the removal of the distortionary force would just result in an ugly war (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems should be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.
+
+This is why I feel like I can't give up faith that good-faith discourse eventually wins (even though I'm starting to suspect that Michael is right to suggest that it doesn't in our world). Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I can criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's ideas without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I know you guys are just fucking with me," then I don't see how that leads anywhere good, even if they really are just fucking with me.
+
+I think Anna's input could potentially be really valuable here, because this kind of issue (whether to cooperate with Society and have peace, or give it the lie at risk of war) seems like one of the core tensions between her and Michael's crew (of which I've been saying for a while that I would really like to see a peace treaty).
+
+> Self-promotion is imposing a cost on others. Eliezer, to a lesser extent Scott, and formerly Will, have all collected actual revenue from their self-promotion, on top of the less legible social capital they've acquired. It sounds like you think that this somehow creates a reciprocal obligation on our part to avoid talking about ways in which they've disappointed us or people like us. ?!?!?!?!?!
+
+> Unilateral surrender to someone strong enough to hold and defend territory, with a low enough time preference not to consume everything in it can be a good way to avoid the war of all against all. Do you think Eliezer or Scott is meeting that standard? It seems to me like Eliezer's not interested in having you as a subject, and Scott will just pass any threats from the outside right through to you.
+
+> Separately there are good pragmatic reasons to be careful about this and I don't want to ignore them - I'm really specifically arguing against what I perceive as a misapplied moralism around not criticizing people who definitely aggressed first, in a way that's much more clearly objectively aggression than criticizing someone's conduct, accurately described.
+
+
+I'd like to elaborate on what seems off to me about this.
+
+> Um. I see the value you're pointing at, but I also really don't want to attack my friends in public.
+
+What is being proposed here is creating clarity about behavioral patterns, and specifically ones that people claim not to have. What you're saying here implies that you believe creating such clarity is an attack on someone. If so, your blog is attacking trans people.
+
+What's going on here? Here's a hypothesis. Creating clarity about behavioral patterns is interpreted as an attack by the social field, and can sometimes (but not always) result in concretely worse outcomes for someone. As such, it is much easier to create clarity about behavior patterns down power gradients than up power gradients. So it's easy for you to create clarity about trans people's narcissistic behavior but hard for you to create clarity about Eliezer and Scott's narcissistic behavior (where they pretend to be pro-truth/rational/agenty and in fact aren't, and even optimize against those things).
+
+In effect, creating clarity about behavior patterns down power gradients but not up power gradients is just going to reinforce the scapegoating system. In a world with high amounts of hypocrisy about drug use, it's rather perverse to only investigate and report on the drug use of majority-black neighborhoods; it ends up maintaining the impression (to privileged people) that it's other people's problem, that someone else can be blamed, and so it does nothing to reform the drug laws.
+
+You don't get to claim that creating clarity about trans people's behavior patterns is justified because that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and also that creating clarity about Eliezer/Scott's behavioral patterns is unjustified because it would be an attack and start a war or whatever. If you're being cowardly here or otherwise unprincipled, own that instead of producing spurious justifications.
+
+> You're obviously correct that this is a distortionary force relative to what Bayesian agents would do, but I'm worried that when we're talking about criticism of people (as opposed to ideas), the removal of the distortionary force would just result in an ugly war (and not more truth).
+
+Oh come on, calling all non-androphilic trans women delusional perverts (which you've done) is totally a criticism of people. We're actual people, you know. If you call all non-androphilic trans women delusional perverts, then you are calling me a delusional pervert, and having corresponding effects on e.g. my chances of being scapegoated. (Which is not to say you shouldn't do this, but you should be honest about what you are doing!)
+
+To conclude, I'm on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not on board with a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies and then doesn't continue that effort where it leads (in this case, to Eliezer and Scott's narcissistic fantasies), and especially not if it produces spurious justifications for this behavior.
+
+
+I would be way more comfortable writing a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists" (e.g.), than "Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't use good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private." I think I'm consistent about this: contrast my writing to the way that some anti-trans-activism writers name-and-shame named individuals. (The closest I've come is mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass, and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done in desperation of other ways to make the point having failed.)
+
+Am I wrong here?
+
+Like, I acknowledge that criticism of non-androphilic trans women in general implies criticism of Jessica Taylor, and criticism of "rationalists" in general implies criticism of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander and Zack Davis, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seems really useful for maximizing the information-conveying component of the speech and minimizing the social-warfare component?
+
+
+If someone says "the Jews are OK, but they aren't Real Americans" I feel similarly concerned, and if they say "Michael is OK but he isn't a Real American" likewise not.
+
+Targeting that is Less Precise is always more violent.
+
+On Mon, Apr 8, 2019, 4:33 PM Michael Vassar <michael.vassar@gmail.com> wrote:
+
+ I think that is really really importantly backwards. If someone says "Michael Vassar is a terrible person" I hope they are OK, and I try to be empathically curious, but if they don't have an argument, I don't worry much and I worry more For them than About them. If someone says The Jews are Terrible People I see that as a much more serious threat to my safety. "rationalists and trans-girls very clearly appear to me to be the exact categories of people that get targeted by the sorts of people who would also target Jews, so this analogy is *particularly* apt.
+
+This actually interacts with the good-faith kind of social constructionism! (Which mostly isn't done, but could be done.) Speakers of my generation are more likely to say "person" when sex isn't relevant, whereas older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers similarly frown on mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
+
+
+I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of being a generic social conservative. My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."
+
+
+cut from the first draft—
+> You scream and punch him in the face. Clutching his bloody nose, Bob seems more shocked than angry. "You—you punched me."
+
+> "I wouldn't say that," you say. "It depends on how you choose to draw the category boundaries of the word 'punch.'"
+
+Um, I guess it's important to notice that the only reason I think the "Vice President" example is "depoliticized" is because I live in a bubble that's obsessed with identity (gender, &c.) politics and doesn't care about class politics. It still works if my audience lives in the same bubble as me, but it would be pretty poor performance on my part to not notice the bubble.
+
+
+
+One reason someone might hypothetically be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out, is the fear that such a policy could be abused by bad-faith nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.
+
+This is why I found myself wondering if, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I'm a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for freaking the fuck out over a blog post from 2014 (!!) and a Tweet (!!!) from November. Like, really? I, too, have probably said things that were wrong five years ago that I would be annoyed about being pressured to issue a correction for now!
+
+But ... I don't know, I thought I put in a lot of interpretive labor making a pretty convincing case that a lot of people are making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction would actually be justified in this case, and that it should be possible to take a hard stance on "categories aren't arbitrary, you idiots, just like Eliezer said in 2008" without taking a stance on what implications that might have for other more contentious questions?? Right? Right?? Like, there are noticeable differences between me and the hypothetical bad-faith nitpicker, right????
+
+My mental health is continuing to deteriorate today, so I may need to focus on that (and therefore staying employable and having money, &c.) for a while rather than whatever we're trying to accomplish here.
+
+
+I still feel sad and upset and gaslighted and I haven't done any dayjob work so far this week even though it's Tuesday afternoon. So, I feel motivated to send this email to communicate that I feel sad, even though this message is of questionable value to the recipients.
+
+
+
+
+
+Eliezer, I've spent my entire adult life in the subculture you created. You created me. Everything I'm doing now, I learned from you. I've put in a lot of effort—along with Ben and Michael and Sarah and [...] and now Jessica—trying to explain that there's a collective sanity problem that we could really use your help with. (You should see the strategy email threads we've been having behind your back!) I don't understand how repeating that people live in different mental universes is a relevant response to our thousands of words of careful arguments?
+
+I'm pretty sure everyone here is strongly in favor of Jessica's existence. But maybe, if someone thinks really carefully about it, there could be some way to protect Jessica's interests without destroying the faculty of language?! (Especially given that Jessica herself may have interests in being able to talk.)
+
+Michael—
+> My guess is that at this point Zack and Ben should both sign off actually, and maybe Sarah as well, and that this should become a conversation between Eliezer and Jessica, [...] myself, and other people who have or have historically had strong MIRI affiliations and have paid serious attention to logical decision theories. Maybe we should bring in Wei Dai, since along with Eliezer, he created logical decision theory, so in so far as there's a natural heir to the Caliphate other than Eliezer it's him. At this point, I think that if this doesn't resolve with Eliezer backing down I am pretty much obligated to involve everyone who I believe has historically taken seriously Eliezer's claims of strong principles against lying. Among other things, I think that it's clear that without standing on such a moral bedrock, Eliezer is no longer claiming to be the spiritual leader of the Caliphate (intuitively, that title passes to me?), and that the secular leader of the AI Risk Caliphate has been Demis for many years now.
+
+> Sarah, don't worry, this definitely doesn't imply involving shit-heads who want to carpet-bomb us. It might involve explicitly discussing the pros and cons of involving leftist shit-heads as part of motivating Eliezer (and/or Scott) and I think that we should try to become psychologically immune to their carpet-bombing in any event, but there may be good reasons for Sarah to remain economically coupled to their good-will, since of all of us she's the only one who may stand to receive resources from the Corporate Center-Left Coalition or to direct their resources. It does seem to me that technically, in so far as their attacks are harmless to those not seeking privilege, leftist shit-heads are Guided by the Goodness of their Weapons, and working out whether this is in fact true may be related to the logical decision theory that will enable us to integrate political threats with compassionate rational engagement and bring Eliezer and Scott back from the team of deception and privilege.
+
+In retrospect, I totally backwards to say that I was worried about you using up our bandwidth! My message was probably pretty predictable given everything else I've said, whereas you actually made progress, even if I didn't quite understand where you were going in the moment.)
+
+
+... I'm kind of perversely enjoying my position as plantiff/pawn/puppydog.
+
+But—wait. Eliezer is accusing you guys of driving me crazy?? I think I might be obligated to respond to that. But, on a weekend.
+
+
+Ben on our epistemic state—
+
+> Zack started out operating on object-level trust that "Rationalists" would generically be trying to build true maps, and that while there might be errors, even quite bad errors, in individuals, coordination would be towards truth on net, on the meta-level and all higher levels of recursion. This hypothesis was decisively falsified - political factors caused it to be false. Zack's level of trust did not pay rent, except insofar as he ended up helping catalyze the formation of a dissident circle who are sympathetic to coordinating towards truth, and not just pretending to do so.
+
+> Eliezer, as the best plausible individual representative of the "Rationalists" as currently constituted, is Eliza the bot therapist in Zack's story, letting the clock run out on the interaction with Zack instead of trying to inform him. He even initially accepted in principle financial compensation for doing this, and more generally is getting paid by MIRI donors. We should consider the whole system structurally similar to Zack's Eliza story. Regardless of the initial intent, anxious scrupulous Rationalists are paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which has no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, but remains in a facsimile of dialogue with them in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue, at least insofar as bigger revenue streams aren't available yet.
+
+> Zacks don't survive long-run in this ecosystem. If we want minds like Zack's to survive somewhere, we need an interior that justifies that level of trust. In the short run, Zack just isn't useful until he self-mods to not be vulnerable to this sort of trolling again, and give up on people exhibiting behaviors like Eliezer's (or Scott's) as not worth his time. This means modeling the politics of the situation proactively, not just defensively as a horrible mess "we" want to fix.
+
+> Jessica started out thinking that things like Eliezer's code of meta-honesty were worth parsing in detail, instead of just dismissing them as the sort of thing someone formerly scrupulous who wanted to narrate their transition to a deceptive strategy as technically okay would do. This hypothesis has been falsified as well - Jessica's attention was wasted by Eliezer on the object level, and was only valuable - like Zack's - because it clarified that people like Eliezer are not operating on the level of fidelity that justifies that attention to detail.
+
+> We should expect others who are modeling politics, including the good guys who would like to build robust networks of truth-oriented trust, to ignore clever explanations we give for our behavior that substantially resemble what Eliezer is doing, and to rationally predict that we have intent to expropriate via clever rationalizations if we behave like someone with intent to appropriate via clever rationalizations. If we were mistaken to trust Eliezer, then others would be mistaken to trust us if we externally seem to behave like Eliezer.
+
+> I'm not sure what this means on the object level except that SOME leftists and anarchists are probably much better allies than they seem to us right now. Possibly some of them have analogous confusions with respect to their faction's internal coordination mechanisms, and haven't figured out how to look trustworthy to people like us. (And also, there are way more than two or three factions.)
+
+
+Michael—
+> I don't think that we should be permanently giving up on people, but I do think that we should be regarding them as temporarily without the appeal to rights in relationship to ourselves. Varelse in Orson Scott Card speak.
+
+> I think that it was extremely worth our time to engage at this level of detail, and at an even greater level of detail in order to achieve common knowledge, as I don't think that we have achieved common knowledge*yet* if [...] still thinks that we shouldn't confidently act on the assumption that Eliezer is not doing useful things unobserved.
+
+> I would defend engagement with Eliezer for as long as we did in the past and in several future cases if we had several future relationships that seemed comparably valuable to the one we were hoping for, e.g. with a reformed Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I think that it's important that we be clear in our own minds that as of now there should be no presumptive loyalty to Eliezer over, for instance, Demis who is the Schelling Point for leader for an AI Risk coalition not Guided by the Goodness of it's Weapons.
+
+> In fact,bin all seriousness, we should see Eliezer as less trustworthy than Demis by default in light of the fact that Eliezer claimed to be following a nuanced strategy but defected while Demis never stood on any claims of morality/trustworthiness and is thus entitled to the standing of any person who seems to have managed to be successful while remaining sane enough to advance technology and to turn down large monetary gains for strategic advantage.
+
+Ben—
+> Zack, I'm not asking you not to say that publicly if that's how you honestly feel and you want to report it, but as a political matter I don't expect it to help Eliezer understand; I just expect it to make him feel sad.
+
+Jessica—
+> Worth making explicit why Eliezer's response to my criticism is sufficient reason to write him off until something majorly changes (e.g. apology and serious signals of intent to recognize and act against corruption):
+
+> - Instead of responding to my criticisms, he does a "tu quoque" (in this case accusing me of making a conflation I didn't make), which is particularly illegitimate (and thus, amusing) because I'm holding him to his standards, not mine.
+
+> - He implies I'm insane for modeling psychology. This is classic play in high-corruption gaslighting equilibria: act in bad faith while pretending to act in good faith, and label those who see it is pretend (and talk about this) as insane, to discredit them. (It's rather obvious that psychological modeling is actually a sign of sanity, not of insanity)
+
+> - He praises Zack relative to me (saying he is comparably sane because he doesn't psychologize... which, Zack does too, that's a lie). Another classic political tactic: praise one member of an alliance while blaming another, to split cracks in the alliance, turning former allies against each other.
+
+> Eliezer shifted from bullshitting in ways that plausibly defend his reputation, to actively trying to hurt me in ways that do not plausibly defend his reputation. (Him initiating a political slap fight with me actually looks worse for him than it does for me)
+
+
+> I think this is what happens when one plays politics too long without sufficiently robust defenses, and develops habits and modes of thinking in different ways. Thinking of such action as being goal-oriented with a detailed map is the wrong way to model it - as you put it, Eliezer's thinking isn't worth this level of attention to its details, as Jessica/Zack observed with its meta-honesty.
+
+> He also engaged in rhetorical actions that the Eliezer we know and value would never do, so he can't be that person at present. He is 'insane' in the sense that he has lost his mind, but it's his mind that he has lost rather than a mind in general, as such views are alas normal round these parts.
+
+Michael—
+> Common knowledge achieved.
+> Intention to transition to politics achieved in so far as everyone agrees regarding 'stay in formation, this is not a drill'.
+
+> Can everyone please let me know what you think about the value of achieving common knowledge. To my mind, we don't need Eliezer, but we absolutely need to be able to count that as value when using our 'board evaluators' or we are Totally Fucking Dead!
+
+> Now that we are doing politics at all, and conveniently, against the least skilled opponent around, it's time to start practicing offense. We have an extremely large, clear-cut weapon here. Eliezer has publicly stated his intention to commit fraud. He has publicly defrauded a number of us. If the guns that we can point at his head aren't larger than the guns already points at his head that means that he has forgotten how to see guns.
+
+Ben—
+> Eliezer's claim to legitimacy really did amount to a claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he almost uniquely was not.
+
+> "Eliezer is criminally insane" and "Eliezer's behavior is a normal failure of rationality" are not competing hypotheses from the perspective of the Sequences - they're the same hypothesis.
+
+> WE CAN'T GRADE OBJECTIVE CATEGORY DESCRIPTORS ON A CURVE.
+
+I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+In general, if someone writes to me with a criticism of the form of "That was really misleading in context; I really think it's worth clarifying to your readers", I think I would either say something like "Actually, I argue that it's not misleading because ..." or "You're right, I'll clarify." Promising to never speak about the topic again just seems weird?
+
+Michael—
+> From my perspective, she is an enemy combatant and can claim no rights in regards to either me or you. We should be lying to her because we should also be trying, when convenient, to slash her tires. I do think that it's pretty important that you absorb that point. Like, we know her to be actively acting against me in a manner that I think is unambiguously unrighteous, unprovoked and not self-serving, and we have established that Eliezer is actively breaking his oaths despite everything he has ever said about how 'you can break your principles once. After that, you don't have principles to break' and the like. Do we at least agree that he is unambiguously wither a criminal or an enemy combatant?
+
+> The latter frame is more accurate both because criminals have rights and because enemy combatants aren't particularly blameworthy. They exist under a blameworthy moral order and for you to act in their interests implies acting against their current efforts, at least temporary, but you probably would like to execute on a Marshall Plan later.
+
+> I don't really need this information, so don't bring it if it makes you uncomfortable, and it's totally fine to be 'friends' with enemy combatants, just not to feel obligations towards them mediated by lawful intuitions. We should work out the logic of this with Ben, as it's important, but basically one can have an obligation of beneficence towards a small child, a tame animal, or many other things, but to attribute rights to those things rather than entitlement to beneficence is actually to give up on the belief in rights.
+
+Um. I can imagine that you might find my attitude here frustrating for reasons analogous to how I find it frustrating when people reach for the fake precision of talking about hormone levels and genitalia as separate dimensions in a context where I think the concept they actually want is "biological sex." But that's just the objection I come up with when I run my "How could a hypothetical adversary argue that I'm being hypocritical?" heuristic; it doesn't actually make me feel more eager to talk about criminality myself.
+
+
+Ben—
+> I don't think it's worth your time to read that thread - the result was Zack decided to do all the public interpretive labor himself, just asked Eliezer for an endorsement of a pretty straightforward but insightful extension of A Human's Guide To Words, and then we have the recent thread. [...] The coordination capital we are building seems way more important than persuading Eliezer.
+
+Jack—
+> And the more this sort of thing continues the more embarrassed I am to be associated
+> Ptting this level of effort in looks pitiful
+> Like actually just pathetic
+> Sharing thread with the 3 most promising MIRI employees and offering to chat with them about it seems like not a horrible idea
+> But sharing it with the whole cult just seems like poking a nest of dog shit - nothing in this thread was sufficiently obviously bad by the standards of either cynicism or naive pattern matching, so making a fuss rather than writing off the troll looks either stupid (can't see obvious troll) or weak (have nothing better to do than kick a pile of excrement)
+> Oh or weak like Sarah read it
+> Someone needs to slap Zack. Not literally, probably.
+> But I already don't have much hope for the level of cultist cuck that Nick is. Zack seems like he might be further in that direction, but otoh he at least has narratized internal conflict about it.
+
+> Zack sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys (which I think he was correct to do conditional on email happening at all). We're (accurately) narratized as a political coalition who people feel obligated to talk to but to not take too seriously.
+
+
+I was _just_ trying to publicly settle a very straightforward philosophy thing that seemed really solid to me
+
+if, in the process, I accidentally ended up being an unusually useful pawn in Michael Vassar's deranged four-dimensional hyperchess political scheming
+
+that's ... _arguably_ not my fault
+
+
+
+"Harry, were you involved in the breakout from Azkaban?" "Involved doesn't have a simple truth condition ..."
+
+
+
+There's this thing where some people are way more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one wants to make it common knowledge (like with the blue-eyed islanders), which is really awkward for the people who are simultaneously (a) known but not commonly-known to be underperforming (such that the culture of common-knowledge-prevention is to my self-interest because I get to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually performing at that level, and my coworkers and even managers don't want to call attention to it because that would be mean—and it helps that they know that I already feel guilty about it) but also (b) tempermentally unsuited and ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation
+
+(where I'm fond of the Ayn Rand æsthetic of "I earn my keep, and if the market were to decide that I don't deserve to live anymore, I guess it would be right and I should accept my fate with dignity" and I think the æsthetic is serving a useful function in my psychology even though it's also important to model how I would change my tune if the market actually decided that I don't deserve to live)
+
+(also, I almost certainly don't have a coherent view of what "unjustly-acquired rents" are)
+
+but the "Everyone knows that Zack feels guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish him, because he's already doing enough internalized-domination to punish himself" dynamic is unsustainable if it evolves (evolves is definitely the right word here) into a loop of "feeling gulit in exchange for not doing work" rather than the intended function of "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work"
+
+I'm not supposed to be sending email during Math and Wellness Month, but I'm sending/writing this anyway because it's Wellness-relevant
+
+You've got to be strong to survive in the O-ring sector
+
+(I can actually see the multiplicative "tasks are intertwined and have to all happen at high reliability in order to create value" thing playing out in the form of "if I had fixed this bug earlier, then I would have less manual cleanup work", in contrast to the "making a bad latte with not enough foam, that doesn't ruin any of the other customer's lattes" from my Safeway-Starbucks-kiosk days)
+
+This is genuinely pretty bad
+
+I should do some of the logging-package prototyping stuff on the weekend (it looks fun/interesting enough such that I might be able to psych myself into thinking of it as a "fun" project)
+
+30 April saying, essentially (and sincerely), "Oh man oh jeez, Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're the only ones backing me up on this incredibly basic philosophy thing and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to go."
+
+(In a darkly adorable twist, Mike and Alicorn's two-year-old son Merlin was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael Vassar.)
+
+Anyway, all of this leading up to a psychological hypothesis (maybe this is "obvious", but I hadn't thought about it before): when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could afford to not-understand (pace Upton Sinclair) the "words need to carve reality at the joints" thing when it was just me freaking out alone, but "got it" almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to walk (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes)—and maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Eliezer (assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later)??
+
+This probably doesn't work if you repeat it (or if you try to do it consciously)?
+
+> I keep scratching my head here Zack. Weaker language on this would just be weaker. We aren't dealing with a problem of pedagogy here. We are dealing with a group of people who literally got together and built a movement around the need to do charity non-fraudulently but who were eventually shaped by the feedback systems they were in into doing exactly the thing they built their movement in opposition to while claiming that "anyone else would have done it and anyway some of us are vegans". Nobody is endorsing punishing people for doing things that anyone else would have done, but we are asking them to stop preventing others from trying to do actual charity and actual science, which they are currently actually opposing in order to defend their egos.
+
+Yes, this is a lame rationalization: if everyone actually knew, what would the act be for? Present day senile!Eliezer wrote of people being "pseudo-fooled in part of themselves even when they are not really-fooled" as if it were no big deal, but 2007!Eliezer identified people being pseudo-fooled as a bad thing. I'll add this to my post-ideas list (working title: "Fake Common Knowledge").
+
+he seems to be conflating transhumanist optimism with "causal reality", and then tone-policing me when I try to model good behavior of what means-end reasoning about causal reality actually looks like. This ... seems pretty cultish to me?? Like, it's fine and expected for this grade of confusion to be on the website, but it's more worrisome when it's coming from the mod team.
+
+I talked with Ray from 7 to 10:30 tonight. My intellectual performance was not so great and I did a lot of yelling and crying. Ray thinks that people need to feel safe before they can seek truth, because otherwise they'll distort stuff until they can feel safe. I think this is mostly true: it's not a coincidence that I put out a poor intellectual performance during the same conversations that I do a lot of yelling and crying. But then Ray goes on to say something about stag hunts and coordination, and I'm like, "In slogan form, 'Telling the truth is not a coordination problem!' You can just unilaterally tell the truth!" And ... it doesn't seem to land?
+
+I wish I hadn't done so much yelling and crying with Ray (it's undignified, and it makes me stupid), but when people seem to be pretty explicitly denying the possibility of actually reasoning with them, it's as if I don't perceive any alternative but to express myself in a language they might have a better hope of understanding
+
+Also, I think it's pretty ironic that this happened on a post that was explicitly about causal reality vs. social reality! It's entirely possible that I wouldn't feel inclined to be such a hardass about "Whether I respect you is off-topic" if it weren't for that prompt!
+
+
+I think mens rea as a concept is pretty clearly necessary for good incentives, at least some of the time. The law distinguishes between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") from premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), and this is an important distinction, because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable ("elastic"?) than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives is going to have analogues in nearby possible worlds who are guilty of vehicular manslaughter.) In the absence of mindreading tech, it may not be easy for the court to determine intent, but it should be possible in at least some cases: if the victim is a stranger and the weapon was a car, then it's probably manslaughter; if the victim was recently revealed to have slept with the perp's wife and the weapon was a gun purchased the previous day, then it's probably murder.
+
+I would be pretty surprised if any of you disagree with this, at least in the case of homicide? The case of misinformation that moves resources is a lot trickier, to be sure (for one extremely important disanalogy, perps don't gain from manslaughter), but I don't see what would reverse the extremely weak principle that "intent matters, somewhat, sometimes"?
+
+
+1. I didn't stay on them for long enough for the full/interesting effects. (I chickened out at 5 months because of health/fertility conservatism; might try again sometime.)
+
+2. I in particular am unusually bad at introspection?? (I think I mentioned this in the posts: there could very well have been lots of changes that I just didn't consciously/verbally register as "change due to HRT".) Possible evidence: I drink coffee often, but I don't feel like I can consciously notice its effects most of the time, except when I'm very sleepy, feel not-sleepy some time after drinking coffee, and infer, "Oh, I'm not sleepy any more; it must have been the coffee, which I know is a stimulant because everyone says so and I believe them." But the fact that I feel motivated to seek out coffee even though it doesn't "objectively" taste particularly good suggests that the drug is doing something to my brain even though I wouldn't be very good at blogging about it.
+
+3. People-in-general's verbal self-reports are heavily influenced by priors/selective-attention: if you expect HRT (or coffee) to drastically change your experience, you'll find things to notice; if you don't, then you won't. The actual effects of biochemistry are presumably real and in-principle-measuable, but the translation from "brain biochemistry" to "blog post" destroys almost all non-culturally-preconceived information.
+
+
+ My previous understanding of the present struggle (filtered through the lens of my idiosyncratic Something to Protect) seemed like a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness; I didn't really feel like I understood what Michael/Ben/Jessica were seeing as a more general dire problem. But now we have two Less Wrong moderators (Ruby and Ray, not rando n00bs) who seem pretty actively opposed to honest discourse (on the grounds that we need to solve the coordination problem of colluding to protect each other's feelings before we can feel safe enough to have arguments). Michael's cockamamie social theories about there being a socio-psychological attractor optimizing for fraud-in-general are actually starting to seem plausible??
+
+Steven, if you have time and are interested, could you read the secret ("secret") thread and my earlier meta-scuffle with Ruby and a just-now thread with Ray tell me if you're seeing what I'm seeing?
+
+Anna, I continue to be pretty baffled at how (from my perspective, stated bluntly) you seem to be basically uninterested in the mounting evidence that your entire life's work is a critical failure?
+
+(Ruby's profile says he's one of two people to have volunteered for CfAR on three continents. If this is the level of performance we can expect from a veteran CfAR participant, what is CfAR for? Like, yes, we've succeeded at getting money and eyeballs pointed at the alignment problem, which is good. But I pretty clearly remember back in 2009 that we thought this was going to take more than money and eyeballs. If we were wrong, that's good news for humanity! But there should be some sort of argument that explains why we changed our minds, rather than everyone seemingly just conveniently forgetting the original vision.)
+
+Really interested in spending time with either of you in person to double-crux on some of this! (Or more Friendship maintenance with Anna.)
+
+> People sometimes think of it as "a math problem", but that's because of the branding, not because of the reality. Yes, a lot of it is a math problem, but it's also an analytic philosophy problem, a cognitive science problem, a social psychology problem, a sociobiology problem, a sociology of science problem, a political strategy problem, and so on. Many of these are politics-laden domains, where it isn't sufficient to merely be skeptical; it's also necessary to directly talk about politics without the conversation getting derailed.
+
+Jessica—
+> 1. GiveWell (talking about how current charities are inefficient/fraudelent/useless, and how it's possible to do better with cost-benefit analyses)
+> 2. The Atheism movement (talking about how religion is false and people who promote it are being deceptive)
+> 3. The fable of the dragon tyrant (talking about how deathists are being insane, worshipping death instead of fighting it)
+> 4. AI safety as a concern for people not in the AI field (talking about how current AGI approaches would result in the discussion of the world; isn't that saying that what AI researchers are doing is bad, and they won't figure out how to do better themselves?)
+> 5. The Sequences (talking about human rationality, including talking about lies and dark side epistemology)
+> 6. Inadequate Equilibria (talking about how e.g. academia is producing disinformation or useless research, due to perverse incentives)
+
+What I was trying to point out in the thread is a pattern where people say, "Yes, of course criticism and truthseeking is important; I just think that tact is important, too," only to go on and dismiss any particular criticism as insufficiently tactful. More generally: the surface indicators of rationality are easy to fake, and if we don't know how to detect when someone is faking, then it might be surprisingly hard to notice if fake versions of "rationality" are memetically outcompeting better versions. (To which a standard reply seems to go: "Ah, but the behavior of claiming that the surface indicators are easy to fake and that you know how to do better is also easy to fake." Well, yes. That's why this is a hard problem.)
+
+
+
+Ben and Jessica, what did you get out of yesterday's meeting? Do you even remember what anyone said?
+
+I think it was Vaniver who brought up "sanity-maximizers" and admitted that that's not what "the team" is trying to do (because Society would destroy it for heresy, like Anna has told me before)? I like Vaniver, who seemed to "get" me.
+
+For me and my selfish perspective, I think the main outcome is finally shattering my "rationalist" social identity. (We knew this was coming, and I still need to mourn, but I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me; this is the first morning where "rationalists ... them" feels more natural than "rationalists ... us".)
+
+I hope I wasn't too emotional, but I guess I had nothing to lose. I have my friends and I have money, and if Oli thinks I'm annoying, I guess I can live with that. (I mean, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be: I am, in fact, annoying.)
+
+Ben—
+
+> Seems like Oli would rather have ongoing internal political disagreements than make Lesswrong anything in particular. Vaniver actually believes that they should behave esoterically. Jim claimed that he updated during the meeting towards believing that norms had in fact shifted - possible he’ll make more downstream updates later. I don’t know how to characterize Ray.
+
+> Everyone agreed that Zack was right and Scott wrong on the substantive issue of category boundaries, and I think agreed with my characterization of Scott as conflating basic decency with giving into extortion.
+
+> There basically seems like there is no appetite for becoming the sort of counterparty we could negotiate with, and it seems like they think we’re probably right to leave.
+
+I actually still feel pretty motivated to write for Less Wrong, but now more in the spirit of "marketing channel for my own writing" and "fuck you guys" rather than my previous hope of recapturing the beacon.
+
+I was really grateful to Jim for piping up with, "We are somewhat cowardly about what we curate" (concerning why "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" didn't get Curated). (I'm not sure if he actually used the word "cowardly", but that was the sense.) I was like, "Thanks, that makes me respect you more!" (Ray was maintaining that my pedagogy wasn't good enough.)
+
+I am a high-neuroticism person (the sex difference is only d = 0.4, so this isn't model-breakingly surprising; it's like being a woman who's 6'2")
+
+In the absence of more details, I'm inclined to speculate that what looks from one perspective like "worse at predicting other people" is actually something more like "preexisting social naïveté (the kind that goes along with an autism-spectrum quotient +1.7 standard deviations from the male mean) plus more courage equals less social savviness, which is horrifying from the perspective from someone who thinks of savviness as a survival skill, but OK from the perspective of someone following a different 'life-history strategy' that regards savviness as non-normative."
+
+Suppose there are 5 true heresies, but anyone who's on the record believing more than 1 gets burned as a witch. Then it's impossible to have a unified rationalist community, because people who want to talk about 1 heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. This is why Scott Alexander can't get the philosophy-of-categorization right in full generality (even though he's written exhaustively about the correct answer, and he and I have a common enemy in the social-justice egregore): he can't afford to. He's already spent his Overton budget on anti-feminism.
+
+
+
+I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and Mean—I don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."
+
+I'm not worried about scenarios where posts criticizing MIRI are marked as spam. That would be too obvious. You are a smart and moral person who would never consciously do anything obviously corrupt.
+
+I'm more worried about elephant-in-the-brain scenarios where, for example, "rationalist" higher-ups who don't consciously think of themselves as corrupted by political power games nevertheless write superficially-plausible bullshit hit pieces denouncing their political rivals as "likely to lie or manipulate" that get highly upvoted based on the author's high status (rather than anyone having thought critically about the content of the charges) and later seemingly-positively cited by their colleagues as an example of the community immune system making an update.
+
+
+In summary, what I see is a culture that has given up on the common interest of many causes, a culture where even our best and brightest are mostly focused on colluding to be nice to each other, minimizing social attack surface, and funneling money to branded EA institutions—even when their own fans can see that they're capable of so much more. In contrast, I want to work on asking interesting questions and then getting the right answer for the right reasons, in public (so that people who aren't already my closest trusted friends can learn, too). Under these circumstances, I don't want the main gravity well to award itself more authority to clear the neighborhood around its orbit, because I haven't been given sufficient reason not to expect that authority to be wielded against me and mine.
+
+ * "losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him", I think Ben-and-Jessica would see as [...] angry about living in simulacrum level 3 and we're worried about everyone else."
+
+
+It seems to that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir privately feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create internal clarity around a thing.
+
+I think this has to mean either
+(a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated
+or
+(b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.
+
+This seems like a pretty important impasse to resolve. I don't think even Zack seriously thinks option (a) is sustainable long-run, which is some evidence for (b) but not decisive. I'm not sure (a) and (b) are actually separate hypotheses, rather than just different frames.
+
+or (c) I've ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular, and while I've made a lot of progress unwinding this, I'm still, still not done, and him seeming to respect me in person at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit ("Ooh, I wish you'd want me to stay / I'll be alright / Just not tonight")
+
+So a philosopher trying to recover a partially-destroyed word using ostensive definition needs to say, "You know all these specific examples (training data) of things we call 'X'? Okay, so, that training data has been mislabeled. Actually, these-and-such specific things are false-positives (your corrupt Society calls them 'X', but they're not) and these-and-such specific things are false-negatives (your corrupt Society doesn't call them 'X', but they are)—and that's the true meaning of 'X'."
+
+angels who timelessly perceive the universal wavefunction sub specie aeternitatis would have no motivation for a shorter encoding for "sex characteristics not changeable at tech level x". But mortal creatures who actually live in a Society with tech level x:=x₀ would, because they need it to compress their descriptions of the world they see (in which, e.g., trans men sometimes get pregnant).
+
+Oh, I think I see what you're getting at if I forget the "application" and just think about binary vectors. In the beginning, there are two kinds of vectors: [0, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], and [1, 1, 1, 1, ..., 1]. As technology gets better, we gain the ability to flip more coordinates from 0 to 1. First we learn how to make [1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then we learn how to make [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, ... 0], then [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, ... 0].
+
+I think you're saying it's lame to make a classifier with a pretentious name that's like, "One 1, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, but then the classifier gets updated to "Two 1s, then zeroes" when the tech allows that, &c.
+
+What I'm saying is that, in any tech regime between the stone age and the Singularity, your population does in fact have three distinct clusters that you might want to use language to talk about: the "all 0's" cluster, the "some 1s, then 0s" cluster, and the "all 1s" cluster. In the very early and very late tech regimes, maybe you don't care about the middle category and just use a two-category system. I think that we live in an early regime that needs three categories.
+
+As far as the state ideology of California is concerned, people who learn math from textbooks rather than dutifully attending classes don't exist. As far as the ideology taught in those schools' social-science classes is concerned, males who wish they were shaped like you but think this is obviously not an intersex condition don't exist and merely having a word for to name them is harmful. I think it makes sense that I'm at war here! If I can avoid it, I don't want to cause collateral damage to you if you're at war with a strain non-progressive authoritarian collectivism which is lower on my enemy list than yours. But if I can't cheaply avoid it (in that I don't want to say silent in situations like this or pay a disclaimer tax), maybe we need to accept some small amount of collateral damage from each other???
+
+Let's add the "lawyer" structure back in. I'm sitting at a restaurant and someone else complains that they ordered a burger but got a veggie burger. Why is it trolling if I speak up in their defense, but not if I speak up about my own burger order? It seems to me that the same interest is being defended (the right to use unmarked "burger" to mean "meat(1)" and expect people to know what you meant rather than pretend not to in order to save animals), and that's what matters (rather than whose name gets listed as "defendant" or who has the philosophy skills to explain why they feel cheated by the veggie burger).
+
+
+> If you are rounding off "they're trying to make me say I'm one of these other things instead of 'autogynephile'" to "they're trying to kill me" then, uhh, stop trying to kill trans and nonbinary people who Blanchard's model fits poorly??? (Like, this is all really hyperbolic! Maybe we shouldn't do this silly exaggeration thing???)
+> - Like, if you can understand why being misrepresented even in this slight way is painful, can't you try to reduce the harm that would come from imposing an ill-fitting ontology on lots of socially vulnerable people???
+> - (Also some trans people don't think it's an intersex brain thing!! They might have a social constructionist view etc.)
+> So it seems like you're going about this "getting a short message length" thing in an overly zero-sum fashion (trying to gain representation at the expense of other people's representation).
+
+(zero-sum actors, e.g. neo nazis, are going to be pushing in various ways that make it easier to push along in their direction than it would if it were just you).
+
+> I think this is how the political factions end up being "protect minorities and be incoherent" and "harm minorities and be locally coherent". Different respectability/violence tradeoffs (to get a mix of zero sum and non zero sum energy). And these define the Overton window, whereas many other Overton windows could be drawn instead.
+
+In the possible world where the parameters of male sexual psychology are such that autogynephilia doesn't exist "but everything else is the same", then I don't think you get the kind and scope of trans-activism movement that Saotome-Westlake's and Adams-Miller's writing is a reaction to. In this world, you still get Judith Butler (AFAB, Gender Trouble published 1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (AFAB, Sexing the Body published 2000), but I think you don't get pronoun stickers at conferences in 2018 and you don't get a "three-year-old [...] is a girl now; she verbally confirmed it!" social-reality enforcement campaign in 2020.
+
+To your second question, it might actually depend on how you operationalize "influence"! Notably, the campaign to trans MMB (whose parents met on lesswrong.com) is being run predominantly by AFAB people; they're just combatants in the service of an ideology that I don't think would have been so memetically fit if it weren't such a convenient accommodation for AGP. (At least, that's my theory under the doctrine of "algorithmic intent"; the people involved don't think of themselves as combatants in the service of anything.)
+
+
+I think your reputation (in the jungle growing around the ruins of what we once called the "rationalist community") has some amount of instrumental value: most of why you were so useful to me during the Category War when everyone I trusted was fucking with me, is that I was leaning on you for internal social proof ("Michael thinks it makes sense that I'm murderously angry about this, and that makes me feel brave enough to keep harrassing Scott and Eliezer instead of quietly committing mind-suicide"), but that only worked because I had a cached reputation of you as one of the Old-Time Rationalist Elders. It seems unfortunate that you don't have the asset of that reputation anymore among today's jungle-dwellers.
+
+
+-----
+
+7 Feb conversation with "Wilhelm" about Rust All-Hands
+
+M. showed people this funny Tweet on his phone: https://twitter.com/reduct_rs/status/1093599017303457793 and my uncontrolled facial expression was probably one of annoyance rather than mirth
+ReductRs on Twitter
+
+https://twitter.com/reduct_rs/status/1093599017303457793
+> Man Who Finds ‘They’ Pronouns Confusing Has No Problem Calling His Computer "She"
+
+You sent
+I don't know if he noticed; it's not like he was testing me for facecrime; showing ppl funny Tweets on your phone is just what everyone does. But maybe the little moments add up?
+You sent
+I lamented that the karoke machine didn't have the background lyrics for the part of "Prince Ali" where the women are fawing over Aladdin, and wokebro said that now that he thinks of it, the song is problematic, and I said, jovially, "It was 1992; it was a different time"
+You sent
+Obviously, no one is going to throw a fit over me casually defending the Disney films of my youth; that's not purity test material. But maybe the little moments add up, as people gradually get a read of who's sending what signals
+
+oh, I guess there was also a moment where I told the wife, "You're our only female vocalist; you should make sure to sing the 'Hope he doesn't see right through me' line in 'Be a Man' from Mulan", which I thought was an obviously innocuous/relevant comment (it was in fact the case that no one else had the voice for that part), I could imagine someone having a negative micro-reaction on the grounds that I was being exclusionary by calling attention to her sex, or because of counterfactual transphobia (I wouldn't have said that if there was also a trans woman in the room, which maybe makes it a bad thing to say even if there wasn't??)
+You sent
+that's sheer speculation; I don't know how the 2019 algorithm works; I haven't been downloading patches since 2009
+
+except, oops, I'm unironically guilty of sexism by referring to the woman as one of the dev's wife, when she's a Site Engineer at GitHub in her own right and therefore deserves one-of-us Hacker status even if she hasn't been working with Rust specifically
+You sent
+you, at least, will forgive me
+
+-----
+
+to Wilhelm 6 Mar 2019
+
+so much stupid drama among the "rationalists"
+You sent
+two non-passing MtFs are kicking up a fuss about my friend Anna allegedly discriminating against trans women, and people are taking this seriously
+You sent
+in contrast to my view (speaking only for myself; Anna is totally innocent) that statistically "discriminating" (i.e., using Bayesian reasoning) against trans women when hiring for a rationality org is just straightforwardly CORRECT
+
+
+at least men's and women's bodies will make similar numbers of paperclips
+You sent
+where "similar" means Cohen's d around 0.9
+
+8 Mar:
+
+watching television is different now that I have anti-prog antibodies
+
+on The Good Place (2016—), the neurotic philosophy professor character is black, and the idiot comic relief guy is Asian
+You sent
+I like Superstore (2015—) as a moderately-funny workplace comedy, but sometimes it veers into prog signaling in a way that just—isn't even well-done? (the most egregious one was when the disabled mulatto main-cast character is attracted to a woman at an anti-trans bathrooms protest, and is faced with the dilemma of, "She's hot, but her views are beyond the pale")
+
+Lauren Ash's character on Superstore is written in a behaviorally-masculine way that makes me swoon (in a world with magical body-swapping, AGPs would be this kind of woman), but Lauren Ash probably doesn't actually behave that way in real life
+
+[11 April:] Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992–1999) got preachy ... like, three episodes in a seven year run
+
+
+30 March
+> The cynicism may not be misplaced? The language of allyship is not a credible signal (in the language of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory) of actually being an ally if non-allies can translate their agenda into that language and are incentivized to do so.
+
+he Liked it; as if you can get away with explaining the game theory of Havel's greengrocer as long as you frame it as "some greengrocers are actually enemies of the people"
+You sent
+"even if they have the sign up"
+
+
+13 April
+
+> Another problem with the view that "how to draw category boundaries is based on subjective priorities" perspective is that it is solipsistic. Your priorities re the territory aren't something you can always dictate; sometimes the territory is dictating priorities to you, and you need to figure out the right categories to address this pressure.
+> For instance, if you are a fisherman, you may not care about whether a dolphin is a fish: you can catch both in nets. But if you are a dophin breeder, then dolphins being mammals matters a lot more.
+> In the case of dolphins, most people won't have to breed dolphins or house them, so they lack skin-in-the-game to care about the exact categorization of dolphins
+
+one possible failure mode of this marketing campaign is that people who saw the object-level culture war version "... To Make Predictions" will have an Absolute Denial Macro reaction, but people who see the meta-level version about dolphins will just be like "This is obvious; everyone already knows this, not worth upvoting or discussion"
+
+there's no way to win
+
+> Perhaps because they don't think they have skin-in-the-game
+
+EVERYONE has skin in the game of Bayesian epistemology!!!
+
+------
+
+Discord conversation 23 Jan 2019
+
+but I need the phrase "actual women" in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call "trans women" would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology
+
+Kelsey—
+what's wrong with 'cis women'?
+
+me—
+it's _pointlessly obfuscatory_
+in this particular context
+
+Kelsey—
+also, cis women get boob jobs all the time
+the people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want
+are mostly cis women
+cis women get labia reconstruction sometimes
+cis women get tummy tucks
+I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints
+
+Elena—
+"the original thing that already exists without having to try" sounds fake to me
+
+
+I agree that the "SneerClub et al. hates us because they're evil bullies" hypothesis has a grain of truth to it, but stopping the analysis there seems ... _incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving_?
+
+
+------
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0WA95Anng7UZZEjqYv2aWC4LxZJU7KPvcRnxkTdmNJpH4PoQQgEFtqszPbCiCnqfil?comment_id=10159410429909228
+
+If you listen to why _they_ say they hate us, it's because we're racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response to seems to trend towards, "That's obviously false (Scott voted for Warren, look at all the social democrats on the LW/SSC serveys, &c.); they're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds." (Fair paraphrase?)
+
+But ... the smears have a grain of truth to them, right? If "sexism" means "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", the "SSC et al. are crypto-sexists" charge is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/.../contra-grant-on.../). (Crypto-racist, crypto-fascist, &c. are left as an exercise to the reader.)
+
+You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism", but that's only convincing if you've _already_ been trained in the "use empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes" tradition; the people with a California-public-school-social-studies-plus-Tumblr education don't already _know_ that. (Source: I didn't know this at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't have Tumblr then.)
+
+In that light ... can you see why someone 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 ethical consideration than "respect confidentiality requests"? The "debate ideas, not people" thing is a specific meta-ideological innovation, not baseline human morality!
+
+If our _actual_ problem is "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time (https://www.lesswrong.com/.../heads-i-win-tails-never...)", but we _think_ our problem is "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we're in trouble!!
+
+
+> We also have an inevitable Kolmogorov Option issue but that should not be confused with the inevitable Evil Bullies issue, even if bullies attack through Kolmogorov Option issues.
+
+Being transparent about the game theory I see: intuitively, it seems like I have a selfish incentive to "support" the bullies (by publicly pointing out that they have a point, as above) insofar as I'm directly personally harmed by my social network following a Kolmogorov Option strategy rather than an open-dissidence Free Speech for Shared Maps strategy, and more bullying might cause the network to switch strategies on "may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb" grounds? Maybe I should explain this so people have a chance to talk me out of it?
+... hm, acutally, when I try to formalize this with the simplest possible toy model, it doesn't work (the "may as well be hung ..." effect doesn't happen given the modeling assumptions I just made up). I was going to say: our team chooses a self-censorship parameter c from 0 to 10, and faces a bullying level b from 0 to 10. b is actually b(c, p), a function of self-censorship and publicity p (also from 0 to 10). The team leaders' utility function is U(c, b) := -(c + b) (bullying and self-censorship are both bad). Suppose the bullying level is b := 10 - c + p (self-censorship decreases bullying, and publicity increases it).
+My thought was: a disgruntled team-member might want to increase p in order to induce the leaders to choose a smaller value of c. But when I do the algebra, -(c + b) = -(c + (10 - c + p)) = -c - 10 + c - p = -10 - p. (Which doesn't depend on c, seemingly implying that more publicity is just bad for the leaders without changing their choice of c? But I should really be doing my dayjob now instead of figuring out if I made a mistake in this Facebook comment.)
+
+> Eliezer is not a private person - he's a public figure. He set in motion a machine that continues to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on moral authority claims centered around his ability to be almost uniquely sane and therefore benevolent. (In some cases indirectly through his ability to cause others to be the same.) "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically.
+
+> If this is TRUE (and also not a threat to destroy the world), then it's important to say, and to actually extract that work. But if not, then it's abuse! (Even if we want to be cautious about using emotionally loaded terms like that in public.)
+
+> We've falsified to our satisfaction the hypothesis that Eliezer is currently sane in the relevant way (which is an extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Eliezer in the current environment). This should also falsify the hypothesis that the sanity-maintenance mechanisms Eliezer set up work as advertised.
+
+> The machine he built to extract money, attention, and labor is still working, though, and claiming to be sane in part based on his prior advertisements, which it continues to promote. If Eliezer can't be bothered to withdraw his validation, then we get to talk about what we think is going on, clearly, in ways that aren't considerate of his feelings. He doesn't get to draw a boundary that prevents us from telling other people things about MIRI and him that we rationally and sincerely believe to be true.
+
+> The fact that we magnanimously offered to settle this via private discussions with Eliezer doesn't give him an extra right to draw boundaries afterwards. We didn't agree to that. Attempting to settle doesn't forfeit the right to sue. Attempting to work out your differences with someone 1:1 doesn't forfeit your right to complain later if you were unable to arrive at a satisfactory deal (so long as you didn't pretend to do so).
+
+--------
+
+7 May—
+> I'm still pretty frustrated with the way you seem to dismiss my desire for a community that can get the basics right as delusional! Yes, I remember how you said in 2009 that you're not going to say the Things You Can't Say, and you keep repeating that you tried to tell me that public reason doesn't work, but that seems really fundamentally unresponsive to how I keep repeating that I only expect consensus on the basic philosophy stuff (not my object-level special interest). Why is it so unrealistic to imagine that the actually-smart people could enforce standards in our own tiny little bubble of the world? (Read the "worthless cowards" political/rhetorical move as an attempt to enforce the standard that the actually-smart people should enforce standards.)
+
+> I'm also still pretty angry about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never actually going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! I didn't just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them: ["A Sense That More Is Possible"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible), ["Raising the Sanity Waterline"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline)
+
+> Can you please acknowledge that I didn't just make this up? Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours
+
+Or see ["A Fable of Science and Politics"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hfGNLf4Hg5DXqJCF/a-fable-of-science-and-politics), where the editorial tone is pretty clear that we're supposed to be like Daria or Ferris, not Charles.
+
+> But, it's kind of bad that I'm thirty-one years old and haven't figured out how to be less emotionally needy/demanding; feeling a little bit less frame-locked now; let's talk in a few months (but offer in email-before-last is still open because rescinding it would be dishonorable)
+
+
+> I liked the conversation and like being on good terms and do not wish to be negative in what I am about to say. That said, if it's okay with you, I in general don't want to receive offers of money anymore (nor actual money either); I think I used to regard them as good-faith proposals for mutual benefit between consenting adults a la libertarianism, and at the moment I am afraid that if I ever accept money (or you ever give me money for an email or something) it'll appear in some Ben Hoffman essay as "using you" or some similar such thing, and receiving such offers (or taking them), given that I am not in fact in much need of money at the present margin, looks to me like not a good way to further my own goals as a consenting adult. (I appreciate the email you then sent afterward; I'd planned to write this before you sent that email, and it still seemed worth saying, but I appreciate also your own efforts to create a low-drama context.)
+
+> Re delusions, perhaps "ideals, which are useful but also partly intentionally simplified/inaccurate so as to be easier to unite around, and which for simplicity one coordinates as though others share" might be a better way to describe them, since sometimes simplified models have uses. Also, of course, the desire part can't be delusional; desires don't have truth-values; only predictions can be false-and-protecting-themselves-from-evidence. You can desire whatever you want, and can work toward it!
+
+> Regarding whether those ideals were ever the thing that a sensible but unbiased seeker-for-uniting-ideals, observing the 2008-2010 community, would've extrapolated from our community's speech and writing:
+
+> I agree such a person might've gotten your ideal from "a sense that more is possible", "raising the sanity waterline", and for that matter the facebook post about local validity semantics. Also from Michael Vassar's speech at the time about how he just went ahead and discussed e.g. race and gender and IQ and didn't seem to get ill effects from this and thought other people should do so too. too.
+> I think there are also pieces of speech one can point to from 2008-2010 that point toward it being unsurprising if people avoid controversial issues, e.g. "politics is the mind-killer" and its reception/quotation"; my own discussion of the essay "things you can't say" and my getting of Benton House to read this essay; various other things that others in good regard (not Eliezer) said to me privately at the time.
+> My own extrapolated ideal from all of this at the time was something like: "Ah, our ideal is 'let's try to figure out how to actually think, and practice it in concrete cases, while meanwhile dodging examples in public that risk getting us into trouble; practicing on less politics-inducing examples should work fine while developing the art, and is a net better idea than heading toward places where our nascent community may get torn apart by politics'".
+
+> (Looking at that last bullet point myself today, that claim seems far from obviously true, though also far from obviously false. It is therefore not a sentence I would say today (to avoid saying things that aren't likely enough to be true). It also seems to me today that we have done less to develop the core art of epistemic rationality than Eliezer hoped for in those posts, partly for lack of diligence and partly because the project itself proved harder and more likely to stir up hard-to-avoid psychological and social cans of instability than I initially expected. I guess my current guess is something like: "politics: can't rationality with it, can't rationality without it", although "it's hard to figure out how to" is maybe more accurate than simply "can't".)
+
+
+
+> When forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether or not I should cut my dick off would become a political issue. That's new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I'm not trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I'm trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" are going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interferes with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but can't correct the mistake (because that would be politically inconvenient), then the 2019-era "rationalists" are worse than useless to me personally. This probably doesn't matter causally (I'm not an AI researcher, therefore I don't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I'm part of a reference class that includes AI researchers).
+
+> Fundamentally, I just don't think you can do consisently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"/"Dark Side Epistemology" mechanism. You, Anna, in particular, are unusually good at thinking things without saying them; I think most people facing similar speech restrictions just get worse at thinking (plausibly including Eliezer), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's easier to recommend "What You Can't Say" to your housemates than to put it on a canonical reading list, for obvious reasons.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+-----
+
+
+there's this thing where some people are way more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one wants to make it common knowledge which is really awkward for the people who are simultaneously (a) known but not commonly-known to be underperforming (such that the culture of common-knowledge-prevention is to my self-interest because I get to collect the status and money rents of being a $150K/yr software engineer without actually performing at that level, and my coworkers and even managers don't want to call attention to it because that would be mean—and it helps that they know that I already feel guilty about it) but also (b) tempermentally unsuited and ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation
+
+(where I'm fond of the Ayn Rand æsthetic of "I earn my keep, and if the market were to decide that I don't deserve to live anymore, I guess it would be right and I should accept my fate with dignity" and I think the æsthetic is serving a useful function in my psychology even though it's also important to model how I would change my tune if the market actually decided that I don't deserve to live)
+
+> but the "Everyone knows that Zack feels guilty about underperforming, so they don't punish him, because he's already doing enough internalized-domination to punish himself" dynamic is unsustainable if it evolves (evolves is definitely the right word here) into
+
+a loop of "feeling gulit in exchange for not doing work" rather than the intended function of "feeling guilt in order to successfully incentivize work"
+
+You've got to be strong to survive in the [O-ring sector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development)
+
+(I can actually see the multiplicative "tasks are intertwined and have to all happen at high reliability in order to create value" thing playing out in the form of "if I had fixed this bug earlier, then I would have less manual cleanup work", in contrast to the "making a bad latte with not enough foam, that doesn't ruin any of the other customer's lattes" from my Safeway-Starbucks-kiosk days)
+
+------
+
+Discord messaging with Scott in October 2021—
+
+However subjectively sincere you are, I kind of have to read your comments as hostile action in the rationalist civil war. (Your claim that "it’s fair for the community to try to defend itself" seems to suggest you agree that this is a somewhat adversarial conversation, even if you think Jessica shot first.) A defense lawyer has an easier job than a rationalist—if the prosecution makes a terrible case, you can just destroy it, without it being your job to worry about whether your client is separately guilty of vaguely similar crimes (that the incompetent prosecution can't prove).
+
+[context for "it's fair for the community to defend itself"—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnFqyPLqbiKL8nSR7/my-experience-at-and-around-miri-and-cfar-inspired-by-zoe?commentId=qsEMmdo6DKscvBvDr
+
+> I more or less Outside View agree with you on this, which is why I don't go around making call-out threads or demanding people ban Michael from the community or anything like that (I'm only talking about it now because I feel like it's fair for the community to try to defend itself after Jessica attributed all of this to the wider community instead of Vassar specifically) "This guy makes people psychotic by talking to them" is a silly accusation to go around making, and I hate that I have to do it!
+]
+
+
+[note: comment this is quoting is at 92 karma in 40 votes]
+> hey just responded with their "it's correct to be freaking about learning your entire society is corrupt and gaslighting" shtick.
+
+I will absolutely bite this bullet. You once wrote a parable (which I keep citing) about [a Society in which it becomes politically fashionable to claim that thunder comes before lightning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/). Imagine living in that Society in the brief period where the taboo is being established. Imagine taking epistemic rationality seriously, thinking that your friends and community leaders take it seriously, and trying to make sense of all of them, seemingly in lockstep, suddenly asserting that thunder comes before lightning, and acting like this is perfectly normal. When you point out that no one believed this ten years ago and ask what new evidence came in, they act like they don't remember. When you pull out videos and textbooks to argue that actually, lightning comes before thunder, they dodge with, "Well, it's depends on what you mean by the word 'before.'" (Technically, true!)
+Eventually, you would get used to it, but at first, I think this would be legitimately pretty upsetting! If you were already an emotionally fragile person, it might even escalate to a psychiatric emergency through the specific mechanism "everyone I trust is inexplicably lying about lightning → stress → sleep deprivation → temporary psychosis". (That is, it's not that Society being corrupt directly causes mental ilness—that would be silly—but confronting a corrupt Society is very stressful, and that can [snowball into](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/11/11/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-dynamic-systems/) things like lost sleep, and sleep is [actually really](https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short) [biologically important](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/).)
+
+This is a pretty bad situation to be in—to be faced with the question, "Am I crazy, or is everyone else crazy?" But one thing that would make it slightly less bad is if you had a few allies, or even just an ally—someone to confirm that the obvious answer, "It's not you," is, in fact, obvious. But in a world where everyone who's anyone agrees that thunder comes before lightning—including all the savvy consequentialists who realize that being someone who's anyone is an instrumentally convergent strategy for acquiring influence—anyone who would be so imprudent to take your everyone-is-lying-about-lightning concerns seriously, would have to be someone with ... a nonstandard relationship to social reality. Someone meta-savvy to the process of people wanting to be someone who's anyone. Someone who, honestly, is probably some kind of major asshole. Someone like—Michael Vassar!
+
+
+From the perspective of an outside observer playing a Kolmogorov-complicity strategy, your plight might look like "innocent person suffering from mental illness in need of treatment/management", and your ally as "bad influence who is egging the innocent person on for their own unknown but probably nefarious reasons". If that outside observer chooses to draw the category boundaries of "mental illness" appropriately, that story might even be true. So why not quit making such a fuss, and accept treatment? Why fight, if fighting comes at a personal cost? Why not submit?
+
+I have my answer. But I'm not sure you'd understand.
+
+
+> I disagree with your assessment that your joining the Vassarites wasn't harmful to you
+
+As compared to what? In the counterfactual where Michael vanished from the world in 2016, I think I would have been just as upset about the same things for the same reasons, but with fewer allies and fewer ideas to make sense of what was going on in my social environment.
+
+I've got to say, it's really obnoxious when people have tried to use my association with Michael to try to discredit the content of what I was saying—interpreting me as Michael's pawn.
+Gwen, one of the "Zizians", in a blog post about her grievances against CfAR, has [a section on "Attempting to erase the agency of everyone who agrees with our position"](https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position), complaining about how people try to cast her and Somni and Emma as Ziz's minions, rather than acknowledging that they're separate people with their own ideas who had good reasons to work together. I empathized a lot with this. My thing, and separately Ben Hoffman's [thing about Effective Altruism](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/), and separately Jessica's thing in the OP, don't really have a whole lot to do with each other, except as symptoms of "the so-called 'rationalist' community is not doing what it says on the tin" (which itself isn't a very specific diagnosis). But insofar as our separate problems did have a hypothesized common root cause, it made sense for us to talk to each other and to Michael about them.
+Was Michael using me, at various times? I mean, probably. But just as much, _I was using him_: from my perspective, I was leaning on Michael for social proof for high-variance actions that I wouldn't have been socially brave enough to take unilaterally—but because Michael had my back, and because my brain still had him tagged as a "rationalist" Authority figure form back in the Overcoming Bias days, that made it okay. Particularly with the November 2018–April 2019 thing (where I, with help from Michael and Ben and Sarah and later Jessica, kept repeatedly pestering you and Eliezer to clarify that categories aren't arbitrary—that started because I flipped the fuck out when I saw [Eliezer's "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032). That was the "Vassarites" doing an _enormous_ favor for _me_ and _my_ agenda. (If Michael and crew hadn't been there for me, I wouldn't have been anti-social enough to keep escalating.) And you're really going to try to get away with claiming that they were making my situation worse? That's absurd. Have you no shame?
+
+
+
+I just wish you'd notice that it is a choice, and that there is a conflict: the lightning-first dissidents in your parable absolutely should not be applying [mistake theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) or the principle of charity to smart thunder-first interlocutors like Kolmogorov, because you've specified in the story that Kolmogorov isn't being intellectually honest! The theory that Kolmogorov is making mere "honest mistakes" makes bad predictions, because actually-honest cognitive mistakes would be random, rather than systematically favoring the orthodoxy.
+
+ Eliezer was offering a vision of a new mental martial art of systematically correct reasoning: "rationalist" in the sense used in the Sequences meant someone who studies rationality (like [Robin Dawes](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0155752154/) or E.T. Jaynes), the way "physicist" means someone who studies physics.
+
+Contrast that to how, in the Alicorner conversation the other day, Kelsey expresses anger at me over ["the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men [...] and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us"](https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/899705780402552852). I think this sense of "wanting to be a rationalist" (wanting to belong to the social cluster) and making sure that "we" don't alienate potential should be seen as obviously non-normative. I don't care about the movement except insofar as it succeeds in advancing the ideology.
+
+See Eli (with many emoji-agreements) in the Alicorner conversation arguing that I shouldn't have taken "DMs open for questions" literally on the presumption that once someone has declared that they "are trans", theory is unwelcome. I appreciate that this crowd is much more intellectually tolerant than people who are actually woke. But insane religious fantatics who "merely" want heretics to know their place (as opposed to wanting to hurt or exile them) are still insane religious fanatics. How do you live like this?!
+
+But those are cases of different conceptual boundaries (which represent probabilistic inferences about the real world) being conventionally attached to the same word/symbol, such that you should disambiguate which concept is meant when it's not clear from context. If you do the disambiguation, you're not accepting an unexpected X deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered Y; you just have two different conceptual boundaries that both use the symbol "Y".
+
+And the persistent lack of clarity on this point is very obviously motivated. When people like Quillette editor Colin Wright say, "Look, I'm not questioning your 'gender', whatever that is; I'm just saying that this female {locker room/prison/sports league/&c.} is on the basis of sex, not gender", then the people who praise you for writing "... Not Man for the Categories" are not satisfied.
+
+the reason the bitterness is there is because of this situation where our marketplace of ideas is rigged, the marketplace owners know it's rigged, and will admit to it in private, and even in public (as in "Kolmogorov Complicity") if you ask the right way—but the "rationalist" and "EA" brand names and marketing machines are still out there sucking up attention and resources based on claims to excellence that everyone in the know actually _agrees_ are false! (And people are still citing "... Not Man for the Categories" without noticing that the edit-note's admission completely undermines sections IV.–VI.) I spent four years of my life arguing that you were wrong about something in increasing technical detail, and Yudkowsky still says you're ["always right"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419)! Obviously, I get that it's not your fault that you write faster than everyone else and Yudkowsky is an arrogant prick. But it's still not fair, and it still stings, and I don't think it's Michael fault that I feel this way, even if I used specific framings (marketing machines, &c.) that came from conversations involving him (would it be better if I felt the same way, but were less articulate about why?), and he was my political ally for a couple years. (I haven't even talked to the guy in ten months!! My last experience with him was actually very bad!)
+
+And when Jessica writes a post to talk about her experiences, it seems messed up that you barge in to make it all about Michael, get the top-voted comment (341 points!), and Yudkowsky boosts you as a reliable narrator ("leaving out the information from Scott's comment about a MIRI-opposed person who is [...] causing psychotic breaks in people"), and the voting on the post turns around (it was [at 143 karm in 97 votes](https://archive.md/MJHom), and now it's down to 50 karma in 162 votes). This looks like raw factional conflict to me: Jessica had some negative-valence things to say about mainstream "rationalist" institutions, so the mainstream rationalist leaders move in to discredit her by association.
+
+You know, I also had a sleep-deprivation-induced-psychotic-break-with-hospitalization in February 2013, and shortly thereafter, I remember Anna remarking that I was sounding a lot like Michael. But I hadn't been talking to Michael at all beforehand! (My previous email conversation with him had been in 2010.) So what could Anna's brain have been picking up on, when she said that? My guess: there's some underlying dimension of psychological variation (psychoticism? bipolar?—you tell me; this is supposed to be your professional specialty) where Michael and I were already weird/crazy in similar ways, and sufficiently bad stressors can push me further along that dimension (enough for Anna to notice). Are you also going to blame Yudkowsky for making people autistic?
+
+"A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible." https://www.alessonislearned.com/
+
+Take all what, specifically?! I briefly told you about a specific incident when Michael and Jessica and Jack were super-mean to me, in response to my perceived negligence during an unusual crisis situation. I do think this should be a negative update about Michael's and Jessica's and Jack's character and judgement. (Even if being super-mean to me would have been justified if it had helped Sasha, I don't think it actually helped or could have been expected to help, and the timescale-of-a-month effects of being super-mean to me turned out to be pretty bad for me because of my preexisting psych vulnerabilities.) That doesn't mean you can assume Sarah is being harmed just by having any social connection to them! (Ask Sarah, if you must!)
+
+I messaged Sarah the next day to talk about what happened. When I mentioned that I was rethinking my earlier vague intention to move to New York to be closer to the Vassarites and to her, "because they (everyone, but Ben being relatively more merciful) are super-quick to escalate the moment their ideology says that you defected first", she replied, "I like em but I could see how being their roommate would be a pain."
+
+[...]
+
+But you know, I also think there are reasons that getting too close to the Valinorians could be bad for someone (in subtler, lower-variance ways). Michael will yell at you and give you terrible drug advice, but at least I can Actually Talk to him; Kelsey will slowly destroy your sanity with superficial "niceness" carefully engineered to block all substantive communication. (Perhaps the best illustration of what I mean is that after typing the previous sentence, I felt an impulse to add "Don't tell Kelsey I said that," whereas Michael you can tell anything. For that, I can forgive a lot. I don't necessarily expect you to understand, but do try to have some empathy that being super-mean over the phone during a crisis is a lesser crime on this side of the trenches than on yours.) In both cases, I want to remain on good terms, without confusing the relationship I actually have with the one I wished I had.
+
+
+Insofar as I'm skeptical of Jessica's narrative, I suspect she's not putting nearly enough emphasis on the acid + weed (!) as a direct causal factor. But I don't think that invalidates everything she has to say about the culture of you guys who aren't us (anymore) and who we don't like (as much anymore). "MIRI's paranoid internal culture did a number on Jessica psychologically, to which there are structural parallels to Zoe's report about Leverage" and "subsequently, trying acid made things much worse" and "subsequently, Michael's recommending weed made things even worse" could all be true at the same time.
+
+I agree that this is a real concern. (I was so enamored with Yudkowsky's philosophy-of-science writing that there was no chance of me bouncing on account of the sexism that I perceived, but I wasn't the marginal case.) There are definitely good reasons to tread carefully when trying to add sensitive-in-our-culture content to the shared map. But I don't think treading carefully should take precedence over getting the goddamned right answer.
+
+For an example of what I think treading-carefully-but-getting-the-goddamned-right-answer looks like, I'm really proud of my review of Charles Murray's 2020 Human Diversity: http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/
+I'm definitely not saying, Emil Kirkegaard-style, "the black/white IQ gap is genetic, anyone who denies this is a mind-killed idiot, deal with it." Rather, first I review the Science in the book, and then I talk about the politics surrounding Murray's reputation and the technical reasons for believing that the gap is real and partly genetic, and then I go meta on the problem and explain why it makes sense that political forces make this hard to talk about. I think this is how you go about mapping the territory without being a moral monster with respect to your pre-Dark Enlightenment morality. (And Emil was satisfied, too: https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/1425334398484983813) ["Probably the best book review ever of an HBD book" https://archive.ph/2cSZh]
+
+I think this should just be normal, and I'm willing to fight for a world in which this is normal. When something is hard to talk about, you carefully flag the reasons that it's hard to talk about, and then you say the thing. If you don't get to the part where you say the thing, then your shared map doesn't reflect the territory!!
+
+It's ahistorical to talk about "the rationalist community" in 2007. There was a blog where Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson wrote about rationality as a subject matter. No one thought the subject matter of reasoning itself was the exclusive property of any particular social group that could have a "caliph." That would be crazy!
+
+I confess, in my frustration at this, sometimes I indulge in the vice of flashy rhetoric that sounds like "Everyone is lying!" (which is surely false), rather than reaching for something wordier like, "This is an astoundingly hostile information environment!" (which is surely true). The reason it's tempting is because I think the outcome of a sufficiently hostile information environment looks a lot like "Everyone is lying", even if the psychological mechanisms are different.
+
+-----
+
+Discord with Scott December 2019
+
+> Don't answer if it would be too unpleasant, but - I'm interested in asking some questions to test the autogynephilia hypothesis on the next SSC survey. Do you have any suggestions beyond the obvious? Also, do you know any intelligent and friendly opponent of the hypothesis who I could ask the same question to to make sure I'm getting advice from both sides?
+
+20 December
+Hi, Scott! You shouldn't worry about answering being unpleasant for me—speech is thought, and thinking is good! I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!
+
+-----
+
+zackmdavis — 12/24/2019 2150
+okay, maybe speech is sometimes painful
+the _Less Wrong_ comment I just left you is really mean
+and you know it's not because I don't like you
+you know it's because I'm genuinely at my wit's end
+after I posted it, I was like, "Wait, if I'm going to be this mean to Scott, maybe Christmas Eve isn't the best time?"
+it's like the elephant in my brain is gambling that by being socially aggressive, it can force you to actually process information about philosophy which you otherwise would not have an incentive to
+I hope you have a merry Christmas
+zackmdavis — 12/24/2019
+oh, I guess we're Jewish
+that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat
+
+---------
+
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Eh, I know we've been over this a thousand times before, but I still feel like we disagree and can't pinpoint the exact place where we diverge and so I'm reduced to vomiting every step of my reasoning process out in the hopes that you say "That step! That's the step I don't like!". Most of the reasoning process will be stuff you know and agree with and I'm sorry.
+
+My confusion is something like - I think of "not trying to replicate God's dictionary" as equivalent to "attempts to design language are a pragmatic process rather than a 100% truth-seeking process". But if you agree that designing language is a partly pragmatic process, then you can't object to appeals to consequence in it, since appealing to consequence is what you're supposed to do in a pragmatic process. I'm sorry if I made that point in a way that insulted your intelligence, but I don't understand how, even though we agree on all the premises, we keep getting opposite conclusions, and I don't have a great solution other than vomiting more words.
+
+Probably you are overestimating my intelligence and ability to understand things, I'm sorry. I continue to regret that something like this has come between us, and I really like you, and if there were something I could do that would prevent us from constantly being at loggerheads and prevent me from constantly offending you and making you feel like I am insulting and misunderstanding you I would, but I just really think I'm right about this, and so far haven't been able to figure out why I might not be, and don't like pretending not to believe something when I do believe it.
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+And I feel like thanks to you getting involved in the Group It Would Be Paranoid Of Me To Blame All Bad Things In The Rationalist Community On, whenever I try to sort this out with you you accuse me of playing dumb and mentally destabilizing you and ruining your day and whatever, and so I don't do it. I don't know how to convince you that I actually think I'm right and am trying to do the right thing as a rationalist and this isn't all part of an attempt to destroy you.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Thanks and merry Christmas 💖 🎅 ; I think I see some productive things I can write that haven't already been written yet that do a better job of pinpointing the step
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I reread your Boundary post and I honestly think we disagree on the f**king dolphins.
+I just 100% literally believe that a fish group including dolphins is exactly as good as one that doesn't, whereas it seems like you are taking it as a preliminary obvious step that this is worse.
+Am I understanding you right?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+oh, that's interesting
+my reply is that the fish group including dolphins is going to be a "thinner" (lower-dimensional) subspace of configuration space
+at least, compared to some alternatives
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Imagine a superdolphin that has had 100 million more years to evolve to live in the sea and converge to sea-optimal, so that it is identical to fish in every way (eg scales, cold-blooded, etc) but still has tiny bits of mammalian DNA that indicate it is evolutionary-relationship a mammal. Do you agree that this could reasonably be classified as a fish?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+yes, but real dolphins are predictably not superdolphins. Again, I use the configuation space visual metaphor for everything: if the superdolphin cluster overlaps with the fish cluster along all dimensions except the "these-and-such tiny regions of the genome" axis, then I want to put superdolphins and fish in the same category (unless I have some special reason to care about those-and-such tiny regions of the genome), but the reason evolutionary relatedness is probably going to be a thicker/more-robust subspace because DNA is the "root" of the causal graph that produces morphology &c.
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Huh, it seems plausible to me that the number of characteristics dolphins share with fish (fluked tails, smooth bodies, fins, same approximate shape, live in water) is larger than the number they share with mammals (tiny irrelevant hairs, bears live young but I think some fish do too, warm-blooded but so are some fish)
+Does it seem to you that somewhere between dolphins (which you classify as obviously mammals) and superdolphins (which you classify as plausibly fish) there's a broad zone where reasonable people could disagree about whether the animal should be classified as a mammal or fish?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+in principle, yes, but the tendency I'm at war with is people saying, "Whelp, categories can't be wrong, so there's nothing stopping me from using pragmatic considerations like politeness as a tiebreaker", which seems like a memetic-superweapon for ignoring any category difference you don't like as long as you can find some superficial similarity in some subspace (sorry for the linear algebra jargon; this is actually how I think about it)
+"Categories can't be wrong; language is pragmatic" is an appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters), when the correct move is to figure out which subspace is more relevant to your goals
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Forget what tendencies we're at war with for now, I want to figure out where we actually differ.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+thanks, that's right
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I'm thinking one possible crux is something like "you believe thingspace is a literal space with one correct answer, even though puny human intelligences cannot perfectly map it, whereas I believe thingspace is a vague metaphor that at best we can agree on a few things that would be obviously true about it". Is that actually a crux of ours?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+it's getting close
+it's not a literal space, but
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Or, like, if dolphins were at the exact spot between real dolphins and superdolphins where reasonable people (including all the smartest people) disagreed whether they were mammals or fish, do you feel like there would still be one correct answer that they just weren't smart enough to converge on?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+no
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Huh.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+maybe the intuition-generating difference (not a crux, but the difference in intellectual backgrounds that generates cruxes) is that I'm not trying to think of "reasonable people", I'm doing AI theory
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Okay, then well-designed AIs who could do other things right and hadn't been programmed to specifically grind an axe on this one point.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+different AIs would use different category systems depending on their goals, depending on which variables they cared about being able to predict/control
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Huh, then I think maybe that is our crux. I feel like there are a bunch of easy ways to solve this for AIs, like "use two different categories to represent sea-adaptedness and evolutionary-descent as soon as you realize there's going to be an issue". Or "figure out why you personally care about dolphins and only use the category that reflects why you care about them". I feel like it's only when we live in a society of hard-to-coordinate humans who already have a word and various connotations around it and who are all pursuing different goals that this becomes a problem.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Right! And like (sorry if this is stepping back into the memetic-warfare thing for a moment which is unhealthy, because we actually trust each other enough to do philosophy), my first reaction to "Against Lie Inflation" was agreeing with the post, and feeling rage that you obviously wouldn't let Jessica get away with saying, "An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false, therefore you can't object to me defining lying this way"
+And then only after I read it more closely and zeroed in on the paragraph about "This definition would make people angrier", was I less angry at you, because that meant we actually had different views on how linguistic pragmatism worked and you weren't just making an unprincipled exception for trans people
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Just to make sure I understand this - you were annoyed I wouldn't let Jessica get away with unprincipled pragmatism because you thought that was something I had supported before and I was being a hypocrite, not because you agree with unprincipled pragmatism.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+right
+I agreed with the post, but was angry at the hypocrisy
+(percieved hypocrisy)
+you could argue that I'm being incredibly unfair for having an axe to grind over something you wrote five years ago (I've written lots of things five years ago that were wrong, and it would be pretty annoying to get angry mail from people wanting to argue about every single one)
+It must suck being famous 😢
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+No, I agree if I'm wrong about this or hypocritical I want to know.
+I guess my claim is something like "language should be used pragmatically to achieve goals, but there is actually a best way to use language pragmatically to achieve goals in any given context".
+I think I also am just much more likely than you to think any given clusters in thingspace are in the vague "is a red egg a rube or a blegg" category where thingspace has nothing further to tell us and we have to solve it practically. I was really surprised you thought there was a right answer to the dolphin problem.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+the reason I accuse you of being motivatedly dumb is because I know you know about strategic equivocation, motte-and-bailey, the worst argument in the world, because you taught everyone about it
+and when I say, "Hey, doesn't this also apply to 'trans women are women'", you act like you don't get it
+and that just seems implausible
+
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Can you give a specific example of that? What's coming to mind is someone saying "Women have uteruses," I say "Sounds right", someone else saying "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman", I say "I'm committed to agreeing with that", and them saying "Therefore Caitlyn Jenner has a uterus", and me saying "Well, wow". Obviously that doesn't work, can you give an example of strategic equivocation in this space that does?
+(I'm not saying there isn't anything, just that it's not immediately coming to mind which may be a flaw in my own generators)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+(yes, one moment to dig up a link from my notes)
+things like ... The Nation, a nationally prominent progressive magazine writes, "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn’t acknowledge that trans women are in fact women." https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I agree that this is stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way I am suggesting.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+this is where the memetic warfare thing comes in; I don't think it's fair to ordinary people to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as I can before they're allowed to object to this
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I think my argument would be something like "the damage from this is less than the potential damage of trans people feeling lots more gender dysphoria". I think the part of your Boundaries post that I marked as a likely crux for that is "Everything we identify as a joint is a joint not 'because we care about it', but because it helps us think about the things we care about" but I didn't really follow - if you agree this is our crux, could you explain it in more detail?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I think "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running the clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amount to "wireheading" and "war" (cont'd)
+If we actually had magical sex change technology of the kind described in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions, no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+(agreed so far, will let you continue)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+and similarly, I don't want to call Jessica a man, but that's because her transition actually worked; the ordinary means by which my brain notices people's secondary sex characteristics and assigns "man"/"woman"/"not sure" and decides which pronoun to use has been successfully "fooled". If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grievious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" within the range of circumstances in which that model continues to perform well, even if someone considering different circumstances (looking at a "thicker" subspace of configuration space) would insist that they need to model it as a duck-oid robot or that that species is actually a goose
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+(are you going to continue, or is that the end?)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+um, I have thousands of words like this in my notes
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I guess I asked because I don't understand how you supported the "either wireheading or war" claim (which I just realized you might have thought I agreed with, I only meant I agreed with the instant sex change thing), and I don't understand how this answered my question.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+right, "wireheading" insofar as if I were to transition today and I didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading/benevolently-gaslighting me
+making me think my transition were successful, even though it actually wasn't
+that's ... not actually a nice thing to do to a rationalist
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Like, my claim is that transgender people have some weird thing going on in their head that gives them an electric shock if you refer to them as their birth gender. The thing isn't an agent and so anti-extortion rules don't apply. So you consider the harms of electric shocking someone a bunch of times, vs. the harms of remembering to say a different word than the one that automatically comes to mind (which is the same problem I face everytime I don't tell a stupid person FUCK YOU YOU ARE AN IDIOT, and isn't a huge cognitive burden), and accept The Nation making specious arguments which it would probably do about something else anyway, and overall you come out ahead.
+I think negative connotations of wireheading are doing a lot of the work there? If I change the metaphor to "give a depressed person a good antidepressant that works for them", I don't think it changes the situation at all but it definitely changes the valence.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+so, I claim to know a lot of things about the etiology of trans about why I don't think the electric shock is inevitable, but I don't want the conversation to go there if it doesn't have to, because I don't have to ragequit the so-called rationalist community over a complicated emprical thing; I'm only required to ragequit over bad philosophy
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Fair.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I think the philosophy crux is likely to be something like: in order to do utilitarianism, you need to have accurate maps/models, so that you can compute what the best thing to do is. If you let utilitarian considerations corrupt our models of the world, then you don't actually maximize utility; you're just gaslighting/wireheading yourself (I know, negative connotations of those words)
+You might think you can change language without changing models, but "37 Words Ways Can Be Wrong" explicitly and at length explains why you can't
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I agree with that, but I feel like I'm proposing something that may be a completely-delimited 0.0001% decrease in world model understanding for a rather substantial increase in utility. Do you disagree with my numbers, or with the claim that it's ever acceptable to make that kind of a tradeoff at all?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Where did you get that 0.0001% from?!?!!
+It's not 0.0001% for me (I've been in constant psychological pain for three years over this), but maybe there aren't enough copies of me for the utilitarian calculus to care
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I currently call trans people by their self-identified gender and don't feel like my world-model has changed much.
+(are you saying it hasn't been a 0.0001% utility decrease for you, or a 0.0001% world-model-clarity decrease?)
+Hm, I only want to debate this if it were our actual crux, do you feel like it is?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+empirical magnitude of trans is not a crux
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+So getting back to my point that I feel like I'm making a very lucrative utility vs world-model-clarity tradeoff, do you think you should never do that regardless of how good the numbers are?
+(I actually think I would agree with you on this if I felt like it was even a noticeable world-model-clarity decrease, or if I thought it had the potential to snowball in terms of my Parable of Lightning, it just doesn't even really register as a clarity decrease to me)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+... uh, what sex people are is pretty relevant to human social life
+much more so than whether lightning comes before thunder
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Yeah, but anyone who cares about it routes around it.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+so, the problem with the fictional "thunder comes before lightning" regime is that they didn't choose the utilitarian-optimal truth to declare heresy???
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Like I'm straight and I don't date transwomen. If for some reason I got "tricked" into dating transwomen by linguistic philosophy (not by lack of knowledge of who was biologically female or not) then I wouldn't regard this as a failure, I would regard this as linguistic philosophy changing my sexual orientation.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Dec/more-schelling/
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I think their problem was that they actually made people ignorant of things. I don't feel like anyone is being made ignorant of anything by the transgender thing, their thoughts are just following a slightly longer path.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I have a paragraph in my notes about this, one moment
+The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [the](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) Popular Author—you actually know the math.
+Slate Star Codex
+Scott Alexander
+The Parable Of The Talents
+[Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I …
+Image
+Slate Star Codex
+Scott Alexander
+The Lottery of Fascinations
+I. Suppose I were to come out tomorrow as gay. I have amazing and wonderful friends, and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to hate me forever or tell me to burn in Hell or anything like that. …
+Image
+If I have a "blegg" concept for blue egg-shaped objects—uh, this is [our](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f/neural-categories) [example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside), just [roll with it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—what that means is that (at some appropriate level of abstraction) there's a little [Bayesian network](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that if I see a black-and-white photograph of an egg-shaped object, I can use the observation of its shape to update my beliefs about its blegg-category-membership, and then use my beliefs about category-membership to update my beliefs about its blueness. This cognitive algorithm is useful if we live in a world where objects that have the appropriate statistical structure—if the joint distribution P(blegg, blueness, eggness) approximately factorizes as P(blegg)·P(blueness|blegg)·P(eggness|blegg).
+Disguised Queries - LessWrong 2.0
+Imagine that you have a peculiar job in a peculiar factory: Your task is to take
+objects from a mysterious conveyor belt, and sort the objects into two bins.
+When you first arrive, Susan the Senior Sorter explains to you that blue
+egg-shaped objects are called "bleggs" and go...
+Image
+Neural Categories - LessWrong 2.0
+In Disguised Queries [/lw/nm/disguised_queries/], I talked about a
+classification task of "bleggs" and "rubes". The typical blegg is blue,
+egg-shaped, furred, flexible, opaque, glows in the dark, and contains vanadium.
+The typical rube is red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, trans...
+Image
+How An Algorithm Feels From Inside - LessWrong 2.0
+"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" I
+remember seeing an actual argument get started on this subject—a fully naive
+argument that went nowhere near Berkeleyan subjectivism. Just:
+
+"It makes a sound, just like any other falling tree!"
+"...
+Image
+Causal Diagrams and Causal Models - LessWrong 2.0
+Suppose a general-population survey shows that people who exercise less, weigh
+more. You don't have any known direction of time in the data - you don't know
+which came first, the increased weight or the diminished exercise. And you
+didn't randomly assign half the population t...
+Image
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I'm still interested in whether you think, if I were correct about the extent of the minimal inconvenience and high utility gain, I would be correct to have the position I do.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+"Category boundaries" are just a visual metaphor for the math: the set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than p is conveniently visualized as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space. If you don't understand the relevant math and philosophy—or are pretending not to understand only and exactly when it's politically convenient—you might think you can redraw the boundary any way you want, but you can't, because the "boundary" visualization is derived from a statistical model which corresponds to empirically testable predictions about the real world. Fucking with category boundaries corresponds to fucking with the model, which corresponds to fucking with your ability to interpret sensory data. The only two reasons you could possibly want to do this would be to wirehead yourself (corrupt your map to make the territory look nicer than it really is, making yourself feel happier at the cost of sabotaging your ability to navigate the real world) or as information warfare (corrupt shared maps to sabotage other agents' ability to navigate the real world, in a way such that you benefit from their confusion).
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Now we're getting back to the stupid dolphin thing.
+I don't want to accuse you of thinking God has a dictionary, but it sure sounds like you're saying that God has pretty strong opinions on which categories are more natural than others.
+...actually, that's unfair, God does have some opinions, just not as deterministic as you think.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I mean, yes? Thingspace is really high-dimensional; the multivariate distributions for females and males are actually different distributions, even if there's a lot of overlap along many of them; your brain is going to want to use this information and want to use language to communicate this information; although maybe an alien surveying earth to decide which rocks to harvest wouldn't bother noticing the difference, because it's only looking at rocks and not the differences between apes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Also, wait a second, you wouldn't want Jessica competing in a woman's marathon either, so your own categorization system doesn't solve this problem any better than mine.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I'm willing to code-switch depending on what I'm talking about
+I definitely want to say "Jessica ... she"
+because of how my visual system makes that call
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Do you agree that gendering trans people based on whether they pass or not doesn't work on a society-wide level?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+unfortunately, yes; that's why this situation is such a horrible, tragic mess; this is where game theory comes in: http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+But it sounds like you still disagree with self-identity?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I'm not trying to do policy; I'm trying to get the theory right, in the hopes that getting the theory right will help people make better decisions
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+....but it not being a stable Schelling point is one example of why it would be a bad decision
+I kind of am trying to do policy, in that what seems important to me is whether myself (and the government, and the society whose norms I try to obey insofar as they're socially-just game theoretic things) should gender trans people one way or another.
+If this reflects badly on AI theory, I would explain to AI designers why there are considerations in favor of them doing things differently.
+Which I think would be pretty easy.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+... you would have AI designers take into account what makes trans people feel better?
+rather than capturing the statistical structure of the world beneath the world?
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+...I think you may be taking the opposite point I intended?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+oh
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I am trying to (pursue the self-identification criterion) because it's the right thing for me to do right now as a human individual for various reasons. If it's bad AI design, I would want AI designers to do something different.
+(though I would hope a superintelligent AI would gender trans people based on self-identification for the same reasons I would)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+if you're going to be a generic Berkeley progressive, that makes sense, but if you're going to be a rationalist, then it doesn't make sense, because the entire point of our community is to import insights from AI theory to make humans smarter
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Wait, no, the entire point of our community is to do the correct thing!
+I worry I'm interpreting you wrong, because it sounds like you're saying "You shouldn't eat food, because an AI wouldn't eat food. You should connect yourself to a wall socket."
+No, that's not right, "You shouldn't eat food because you wouldn't want an AI designer to program their AI to eat food"
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+okay, my previous message is not phrased well; if I were writing a long form rather than live Discord I would have rewritten it to be less mockable
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Fair.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Here's another couple paragraphs from my memoir draft:
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+A friend—call her ["Erin Burr"](https://genius.com/7888863)—tells me that I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision never included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember Erin recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then don't say it.)
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, we did not anticipate that whether or not I should cut my dick off would become a politicized issue.
+To be fair, it's not obvious that I shouldn't cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem pretty happy! But in order to decide whether to join them, I need accurate information. I need an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where it's not a good idea.
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+But I should do the thing which is morally and rationally correct right now, not the thing that will create good results if AI designers inexplicably program a tendency to do the exact same thing into their AI, in a stupid way that changes the entire architecture.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Your position seems to be, "It's okay to distort our models, because the utilitarian benefit to this-and-such neurotype interest group makes it a net win", but I'm claiming that I'm in the neurotype interest group and I want non-distorted models
+I don't want people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me
+Jessica doesn't want that, either
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I can see why you think that, but I don't identify with that belief, partly because there are certain ways I wouldn't distort my model. The trans thing seems so much like using a different word, rather than distorting a model, that it's really hard for me to care.
+I definitely don't want to make it impossible to accurately view the territory, but this seems more like (forgive a totally different metaphor than the one I've used before) rebranding Mt. McKinley to Denali on my map, with everyone knowing that these are the same mountain.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+the entire thesis of "37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong" is that "I can use a different word without distorting my model" isn't true as a matter of human psychology
+if we learned something new about how language works in the last 10 years, that would be really interesting
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Yet I feel like I would come to all the same conclusions about men and women as you would.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+when System 2 knows what the answer your questioner expects is
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I think I mean "about the territory", which I think is independent of what my questioner expects.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Here's someone who's not part of our philosophy cult who understands the point I'm making: https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
+author compares preferred pronouns to a Stroop test
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+The whole interesting thing about Stroop tests is that you can't do them if you try to do them super-quickly, but you don't end up fundamentally confused about what colors are.
+I agree if you gave me an IAT about trans people and pronouns, I would do worse than you (probably)
+But IAT doesn't correlate with actual racism, and I think this is the same kind of situation.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can express things using Newspeak, but a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs ... doesn't seem like a nice place to live, right?
+Doesn't seem like a culture that can solve AI alignment, right?
+Zvi wrote about a pattern where people claim that "Everybody knows" something, being motivatedly used as an excuse to silence people trying to point out the thing (because they don't see people behaving as if it were common knowledge) https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/
+"'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from the male multivariate distribution rather than the female multivariate distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out"
+I really don't think everyone knows
+I think the people who sort-of know are being intimidated into doublethinking around what they sort-of know
+I think this is bad for clarity
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+That is why I keep stressing that this is the only thing I know of that works this way. It's not opening the door to total confusion. If we randomized half the people at OpenAI to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+(let me think for a few moments about how to answer that one)
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I actually want to go to the Christmas party today. Any interest in also coming and we can continue the discussion there?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+at Valinor? I've been avoiding because I haven't gotten my flu shot yet because I've been too caught up in the rationalist civil war to have any executive funcitoning left over
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+No, at Event Horizon.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+sure, remind me the address?
+(Thanks so much for your time; it would be really exciting if we could prevent a rationalist civil war; I think this "you need accurate models before you can do utilitarianism" general philosophy point is also at the root of Ben Hoffman's objections to EA movement)
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+(actually, I just saw something on the party thing saying "Ask us before you invite anyone else", so give me a second to ask them)
+I agree that the principle "It's important to have good models because otherwise we can't do anything at all" is a principle. But it seems to me, like other principles, as something that's finite and quantifiable, as opposed to "if you sacrifice cognitive categorization efficiency even 0.01%, everything will be terrible forever and you'll fail at AI". In the same way that "make a desperate effort" is a principle, but I would still balance this against burnout or something, I feel like "never do anything that messes with cognitive categorization efficiency" should be followed but not off a cliff. I still don't feel like I understand whether our crux is absolutism vs. practicality, you just think this is legitimately a much bigger deal than I do, or something downstream of the dolphin problem where you think categories are much less inherently ambiguous than I do.
+Like, suppose Benya Fallenstein gets angry at us for constantly misgendering them and leaves MIRI. Is that better or worse than whatever epistemic clarity we gain from having a better split-second Stroop reaction to gender issues?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+Eliezer has this pedagogy thing where he'll phrase things in an absolute manner because that's the only way to get people to take things seriously, even if it's not literally absolute in human practice
+thus, "you can't define a word any way you want", https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try, &c.
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+(it's possibly unfair for me to point to Benya, and I'm definitely not trying to become even more pragmatic than I was a moment ago talking about being nice to people, I'm trying to head off a problem where AI is so much more important than people's feelings that we end up Pascaling ourselves)
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+maybe all three of those are partial cruxes
+like, when you say "trans is the only issue for which this comes up, it isn't a big deal for me" ... you realize that I do have to functionally treat that "part of an attempt to destroy [me]". You don't want to destroy me, but you're willing to accept it as a side-effect
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I think I can predict that you would say something like that, but it still doesn't make sense to me.
+I think I'm modeling you as having the weird electric shock thing, but it fires opposite as for everyone else.
+But I'm pretty sure that's not fair.
+Obviously I will address you by whatever pronouns you prefer and so on, but yeah, I acknowledge that if trying to help everyone else hurts you, then I am going to hurt you.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+it might be related! I think I have the same neuro-quirk that leads to the trans women we know, but I got socialized differently by my reading
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Part of what I'm trying to do is convince you not to care about this.
+My real position is "all of this is dumb, go through life doing things without caring what your gender is", and so I model some sort of weird electric shock thing that prevents people from doing this.
+I feel like because you are at least saying that what you're doing is based on principles, maybe if we can converge on principles I can help you.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I read https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions 10 years ago and it had a huge effect on me
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+But I am also trying really hard not try to help you directly because I think that made you feel a lot worse the last time we talked than just talking philosophy of language.
+I think a meta-position of mine is something like "people fail to converge on object-level issues for unclear reasons, so try to figure out a set of norms that let people with unconverged object-level positions continue to cooperate", but I feel like you're fighting me on that one too.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+the "category absolutism" sub-crux seems legitimately important to the Great Common Task
+the "you just think this is legitimately a much bigger deal than I do" sub-crux isn't
+the extent to which dolphins are ambiguous is
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+But it sounds like you're not a 100% Category Absolutist, and you would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and I worry our real difference is I think this is tiny enough to ignore, and you don't.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I think your self-report of "this is tiny enough to ignore" is blatantly false (Jessica would say you're lying, but I tend to avoid that usage of "lie" except sometimes when talking to Jessica et al.)
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+As in I'm misdescribing my experience, or failing to notice ways that my experience is unrepresentative of broader concerns?
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+I'm saying that your brain notices when trans women don't pass, and this affects your probabilistic anticipations about them; your decisions towards them, &c.; when you find out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects your probabilistic anticipations, &c.
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+Plausibly yes.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+This is technically consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right away in order to force that sentence to be true
+... you see the problem; if I take the things you wrote in "Categories Were Made" literally, then I can make any sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I want to think about that statement more, but they've approved my invitation of you to the party. 2412 Martin Luther King, I'll see you there.
+zackmdavis — 12/25/2019
+cool, thanks so much; I really want to avoid a civil war
+ScottAlexander — 12/25/2019
+I also want to debate the meta-question of whether we should have a civil war about this, which I think is much easier to answer and resolve than the object-level one.
+
+------
--- /dev/null
+(No private reply expected.)
+
+> If it is as you describe
+
+Done (1 2 3), although I think the final product turned out more aggressive than my earlier messages in this thread made it sound ([TODO quotes]), thus justifying this additional notification email (because "a true friend stabs you in the front").
+
+If you care about defending yourself, the comments for the _Less Wrong_ linkpost on the last part is probably the best place to do so.
+
+------
+
+But you probably don't care. (If you already thought sucking up to Stalin was more important than living up to my standards, it's hard to see why me explaining the standards-violation to everyone else would change anything.)
+
+--------
+
+Or maybe the summary comment would actually make things worse? It would turn the memoir into an instrument of war. But maybe the Whole Dumb Story speaks for itself. (In the process of writing, I realize that Yudkowsky _did_ give me a _lot_ of concessions—so many, that I shouldn't want to make war against him, because war is the wrong framing: I want to explain, to anyone who can still listen, about how it's terrible that our incentives make people take for granted that speech doesn't work.)
+
+------
+
+I could use some politics/ettiquiete advice
+
+I want to publish (as a comment on the _Less Wrong_ linkpost for my forthcoming memoir) a summary of Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty, and promote the comment on social media
+
+and I'm kind of facing conflicting deciderata
+
+Right now, I have Yudkowsky blocked on Twitter. It seems wrong to leave him blocked while Tweet-promoting my comment, because that's attacking his reputation _behind his back_, which is dishonorable. ("A true friend stabs you in the front.")
+
+But if I unblock and tag him, then I'm effectively bidding for his attention, which I had said that I wasn't going to do anymore, which is the reason I have him blocked.
+
+(Really, that's _also_ why I'm publishing the comment. I tried talking to the guy _first_, a lot, before eventually concluding (after using up what I assume is my lifetime supply of Eliezer-bandwidth) that it's a waste of time. My final email to him said, "I think the efficient outcome here is that I tell the Whole Dumb Story on my blog and never bother you again", and even if that wasn't a _promise_, it seems healthier to basically stick to that—I mean, like, I said a few words to him about _Planecrash_ at the anti-smallpox party, but my position is that that doesn't count as "bothering him" in the relevant sense.)
+
+If he _wants_ to engage to defend his reputation, that's _great_—I would actually prefer that—but I don't want it to look like I'm trying to demand that, or threaten him into more engagement: rather, the function of the comment is to explain to _everyone else_ why I, in fact, don't trust him anymore, which is something I seflishly want them to know before the world ends
+
+probably the right move is to unblock and tag, but then explain the "stabs you in the front" rationale in a followup Tweet?
+
+-----
+
+
+I'm attacking his reputation seflishly; he's _welcome_ to defend himself, if he wants, but I'm trying to do this in a way where I'm not _asking_ for that; I'm addressing the audience rather than him (because I said the efficient outcome is that i never bother him again)
+
+Definitely in-bounds—
+_ UUT posts
+_ short Twitter thread promoting the posts
+_ "I Don't Trust EY's Intellectual Honesty" comment on pt. 3
+
+
+Questionably in-bounds—
+_ maybe a comment on the pronouns post (does that count as bothering him? probably the Facebook algorithm doesn't give enough visibility to comments on old posts that this isn't worth it anyway?)
+_ unblock and tag him in the Twitter thread
+_ ask Alicorner #drama for advice about this?
+
+(if he sees the #drama discussion, that's not my fault)
+
+I want this to be a _targeted_ update about his character, not a generic EY=Bad tarring that would spill onto "EY Bad, therefore AI safety Bad"
+
+(my rightness on the object level is locally detachable from my optimal political strategy; for the purposes of the drama discussion, you can assume that I'm trying to get some Kitten Facts on the shared map, and Yudkowsky has been opposing me with dirty tricks because he's in the pocket of Big Kitten; your honest _strategy_ advice to me _conditional_ on my worldview doesn't depend on whether you think I'm wrong about kittens)
+
+++ /dev/null
-The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
-
-https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
-
-So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander
-
-, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
-
-So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which
-
-Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
-
-But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win.
-
-[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
-When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
-Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
-]
-
-I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
-
-At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
-
-Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-
-An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
-
-It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
-
-In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
-
-There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
-
-But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
-
-If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
-
-(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
-
-_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—
-
-_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
-
-I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.
-
-[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]
-
-But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
-
-_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
-
-In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
-
-> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
-
-This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
-
-[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
-
-If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
-
-In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
-
-At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
-
-Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
-
-But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
-
-If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
-
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
-
-In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
-
-Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
-
-No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
-
-What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
-
-[missing mood]
-
-Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
-
-It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)
-
-I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
-
-Because of the particular historical moment in which we live, 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 many 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).
-
-I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that [would happen in some form in any place and time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone), rather than having to do with American politics or "the left" in particular. In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for [thinking about market economics](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/) (as a [positive technical discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem) adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).
-
-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 what they say in public. (I am not smart.) Scott Aaronson wrote of [the Kolmogorov Option](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376) (which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/): serve the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. This after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who _knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win_.
-
-Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
-
-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
-
-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
-
-Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
-
-And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
-
-Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
-
-But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
-
-[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
-
-Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
-
-But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
-
-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
-
-I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
-
-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
-
-In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
-
-In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-
-In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
-
-Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
-
-I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
-
-It worked once, right?
-
-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
-
-> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
-OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
-
-The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
-
-Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
-> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
-(!!)
-
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47
-https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/97
-> one technique was to look at what _ended up_ happening, assume it was the _intended_ result, and ask who benefited.
-
-> This about dath ilani, they are trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything, and so at the end of it all you look at what happened and try to build an explanation around that alone.
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866
-
-
-
-> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
-
-> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
-
-> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
-
-> I aspire to make sure my departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others, so this tweet is very validating.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608
-
-"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
-
-I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-
-whom I have variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"
-
-* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
-
-> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
-
-EGS??
-
-(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
-
-* papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
-
-how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
-
-https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
-> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
-
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
-
-I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
-> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
-
-https://archive.is/7Wolo
-> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
-Namespace's point about the two EYs
-
-[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
-
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
-
-
-Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
-
-But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
-
-what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"
-
-I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
-
-
-I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
-
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
-
-"Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments."
-
-The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
-
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
-
-A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
-
-> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
-https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
-
-twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
-
-I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
-
-> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
-
-(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-
-
-It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
-
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
-
-E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
-
-The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
-
-> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
-https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
-
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
-
-It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
-
-But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
-
-
-As far as I can tell, Professor, I'm just doing what _you_ taught me—carve reality at the joints, speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect.
-
-"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!
-
-> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things
-
-Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
-
-https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
-> These neurons detect gender^10
-> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
-
-https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
-
-> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
-If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
-
-https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
-
-https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-government/
-> propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network.
-
-https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
-
-the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-
-I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
-You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
-but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
-which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
-
-that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
-
-[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
-
-[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
-> anything that people are motivated to argue about is not arbitrary. It is being controlled by invisible criteria of evaluation, it has connotations with consequences
-
-If Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man ..." had never been published, would we still be talking about dolphins and trees in the same way?
-
-Scott has so many fans—
-https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
-https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
-https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles
-
-Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
-https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
-Yudkowsky retweeted Nate on dolphins—
-https://archive.is/Ecsca
-
-my rationalist community has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my community's name
-
-cite to "Not Especially Related to Transgender"
-https://twitter.com/fortenforge/status/1402057829142302721
-
-"Hero Licensing": to provide an earnest-token of all the techniques I couldn't show
-
-uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.
-
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
-It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
-
-If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?
-
-When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."
-
-humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
-
-The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!
-
-> just the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men, and that this is obvious if you are rational, and a hidden truth most people are too cowardly to speak, until you retreat in misery and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us....
-
-People change their opinion with the party line—similarly with Scott and Yud
-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12550?campaign=woletoc
-
-"No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand."
-https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089
-
-Robert Stadler
-
-----------
-
-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 _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
-
-> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. [TODO: continue the quote to the part about Verrez self-awareness]
-
-When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
-
-Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
-
-The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
-
-The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves—and that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
-
-A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
-
-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
-
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. [TODO: echo the Verrez self-awareness phrasing]
-
-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way 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 reliniqush [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; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
-
-In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
-
-But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
-
-And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
-
-And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
-
-Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
-
-[in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
-
-----------
-
-[TODO: David Xu's postrat]
-And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
-
-
------------
-
-Really, it's impressive how far we got in establishing a cult of Bayesians in a world where "discimination" is a transgression against the dominant ideology! I can't be the only one who got the joke
-
-https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
-
-prevaricate
-
-back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as if you had to be of a particular generation to understand the ideas—that could apply in both directions (the next generation's culture does not look promising to me; midwits say that elders have always said that, but maybe the elders were always right, by the standard preference-stability argument)
-
-> [Anna] seemed to disapprove of our putting pressure on Scott, because the fact that Scott has done a lot of great work is exactly what made him a target for our pressure.
-
-> Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused
-
-> I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and Mean—I don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."
-
-> He says he likes "monastic rationalism vs. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben is proposing.
-
-> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.
-
-• at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
-
-Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
-
-> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270
-
-But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
-
-Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
-
-[
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans) - I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-
-Tweet said "I've never persuaded anyone to go trans" in light of his track record; is like thinking it's personally prudent and not community-harmful to bash Democrats and praise Republicans. If any possible good thing about Democrats is something you mention that "the other side" would say. Even if you can truthfully say "I've never _told_ anyone to _vote_ Republican", you shouldn't be surprised if people regard you as a Republican shill ; the "30% of the ones with penises" proclamation sort of was encouraging it, really!
-
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-
-I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
-
-> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
-
-> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
-
-> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.
-
-]
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
-> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
-
-If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
-> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
-Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped
-
-example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
-https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
-> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1434906470248636419
-
-> Anyways, Scott, this is just the usual division of labor in our caliphate: we're both always right, but you cater to the crowd that wants to hear it from somebody too modest to admit that, and I cater to the crowd that wants somebody out of that closet.
-
-Okay, I get that it was meant as humorous exaggeration. But I think it still has the effect of discouraging people from criticizing Scott or Eliezer because they're the leaders of the caliphate. I spent three and a half years of my life explaining in exhaustive, exhaustive detail, with math, how Scott was wrong about something, no one serious actually disagrees, and Eliezer is still using his social power to boost Scott's right-about-everything (!!) reputation. That seems really unfair, in a way that isn't dulled by "it was just a joke."
-
-Or as Yudkowsky put it—
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154981483669228
-> I know that it's a bad sign to worry about which jokes other people find funny. But you can laugh at jokes about Jews arguing with each other, and laugh at jokes about Jews secretly being in charge of the world, and not laugh at jokes about Jews cheating their customers. Jokes do reveal conceptual links and some conceptual links are more problematic than others.
-
-It's totally understandable to not want to get involved in a political scuffle because xrisk reduction is astronomically more important! But I don't see any plausible case that metaphorically sucking Scott's dick in public reduces xrisk. It would be so easy to just not engage in this kind of cartel behavior!
-
-An analogy: racist jokes are also just jokes. Alice says, "What's the difference between a black dad and a boomerang? A boomerang comes back." Bob says, "That's super racist! Tons of African-American fathers are devoted parents!!" Alice says, "Chill out, it was just a joke." In a way, Alice is right. It was just a joke; no sane person could think that Alice was literally claiming that all black men are deadbeat dads. But, the joke only makes sense in the first place in context of a culture where the black-father-abandonment stereotype is operative. If you thought the stereotype was false, or if you were worried about it being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you would find it tempting to be a humorless scold and get angry at the joke-teller.
-
-Similarly, the "Caliphate" humor only makes sense in the first place in the context of a celebrity culture where deferring to Scott and Eliezer is expected behavior. (In a way that deferring to Julia Galef or John S. Wentworth is not expected behavior, even if Galef and Wentworth also have a track record as good thinkers.) I think this culture is bad. Nullius in verba.
-
-
-
-Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.
-
-I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
-
-https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
-
-"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
-
-3 January 2020 text from Michael to me:
-> because I want to make it very clear to you, and to encourage you to make it very clear to others [...] that you are experiencing extremely articulate and extremely by the book trauma, caused in a very canonical manner by institutional betrayal and causing silencing of a sort very similar to that which causes investigation of sex crimes to be problematic (as in the high quality current Netflix show "Unbelievable", which you all might benefit from watching)
-
-Forget it, Jake—it's the rationalist community
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
-> The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious.
-That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorization—actually, I'm going to bite the bullet here; "Eurasian" is actually fine as a paraphyletic category (and @CovfefeAnon uses it productively)
-
-And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity.
-
-[For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
-
-> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
-
-Sure, _in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology_, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have _not_ said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where _we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology_. As Yudkowsky [acknowledges in the previous Tweet](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888), "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of HRT does not take us into the Glorious Transhumanist Future where everyone is the sex they say they are.
-
-Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
-
-But the _reason_ for having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are quite different.
-
-[TODO: (clean up and consolidate the case here after reading the TW-in-sports articles)
-
-The "multivariate" part is important, because
-
-Different traits have different relevance to different sports; the fact that it's apples-to-oranges is _why_ women do better in ultraswimming—that competition is sampling a corner of sportspace where body fat is an advantage
-
-It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average
-
-It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight"
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
-
-If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in almost all sports, with some exceptions [like ultra-distance swimming](https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/)).
-
-]
-
-Given the empirical reality of the different multivariate trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes _among females_" is a natural question for people to be interested in, and want separate sports leagues to determine.
-
-(Similarly, when conducting [automobile races](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_racing), you want there to be rules enforcing that all competitors have the same type of car for some common-sense-reasonable operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a [moped](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped) would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer.)
-
-Including males people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league.
-
-[TODO: more sentences explaining why HRT doesn't break taxonicity of sex, and why "gender identity" is a much less plausible joint anyway]
-
-[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
-https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
-https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
-]
-
-[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's feats occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
-https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
-https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
-https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
-https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/
-]
-
-In light of these _empirical_ observations, Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant comittment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports, is revealed as an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically-literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue _at all_, as contrasted to having _first_ decided (consciously or not) to bolster one's reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and wielding one's philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant empirical facts are _not subtle_, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions".
-
-Yudkowsky's pretension to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions isn't credible: if you _just_ wanted to point out that the organization of sports leagues is a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" strawman and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues that I don't _personally_ care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people _do_ care.
-
-(And in this case, the empirical facts are _so_ lopsided, that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. Lia Thomas trounces the entire field by _4.2 standard deviations_ (!!), and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to _pretend not to see the problem?_ You've got to admit, that's a _little_ bit funny.)
-
-when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
-
-me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
-
-If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts
-
------
-
-If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume 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 other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
-
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
-
-> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. [...]
->
-> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
->
-> Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.
->
-> 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.
-
-So, 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 just _laughable_. My point that _she_ and _he_ have existing meanings that you can't just ignore by fiat given that the existing meanings are _exactly_ what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place is _really obvious_.
-
-Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright 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 clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
-
-
-... and, I had been planning to save the Whole Dumb Story about my alienation from Yudkowsky's so-called "rationalists" for a _different_ multi-thousand-word blog post, because _this_ multi-thousand-word blog post was supposed to be narrowly scoped to _just_ exhaustively replying to Yudkowsky's February 2021 Facebook post about pronoun conventions. But in order to explain the problems with "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" and "people are better off at the end of that", I may need to _briefly_ recap some of the history leading to the present discussion, which explains why _I_ didn't know and _I'm_ not better off, with the understanding that it's only a summary and I might still need to tell the long version in a separate post, if it feels still necessary relative to everything else I need to get around to writing. (It's not actually a very interesting story; I just need to get it out of my system so I can stop grieving and move on with my life.)
-
-I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-
-You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)]
-.
-
-In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that "changing sex" is vastly easier said than done—
-
-
-
-[[[ TODO summarize the Whole Dumb Story (does there need to be a separate post? I'm still not sure)
-
-[TODO: But that was all about me—I assumed "trans" was a different thing. My first clue that I might not be living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky, with the "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" thing]
-
-_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 counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
-
-[So I ended up arguing with people about the two-type taxonomy, and I noticed that those discussions kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word woman doesn't actually mean that". So I took the bait, and starting arguing against that, and then Yudkowsky comes back to the subject with his "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"—and I go on a philosophy of language crusade, and Yudkowsky eventually clarifies, and _then_ he comes back _again_ in Feb. 2022 with his "simplest and best protocol"]
-
-]]]
-
-At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
-
-On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
-
-On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
-
-Note: being _on peaceful terms_ with the progressive _Zeitgeist_ isn't the same as kowtowing to it entirely. So, for example, Yudkowsky is _also_ on the record claiming that—
-
-> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.
-
-> [To be clear, I don't](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857) know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.
-
-There's a sense in which this could be read as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF _was_ the thing I was originally trying to talk about, before the philosophy-of-language derailing, and here Yudkowsky is backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology. So there's an intuition that I should be grateful for and satisfied with this concession—that it would be _greedy_ for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he's throwing me a bone here.
-
-But that intuition is _wrong_. The perception that there are "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an _illusion_ of the human cognitive architecture; it's not something that any sane cognitive process would think in the course of constructing a map that reflects the territory.
-
-As I explained in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), this argument that "gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties" is actually _wrong_. The _reason_ I believe in the two-type taxonomy of MtF is because of [the _empirical_ case that androphilic and non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexualism actually look like different things](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), enough so for the two-type clustering to [pay the rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) [for its complexity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length).
-
-But Yudkowsky can't afford to acknowledge the empirical case for the two-type taxonomy—that really _would_ get him in trouble with progressives. So in order to throw me a bone while maintaining his above-it-all [pretending to be wise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise) centerist pose, he needs to come up with some other excuse that "exhibit[s] generally rationalist principles".
-
-The lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even when the political pressure is coming from _me_.
-
-If you "project" my work into the "subspace" of contemporary political conflicts, it usually _codes as_ favoring "anti-trans" faction more often than not, but [that's really not what I'm trying to do](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). From my perspective, it's just that the "pro-trans" faction happens to be very wrong about a lot of stuff that I care about. But being wrong about a lot of stuff isn't the same thing as being wrong about everything; it's _important_ that I spontaneously invent and publish pieces like ["On the Argumentative Form"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) and ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) that "favor" the "pro-trans" faction. That's how you know (and how I know) that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
-
-In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly 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 administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ 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 [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 [_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's not what's going on, 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_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
-
-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 an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
-
-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 _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
-
-(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly 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_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
-
-What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
-
-Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
-
-Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
-
-But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
-
-Why does this matter?
-
-[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
-
-a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
-
-It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
-
-> _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._
-https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good
-
-https://www.readthesequences.com/
-> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
-
-> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
-https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
-
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1769064#reply-1769064
-> "Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly. None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."
-It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly
-
-congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404700330927923206
-> That is: there's a story here where not just particular people hounding Zack as a responsive target, but a whole larger group, are engaged in a dark conspiracy that is all about doing damage on issues legible to Zack and important to Zack. This is merely implausible on priors.
-
-I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/
-
-> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
-
-playing on a different chessboard—I would be fine with it if he didn't shit on my chessboard. But my shitting on his chessboard
-
-I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard ("at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard ([TODO linky-quotey not standing in defense of truth]) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards ([TODO linky-quotey clarification]), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4. But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ([TODO linkey-quotey normative meaning of 'he']) ... at _that_ point, it's hard for me to consider him as neutrally playing on a different chessboard, rather than actively trying to shit on mine; the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio in favor of the latter hypothesis.
-
-
-Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
-> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
-
-> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is—aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences—committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
-
-> The people who aren't doing that mostly aren't participating in the LessWrong identity, but while factions like that are hostile to the confused people who behave as though they're part of a community trying to become less wrong, such factions are also parasitic on such people, claiming credit for their intellectual contributions. When such participation is fully extinguished, the group begins to decay, having nothing distinctive to offer, unless it has become too big to fail, in which case it's just another component of one political faction or another.
-
-https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
-
-Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
-https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
-> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly insinuates nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it does present.
-
-contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard, you don't take it lying down
-
-Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
-
-maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
-
-Feb. 2016 happy price schedule https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228
-
-one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
-
-When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
-
-OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
-
-http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
-
-A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/
-
-https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
-> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
-[...]
-> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
-> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
-[...]
-> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
-in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
-
-Rubices—
-> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
-gonna mostlky bite the bullet on this one
-
-
-https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
-> You all remember the thing I predicted correctly 12 years ago, therefore you should heed my word on this completely unrelated topic
-
-The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels telling—you could say it's circumstantial nitpicking, but I think it's revealing, like the "reducing negativity"
-https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz
-
-"Death With Dignity" isn't really an update; he used to refuse to give a probability, and now he says the probability is ~0
-
-https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
-> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
-
-> One nice thing about intellectuals is that when they turn, they frequently leave behind a detailed, mostly coherent record of what a person turning into a rhinoceros thinks is going on.
-https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1477733825702936581
-
-Rationality was supposed to be important!!
-
-Paul says so—
-> My current sense is that cooperation has a better tradeoff than some forms of enhancement (e.g. giving humans bigger brains) and worse than others (e.g. improving the accuracy of people's and institution's beliefs about the world).
-
-Rob says so, too—
-> Help ourselves think more clearly. (I imagine this including a lot of trying-to-become-more-rational, developing and following relatively open/honest communication norms, and trying to build better mental models of crucial parts of the world.)
-
-> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228
-
-dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
-> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140
-
-> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374
-
-I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)
-
-The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
-
-jbeshir
-> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
-—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing
-
-
-[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
-[internet pharmacy]
-
-
-> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
-response—
-> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do
-
-In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]
-
-https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma
-
-postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
-
-if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
-
-Gell-Mann amnesia
-
-EY's commenting guidelines
-
-> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
-https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409
-
-flu virus that cures Borderer culture
-https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
-
-Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
-
-an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that _wasn't_ why my ordeal's and Devi's were so traumatic _at all_: the psych ward is _very much_ governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
-
-[initial fan mail to Bailey on 7 January, followup to include blog link on 11 February; initial fan mail to Blanchard 10 August]
-
-I had some self-awareness that I was going off the rails—
-> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state. https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199
-
-to Ben: "I thought I got a message from Michael Vassar saying that the main coalitions were you, and Sarah Constantine, and Zack Davis vs. the world" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:30:55 GMT-0800
-
-scared that Orion was going to kill me
-
-to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
-
-]
-
-You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
-Mon Apr 10 08:51:03 PDT 2017
-
-Michael's "Congratulations on not going back to work at the carpet store!" was a reference to Rick & Morty "Mortynight Run" which aired in August 2015, but I hadn't seen it yet
-
-winning Hamilton tickets at $2200
-
-meeting Katie—
-
-Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
-Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"",
-
-He was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff"
-But in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy
-Not in the way of someone feminine
-The only thing I knew about it at the point we got married was that he thought it was fun to go in drag sometimes
-Like Halloween
-
-And he thought feminization kink was fun
-Like me making him dress up? But he said it was about humiliation
-We didn't even do it more than a handful of times, it wasn't really my thing
-Nothing in my experience ever caused me to think he was trans
-
-"He talked about being a child always feeling out of place
-"But out of place seemed like because he was shy and anxious
-He said he was convinced his anxiety and social problems was *because* he was trans
-
-Spencer seemed much less happy to me after admitting to want transition, often crying about how ugly his body was
-
-because it basically amounts to, \"You rebuilt your entire life around your perverted narcissistic fantasy and didn't even notice\
-like, there's no nice way to say that
-
-My taxon, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.\
-
-all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
-and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
-
-
-
-Tue Feb 14 2017 11:26:20 (this conversation was actually during the tantrum)—
-K: I really *was* getting to the point that I hated transwomen
-Z: I hate them, too!
-Z: Fuck those guys!
-K: I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was *getting* to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
-K: But you're actually changing that for me
-K: You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
-K: To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
-K: It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
-Z: the \"suffering\" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-K: You've made me hate transwomen *less* now
-K: Because I have a model
-K: I understand the problem
-[...]
-K: I understand why it's hard
-K: I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
-K: This is a better thing for me
-I did not *want* to be a hateful person",
-I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
-I think now I can do it more honestly
-They might not want *me* as a friend
-But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
-And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
-I'm very grateful for that
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZEgQGAjQm5rTAnGuM/beware-boasting-about-non-existent-forecasting-track-records
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement
-
-> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps
-
-> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
-> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
-
-Standard excuses—
-"i just don't think that gender is less of a politeness mind-control regime when it doesn't allow people to switch categories"
-biosex actually exists
-also no one cares about that fact of the matter, unless they want to have sex with someone or are doing a weird ideological thing
-I think you're the ones doing a weird ideological thing
-
-brain: wow, eiko has a deep understanding of straight men for a lesbian! she must be so empathetic
-me: ...
-
-... why validated and not offended??
-Eiko — Today at 8:37 PM
-?_?
-what... would i be... offended by...
-Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 8:38 PM
-The "brain: / me:" thing seems like it should be offensive for the same reason that the phrase-I-said-I-wasn't-going-to-say is offensive
-the language is subtler, but it's gesturing at the same thing
-
-(explanation: I read this as ozy saying they parsed Eiko as a girl so much that they didn't remember she used to be a straight guy)
-
-... I, just, really have trouble emphasizing with this culture where people are allowed to make jokes about the similarities between trans lesbians and straight guys, and as long as you talk in terms of "I thought I was a straight guy", it's all cool, but as soon as someone bites the bullet and says, "Yes, because trans lesbians are straight males, etiologically; you thought correctly", then they're ... marking themselves as not part of the coalition? From my perspective, it just looks like your culture is pro-lying
-
-like if i look at a person and my brain's intuitive instinctive bucketing function goes "girl" and they tell me "i'm a boy actually" does whether that's mind control depend on what genitals the person has??
-Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 10:02 PM
-Yes?
-Omega ω — Today at 10:02 PM
-?????
-
-... people just don't see the ideological bubble they live in! People tell me, "frankly you seem to be deeply unhappy about [being gendered male]", because they're relying on their prior of what trans women need. And having been born in 1987, I just don't share that prior! If you actually listen to the thing I'm been yelling for the last six years, I'm much more unhappy about the culture of mind-control than I am about being male, but people put more weight on their prior than my verbal self-report! I guess I can't blame them on the meta level (I also put more weight on priors that people's self-reports a lot of the time), but it's just—so shocking, that people don't see the thing
-
-I don't actually want to return to the past permanently; I want to first rewind to 2007 or so, and then re-do the trans rights thing but with less 🐛 lying this time, "lying" being my heat-of-the-moment angry word for the thing where the born-in-the-wrong-body story that gets sold to the public is very different from the picture you get when you read what people write about their feelings when the general public isn't looking, and people know it's different, and they go on talking in terms of the standard story anyway, and when you challenge them on none of this stuff being true, they say, "Oh, well, those are just lies to cis people; that doesn't count" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/) as if lies to cis people weren't still lies
-
-And, just—I think if an alien or an AI or really any normal person outside of this very specific Berkeley 2016– ideological subculture were to try to objectively describe what's actually happening there in the real physical universe, I don't think they would want to talk about a woman born in the wrong body, coping with her tragic dysphoria; I think the alien or AI would talk about a male primate with some kind of brain malfunction in its sexual targeting system causing it to get confused about a self-other distinction, and I think the normal person would talk about a man with a gross, weird fetish who they don't want sharing a locker room with their daughter.
-
-And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the right ontology here? The Berkeley 2016– denizen can come up with a lot of replies ("But cis women also enjoy being women", "But I don't care about someone's private thoughts; I only care about whether they'll come vintage dress shopping with me"), but they all just seem fundamentally unserious to me?
-
-----
-
-Habryka's PalmCone memo mentions there being people whose top priority is to influence you—that's totally what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
-
-https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
-https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/
-
-The LW community is a bubble/machine that made me who I am (it doesn't infringe on my independence more than school, but it's still shaping force in the way that going to University or Google shapes people)
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
-> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving them—well, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?
-
-the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
-> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
-
-------
-
-If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
-
-> "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me" I wish I had never written about LDT and just told people to vote for reasons they understand when they're older [TODO full direct quote]
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929
-
-Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I calim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
-
-To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once [TODO: linky] wrote to Judea Pearl to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
-
-[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
-
-If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he should remember the only reason he has _any_ people who defer to him _at all_ is _because_ he used to be such a good explainer who actually argued for things.
-
-[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
-
-[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq ]
-
-------
-
-Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter
-
-https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/686455476984119296/eliezer-yudkowsky-seems-really-depressed-these
-
-> So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do. In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes. The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy. It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen
-https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1614129#reply-1614129
-
-I was pleading to him in his capacity as rationality leader, not AGI alignment leader; I know I have no business talking about the latter
-
-(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
-
-[TODO: misrepresentation of the Light: Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.]
-
-"You're allowed to talk to me," he said at the Independence Day party
-
-MIRI made a point of prosecuting Tyler Altman rather than participating (even if it was embarrassing to be embezzled from) because of game theory, but it sees folding to social-justice bullies as inevitable
-
-re Yudkowsky not understanding the "That's So Gender" sense, I suspect this is better modeled as a nearest-unblocked-strategy alignment problem, rather than a capabilities problem ("doesn't comprehend"). Author has a Vision of a Reality; that Reality conflicts with the ideology of the readership, who complain; Author issues a patch that addresses the surface of the complaint without acknowledging the conflict of Visions, because describing the conflict in too much detail would be construed as aggression
-
-------
-
-
-
-
-
-
-[TODO:
-Email to Scott at 0330 a.m.
-> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: "The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories." That thing is a fucking Absolute Denial Macro!
-]
-
-So, because
-
-[TODO: the rats not getting AGP was excusable, the rats not getting the category boundary thing was extremely disappointing but not a causis belli; Eliezer Yudkowsky not getting the category boundary thing was an emergency]
\ No newline at end of file
--- /dev/null
+28 November 2018
+
+[TODO: "not ontologically confused" concession]
+
+It's true that I was _originally_ thinking about all this in the context of autogynephilia and Blanchard's proposed two-type taxonomy. But the philosophical issues at hand here are _way_ more general than that specific hypothesis, and I think Yudkowsky _already_ had more than enough evidence—if [used efficiently](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)—to see that the distribution of actual trans people we know is such that the categories-are-not-abritrary point is relevant in practice.
+
+Consider again the 6.7:1 (!!) cis-woman-to-trans-woman ratio among 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ survey respondents (which I cited in ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)). A curious rationalist, having been raised to believe that trans women are women (or at least, that people who insist that trans women _aren't_ women are ontologically confused), and considering observations like this, might ask the question: "Gee, I wonder _why_ women who happen to be trans are _so much_ more likely to read _Slate Star Codex_, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women who happen to be cis?"
+
+If you're _very careful_, I'm sure it's possible to give a truthful answer to that question without misgendering anyone. But if you want to give a _concise_ answer—perhaps not a _maximally rigorous_ answer, but an answer that usefully [points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) to the true causal-structure-in-the-world while still fitting in a Tweet—I think you _need_ to be able to say something like, "Because trans women are men." (At least as a _live hypothesis_, even if you prefer an intersex-brain etiology for the people we know.)
--- /dev/null
+Remaining email timeline—
+17 Feb: appointment reminder for outpatient on 21 Feb
+22 Feb: Michael asks for my phone number
+
+
+
+9 Mar: me to Michael on "slowly coming around to you"—Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
+11 Mar: me to Orion—Do you want to get a beer sometime next week?
+12 Mar: me to Lauren Rath on getting around to reading Girard
+12 Mar: Can I have your promise that you wouldn't contact the authorities even if you did literally think I would literally successfully kill myself if you didn't? (I don't expect this scenario to come up, but I want to know who I can trust in scenarios where my will comes into conflict with social reality.)
+14 Mar: reach out to Jon Solera
+14-15 Mar: fighting with James Cook
+15 Mar: email Prof. Smigelski
+15 Mar: email Prof. Huff
+15 Mar: "a few thoughts" to Marcus
+15 Mar: Prof. H.
+19 Mar: I get back to Jessica
+18 Mar: forward my first hate mail to Kay
+23 Mar: Blanchard forwards to Lawrence article
+24 Mar: Marcus—
+> I do not think a sane society could deal with 3% of males transitioning [...] I can't quite visualize what such a world would look like
+me—
+> It looks like my social circle. (This is why I'm worried about suboptimal social norms getting locked in for the wrong reasons—what's fashionable in Berkeley in year X is likely to be mainstream in year X+20.)
+25 Mar: more with Marcus
+26 Mar: SEXNET invitation
+30 Mar: possible part-time work on Portal
+30 Mar: SwiftStack options
+31 Mar: forward AllDayChemist order to Alice
+1 Apr: Blanchard-Bailey-Lawrence
+1 Apr: reply to Smigelski ...
+2 Apr: Re: Another autogynophilic rationalist is in a psych ward
+
+> Beyond that, do you know anyone in Pittsburgh? Can you look for CMU EAs out rationalists willing to help out?
+> If needed, can you visit a hospital there, talk with someone having an episode (maybe ideally staying at their place) and help them to get out of there and it to the Bay Area, enlisting Scott S if there's a need for an actual psychiatrist to help?
+
+> Do you feel that you can provide the sort of attentive, active listening that would emotionally support someone in a high integrity agitated state where their ideas may not be literally true, and also may be true but hard to justify, but the ideas are at least honest metaphorical pointers at something that they think is there and needs to be recognized for safety?
+
+3 Apr: Devi situation continues
+(and getting back to Solera)
+
+> ... or the bastards didn't actually give her the message and the opportunity to make a phone call, or she's so upset from the combination of the psychotic break and getting kidnapped that she can't make a phone call herself, but would really really appreciate being handed a phone with someone she knows on the line. Don't you think those scenarios deserve some probability mass?
+
+3 Apr: AllDayChemist order
+4 Apr: "A Proposition"—2 day/wk Portal work??
+3 Apr: yelling at psych ward employees, bet with Scott
+4 Apr: Chana reports in, I pay out the bet
"Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
-
-
-Julia Serano:
-
-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-
-I don't doubt that Julia Serano is telling the truth about her _subjective experiences_. But "that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience_. It's a _hypothesis_ about human psychology. We shouldn't _expect_ anyone to get that kind of thing right based on introspection alone.
-
-
How to account for people disagreeing?
* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
How to get over feeling like I'm fetishizing womanhood?
https://archive.ph/6l1W8
-On my last day at SwiftStack, I said that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke, but not one that I would have made after Charlottesville
-
someone posted an inflation fetish joke in Kelsey's channel and got a lot of laugh reactions including from Big Yud, and it's salient to me that people don't gaslight people with other transformation fetishes
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/458329253595840522/987991378590052402/SPOILER_unknown.png
+
+Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
+
+an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that _wasn't_ why my ordeal's and Devi's were so traumatic _at all_: the psych ward is _very much_ governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
+
+[initial fan mail to Bailey on 7 January, followup to include blog link on 11 February; initial fan mail to Blanchard 10 August]
+
+I had some self-awareness that I was going off the rails—
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state. https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199
+
+to Ben: "I thought I got a message from Michael Vassar saying that the main coalitions were you, and Sarah Constantine, and Zack Davis vs. the world" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:30:55 GMT-0800
+
+scared that Orion was going to kill me
+
+to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
+
+]
+
+You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
+Mon Apr 10 08:51:03 PDT 2017
+
+Michael's "Congratulations on not going back to work at the carpet store!" was a reference to Rick & Morty "Mortynight Run" which aired in August 2015, but I hadn't seen it yet
+
+winning Hamilton tickets at $2200
+
+meeting Katie—
+
+Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
+Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"",
+
+He was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff"
+But in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy
+Not in the way of someone feminine
+The only thing I knew about it at the point we got married was that he thought it was fun to go in drag sometimes
+Like Halloween
+
+And he thought feminization kink was fun
+Like me making him dress up? But he said it was about humiliation
+We didn't even do it more than a handful of times, it wasn't really my thing
+Nothing in my experience ever caused me to think he was trans
+
+"He talked about being a child always feeling out of place
+"But out of place seemed like because he was shy and anxious
+He said he was convinced his anxiety and social problems was *because* he was trans
+
+Spencer seemed much less happy to me after admitting to want transition, often crying about how ugly his body was
+
+because it basically amounts to, \"You rebuilt your entire life around your perverted narcissistic fantasy and didn't even notice\
+like, there's no nice way to say that
+
+My taxon, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.\
+
+all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
+and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZEgQGAjQm5rTAnGuM/beware-boasting-about-non-existent-forecasting-track-records
+
+Idle anecdote on zero-sum intutions: I tend to invent fake conservation laws when I'm having a psychotic episode. In 2013, it was "the happiness and suffering in the universe sum to zero". In 2017, it was something more complicated about a pattern where "frenemies" (think Hamilton and Burr in the musical) inevitably get into a conflict where one murders the other, but, in order to make the equation balance, aspects of the dead man's personality and values rub off on the victor. (I'm not claiming there's a moral here other than "Psychosis is good for inventing fake conservation laws.")
+
+ If my so-called "friends" are going to selectively pretend not to know basic Sequences shit in a way that has clearly been optimized for tricking me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical evidence determining whether or not we live in one of the possible worlds where cutting my dick off is a good idea), and still won't correct the mistake after I (and Michael, and Ben, and Sarah, and Zvi—and Jessica, who can be presumed to not share my object-level-politically-derived biases, because she seems pretty happy about having had her dick cut off) spend thousands of words patiently explaining the problem ... how do I know these "friends" aren't already secretly in the pay of the mine dwarves? They're certainly acting like it.
+
+A distributed intelligence that's using your former friends for processing power and actuators is trying to confuse you into cutting your dick off. Another former friend says, "Oh, that's just an exception; the distributed intelligence isn't usually that crazy. You shouldn't stop believing its story about how you need to give it your lunch money so that it can save the world." You think for a moment. "I guess that makes sense," you say, and hand over your lunch money.
+
+* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
+
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
+
+I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing, either by design or due to technological limitations.
https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1516637367821639680
> wow, this site is extremely sch1z0
-https://twitter.com/typedfemale/status/1516642775764115458
\ No newline at end of file
+https://twitter.com/typedfemale/status/1516642775764115458
+
+https://axrp.net/episode/2022/05/23/episode-15-natural-abstractions-john-wentworth.html
+
+
+13 results in the Slate Star Codex Discord server
+> smorc — 08/19/2022
+> this seems like some terf blog
+> complete with quotes of terfs complaining about transwomen in bathrooms
+> B_ (halloween edition) — 08/19/2022
+> As someone that reads terf blogs, it's weak shit lol
+> Theo DIE dactus — 08/19/2022
+> Really great post, which I love
+> If I were to do a rationalism and law series I'd include that in like the very beginning along with that old post from what's her name about the great amphibian
+
+(on "Blame Me for Trying")
+> I'm 100 words into this and I love it already
+https://discord.com/channels/289207224075812864/289207289930448897/399039618458058753
+
+https://twitter.com/RichardHakania/status/1628384239224750086
+> one of the best things I've read about the sexed-brain claims of trans ideology
+
+"Blame Me for Trying" retweeted by Riley Goodside
+https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1642435862410457089
+
+> one of the most insane things i've ever read
+https://twitter.com/typedfemale/status/1670205820221665281
+
+https://twitter.com/randomstring729/status/1672307146724089867
+
+https://twitter.com/randomstring729/status/1672284217856720896
+
+https://twitter.com/CasaubonZ/status/1672106657047015424
+> honestly one of the many reasons why Eliezer Yudkowsky will burn is for the way that rationalist brainworms seriously fuck with ppl questioning their gender.
+
+https://twitter.com/typedfemale/status/1680409277952065537
+>> my long con is contributing patches to rust so i can later shill blanchard's transsexualism typology on my personal twitter account, all to piss off the rust community as punishment for their suffocating wokeness
+>
+>lesswrong is hitting so different these days 😳
+(13 retweets / 298 Likes / 45.2K views)
+
+https://twitter.com/mutual_ayyde/status/1680444686169960448
+> this is shit i'd rather commit suicide over admitting oh my god
+
+https://twitter.com/vansianism/status/1680447935371436032
+> There's being a repressor in denial and there's being this. Okay it's not as bad as ted k but still lmao
+
+https://twitter.com/mutual_ayyde/status/1680448722222841859
+> i've tried to rationalize my self hate many a time but never this rigorously
+
+https://twitter.com/mutual_ayyde/status/1680445977109626881
+> lesswrong is like a particle accelerator for posting, this is some pathos on par with tolsoi, thank you for this
+
+https://twitter.com/pawnofcthulhu/status/1680457016773595137
+> man
+> at the end of the day i can't help but have any reaction to zack-m-davisism other than "this is an exotic flower of an ideology that can't grow anywhere else but this greenhouse we've built"
+
+
+https://twitter.com/radgendervibes/status/1680457834591588355
+> Get over yourself, get over your misogyny, and get back on hormones before you fucking kill yourself from the despair we all feel. This shit isn't a fucking game, I hope you have a good life <3
+
+https://twitter.com/Lavender_2115/status/1681490996528398337
+> I didn't read the whole thing but this might be the saddest eggpost I've ever read.
+
+https://twitter.com/alyssamvance/status/1681441114384109568
+> I'm pretty moderate, but I really disagree with LessWrong that trans people are universally sexual predators who should be burned at the stake
+(2 retweets / 140 Likes / 21.3K views)
+
+https://awful.systems/post/130
+
+https://twitter.com/adrusi/status/1681782160984883201
+> sure. i just dont know if that means he's necessarily self-hating
+>
+> like, obviously it's not a good sign, but I don't know him well enough on a personal level to be willing to say that
+>
+> where 2017-zack... was on a different level
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/10w6r33/sequel_to_a_beloved_siskind_classic_from_a/
+
+> The one guy in the Cthulhu cult who's sincerely devoted to resurrecting the dark god and ending the world, and is constantly angry and disappointed that the rest of the cult is just in it for the blood orgies and professional networking.
+>
+> Freddie deBoer.
+> ----
+> I thought this was a tweet about Zack M Davis
+https://twitter.com/Sesquame/status/1746360508482027853
+
+https://twitter.com/halcyon_hazel/status/1747347608417267906
+> i have happened across a subgroup that would properly be termed as “male agp rationalists” and i want to claw my eyes out. can y’all be normal for five minutes??
+> do NOT tag him
+
+https://twitter.com/Ida_Clemens/status/1747347899116147017
+> oh no, that guy with the insane blog is just a *type* of guy???
+
+https://twitter.com/halcyon_hazel/status/1747445721081495787
+> i’ll compliment him here!! that’s why i enjoy reading his stuff more than the other examples — he’s excruciatingly honest
+
+https://twitter.com/adrusi/status/1747390956159037508
+> idk. at one point, with the particular character i have in mind, i think it's pretty clear there was a lot of envy going on, but i think that's mostly in the past and now he's just like "eh ok, im cool w this"
+> though i suspect there's something subtle going on where he's reluctant to believe when trans women tell him they differ from how how he describes his agp. a "it wouldn't be fair if it were so" playing out underneath the "i was so tempted to lie just like that and im demonstrably a better rationalist than they are"
+> and i do think zd is a better rationalist than 95% of the transfems i know. at the hard parts, like having a reflexive aversion to self-deceit, evidenced by stuff unrelated to all this, even
+> and a distinct level of care in his thought. i think he's wrong about some important things, but never bc of oversights
+
+https://twitter.com/sesquimundist/status/1750889751807131731
+> it's guys like zack m davis that deserve to have a high religious role
--- /dev/null
+-------
+
+[OUTLINE—
+ * the race of dath ilani humans are called the "eliezera" in Word of God canon
+ presenting an eliezera racial supremacy narrative. (It's still a racial supremacy narrative even if he doesn't _use the verbatim phrase_ "racial supremacy.")
+ * Bluntly, this is not a culture that gives a shit about people being well-informed. This is a culture that has explicitly
+ * In more detail: the algorithm that designed dath ilani Civilization is one that systematically favors plans that involve deception, over than plans that involve being honest.
+ * This is not a normative claim or a generic slur that dath ilani are "evil" or "bad"; it's a positve claim about systematic deception. If you keep seeing plans for which social-deception-value exceeds claimed-social-benefit value, you should infer that the plans are being generated by a process that "values" (is optimizing for) deception, whether it's a person or a conscious mind.
+ * Watsonian rationale: with smarter people, knowledge actually is dangerous. I'm more interested in a Doylist interpretation, that this reflects authoritarian tendencies in later Yudkowsky's thought.
+
+You can, of course, make up a sensible [Watsonian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) rationale for this. A world with much smarter people is more "volatile"; with more ways for criminals and terrorists to convert knowledge into danger, maybe you _need_ more censorship just to prevent Society from blowing itself up.
+
+I'm more preoccupied by a [Doylistic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist) interpretation—that dath ilan's obsessive secret-Keeping reflects something deep about how the Yudkowsky of the current year relates to speech and information, in contrast to the Yudkowsky who wrote the Sequences. The Sequences had encouraged you—yes, _you_, the reader—to be as rational as possible. In contrast, the dath ilan mythos seems to portray advanced rationality as dangerous knowledge that people need to be protected from.
+
+As another notable example of dath ilan hiding information for the alleged greater good, in Golarion, Keltham discovers that he's a sexual sadist, and deduces that Civilization has deliberately prevented him from realizing this, because there aren't enough corresponding masochists to go around in dath ilan. Having concepts for "sadism" and "masochism" as variations in human psychology would make sadists like Keltham sad about the desirable sexual experiences they'll never get to have, so Civilization arranges for them to _not be exposed to knowledge that would make them sad, because it would make them sad_ (!!).
+
+What happens, I asked, to the occasional dath ilani free speech activists, with their eloquent manifestos arguing that Civilization would be better off coordinating on maps that reflect the territory, rather than coordinating to be a Keeper-managed zoo? (They _had_ to exist: in a medianworld centered on Yudkowsky, there are going to be a few weirdos who are +2.5 standard deviations on "speak the truth, even if your voice trembles" and −2.5 standard deivations on love of clever plots; this seems less weird than negative utilitarians, who were [established to exist](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1789623#reply-1789623).) I _assumed_ they get dealt with somehow in the end (exiled from most cities? ... involuntarily cryopreserved?), but there had to be an interesting story about someone who starts out whistleblowing small lies (which Exception Handling allows; they think it's cute, and it's "priced in" to the game they're playing), and then just keeps _escalating and escalating and escalating_ until Governance decides to unperson him.
+
+[...]
+
+If we believe that [IQ research validates the "Jews are clever" stereotype](https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf), I wondered if there's a distinct (albeit probably correlated) "enjoying deception" trait that validates the "Jews are sneaky" stereotype? If dath ilan is very high in this "sneakiness" trait (relative to Earth Jews), that would help explain all the conspiracies!
+
+The existence of such a widespread sneakiness/"taste for deception" trait among the eliezera, in conjunction with their culture just not particularly valuing public knowledge (because they assume everything important is being handled by the Keepers), explains the recurring conspiracies and coverups, like the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, Exception Handling's fabrication of evidence for Sparashki being real, the sadism/masochism coverup, and [the village that deliberately teaches anti-redhead bigotry to children in order to test the robustness of dath ilan's general humanism indoctrination](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uyBeAN5jPEATMqKkX/lies-told-to-children-1).
+
+I stress that this hypothesis _doesn't_ require dath ilani to be cartoon villains who hate knowledge and want people to be ignorant. Just that, as a result of the widespread sneakiness trait and their outsourcing information-process to the Keepers, in the course of trying to accomplish other things, plans-that-involve-conspiracies are often higher in their search ordering than plans-that-involve-keeping-people-informed.
+
+I claimed that there was a hidden-core-of-rationality thing about a culture that values living in truth, that the dath ilani didn't have. In previous discussion of the Sparashki example, a user called lc had written, "If you see someone wearing an elf costume at work and conclude elves are real and make disastrous decisions based on that conclusion you are mentally deranged". And indeed, you would be mentally deranged if you did that _on Earth_, because we don't have an elves-are-real conspiracy on Earth.
+
+In elves-are-real conspiracy-world, you (Whistleblower) see someone (Conspirator) wearing an elf costume at work and say, "Nice costume." They say, "What costume?" You say, "I see that you're dressed like an elf, but elves aren't real." They say, "What do you mean? Of course elves are real. I'm right here." You say, "You know exactly what I mean."
+
+It would appear that there's a conflict between Conspirator (who wants to maintain a social reality in which they're an elf, because it's fun, and the conspiracy is sufficiently outlandish that it's assumed that no one is "really" being deceived) and Whistleblower (who wants default social reality to map to actual reality; make-believe is fine at a designated fandom convention which has designated boundaries, but let's be serious at work, where your coworkers are trying to make a living and haven't opted-in to this false social reality).
+
+I was skeptical that a culture where people collude to maintain a fake social reality at their job in a hospital, and everyone else is expected to play along because it's fun, really has this living-in-truth thing. People play those social-reality games on Earth, too, and when _they_ say no one is being deceived, they're _definitely_ lying about that, and I doubted that the eliezera were actually built that differently.
+
+"Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence"
+
+(I was tempted to tag that as "epistemic status: low-confidence speculation", but that's _frequentist_ thinking—as if "Jews and gentiles are equally sneaky" were a "null hypothesis" that could only be rejected by data that would be sufficiently unlikely assuming that the null was true. Ha ha, that would be _crazy!_ Obviously, I should have a _prior_ on the effect size difference between the Jew and gentile sneakiness distributions, that can be updated as sneakiness data comes in. I think the mean of my prior distribution is at, like, _d_ ≈ 0.1? So it's not "low confidence"; it's "low confidence of the effect size being large enough to be of much practical significance".)
+
+For context on why I have no sense of humor about this, on Earth (which _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan), when someone says "it's not lying, because no one _expected_ me to tell the truth in that situation", what's usually going on, [as Zvi Mowshowitz explains](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/), is that is that conspirators benefit from deceiving outsiders, and the claim that "everyone knows" is them lying to _themselves_ about the fact that they're lying.
+
+(If _you_ got hurt by not knowing, well, it's not like anyone got hurt, because if you didn't know, then you weren't anyone.)
+
+Okay, but if it were _actually true_ that everyone knew, what would be _function_ of saying the false thing? On dath ilan (if not in Earth boardrooms), I suppose the answer is "Because it's fun"? Okay, but what is the function of your brain giving out a "fun" reward in this context? It seems like at _some_ point, there has to be the expectation of _some_ cognitive system (although possibly not an entire "person") taking the signals literally.
+
+That's why, when I _notice_ myself misrepresenting my actual beliefs or motivations because I think it's funny or rhetorically powerful (and it takes a special act of noticing; humans aren't built to be honest by default), I often take care to disclaim it immediately (as was observed in the message this is one a reply to), precisely because I _don't_ think that "everybody knows"; I'm not going to give up on humor or powerful rhetoric, but I'm also not going to delude myself into thinking it's "zero-calorie" (people who don't "get the joke" _are_ going to be misled, and I don't think it's unambigously "their fault" for not being able to read my "intent" to arbitrary precision)
+
+But maybe dath ilan is sufficiently good at achieving common knowledge in large groups that they _can_ pull off a zero-calorie "everyone knows" conspiracy without damaging shared maps??
+
+I'm still skeptical, especially given that we see them narratizing it as "not lying" (in the same words that corrupt executives on Earth use!), rather than _explicitly_ laying out the evopysch logic of sneakiness superstimuli, and the case that they know how to pull it off in a zero-calorie (trivial damage to shared maps) way.
+
+In general, I think that "it's not lying because no one expected the truth" is something you would say as part of an attempted nearest-unblocked-strategy end run around a deontological constraint against "lying" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly); I don't think it's something you would say if you _actually cared_ about shared maps being accurate
+
+What I see on Earth (which, again, _actually exists_, unlike dath ilan, which _does not exist_), is that people mostly drink their own Kool-Aid; lying to the world without lying to yourself is just not psychologically sustainable.
+
+I had some insightful discussion with someone in 2017, in which I was saying that I wanted something to be public knowledge, that was frequently denied for political reasons. (The object-level topic doesn't matter in this context.) This person said, "I don't particularly care about this being commonly recognized. C'mon! It's fun to have some secrets that are not public knowledge".
+
+In 2021, _the same person_ says she feels "disgusted and complicit" for having talked to me.
+
+> At some point during this time I started treating this as a hidden truth that I was proud of myself for being able to see, which I in retrospect I feel disgusted and complicit to have accepted
+
+> above exchanges did in retrospect cause me emotional pain, stress, and contributed to internalizing sexism and transphobia.
+
+I think it's very significant that she _didn't_ say that she encountered _new evidence_ that made her _change her mind_, and decided that she was _actually wrong_ in 2017. The claim is just that the things we said in 2017 are "harmful."
+
+wrap-up dath ilan is fictional
+
+the reason I'm paranoid and humorless about
+
+positive-valence fictional depictions of
+
+"but, but, information can _hurt people_, and hurting people is wrong" and "it's not lying if 'everybody knows'" memes, is because I _actually see this stuff destroying people's minds in real life_
+
+I certainly don't think Yudkowsky is consciously "lying"
+
+(natural language is very flexible, you can _come up with_ some interpretation)
+
+You can cosplay an elf _at a designated fandom convention_, where people have temporarily _opted in_ to that false social reality. But I don't think you can cosplay an elf _at work_ (in "real life") and have everyone play along for extended periods of time, without dealing damage to real-life shared maps.
+
+Similarly, I cosplay female characters at fandom conventions, and that's fun, and I'm glad that conventions exist, but I can't transition in "real life", because I don't expect anyone in real life to believe that I'm female, because it's _very obviously not true_. People will _pretend_ to believe it because they're terrified of being accused of transphobia, but _they are lying_, and the
+
+people who try to claim that no one is being deceived because "everyone knows"
+
+_are also lying_.
+
+Keltham contradicts himself _in the same tag_
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1865236#reply-1865236
+
+> The sneakiest thing dath ilan did was covertly shape him to never notice he was a sadist
+> [...]
+> Obviously past-Keltham was shaped in all sorts of ways as a kid, but those shaping-targets are matters of public documentation on the Network. They're not _covert_ intended effects of the alien technology.
+
+I mean, it's worth noting that their concept of a "good reason" literally includes "prediction markets think people will be happier this way". This is not a Society that gives a shit (as a terminal value) about non-Keepers having accurate information (or they wouldn't, _e.g._, gaslight Merrin about how famous she is).
+
+_Of course_ a Society that prizes freedom-from-infohazards as a core value is going to have lots of "good reasons" for the systematically-misleading-representations they make, that will seem genuinely compelling to the people of that Society who are in on it!
+
+One might have hoped that dath ilani would be self-aware enough to notice that things that seem like a "good reason" for a conspiracy _to dath ilani_, would not seem like a "good reason" to people from a Society that prizes freedom-of-speech? But if they've screened off their history (for the greater good, of course), they might not have a concept of what other Societies are like ...
+
+(Yes, I know we've been informed by authorial fiat that dath ilan has a lot of internal diversity, but there are necessarily limits to that if you're going to be a human Society specifically rather than a Solomonff inductor, and it seems clear that any faction that thinks gaslighting Merrin is morally wrong is on the losing end of the counterfactual warfare of democracy.)
+
+Aslan / amputation of destiny
+
+ * An ethnographer might note that Americans believe themselves to be "the land of the brave and the home of the free", without being obliged for their ethnography to agree with this description. I'm taking the same stance towards dath ilan: as a literary critic, I don't have to share its Society's beliefs about itself.
+
+spoilers for the pleasure of discovering sex for themselves: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812613#reply-1812613
+
+being told eugenics prospects early as self-fulfilling prophecies, as a legitimate infohazard: https://glowfic.com/replies/1812614#reply-1812614
+
+sex and classical mechanics spoilers (spoilers are not the same thing as conspiracies/secrets; Keltham and Carissa arne't supposed to find out): https://glowfic.com/replies/1718168#reply-1718168
+
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1788890#reply-1788890
+> He likes confusing people. Supposedly it's to train strong minds that don't weakly rely on being told how reality works. I think it may be what dath ilan does with all its repressed sadism.
+
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1801463#reply-1801463
+> "I really think all y'all don't give dath ilan enough credit on some dimensions, if not others. They didn't tell me about my sexual sadism because there would have been no good way for me to satisfy it, Pilar, not because they wanted to deny me my utilityfunction. Or did you have something else in mind?"
+
+(masochism search tags)
+https://glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
+
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044
+> "But yes, or rather, my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.
+
+> His Lawful Good world tried to make sure he never found out about that. Keltham thinks that's because dath ilan has no masochists. He thinks masochism itself is unlikely
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1788845#reply-1788845
+
+
+In the #dath-ilan channel of the server, Yudkowsky elaborated on the reasoning for the masochism coverup:
+
+> altruistic sadists would if-counterfactually-fully-informed prefer not to know, because Civilization is capped on the number of happy sadists. even if you can afford a masochist, which requires being very rich, you're buying them away from the next sadist to whom masochists were previously just barely affordable
+
+In response to a question about how frequent sadism is among Keepers, Yudkowsky wrote:
+
+> I think they're unusually likely to be aware, nonpracticing potential sexual sadists. Noticing that sort of thing about yourself, and then not bidding against the next sadist over for the limited masochist supply, and instead just operating your brain so that it doesn't hurt much to know what you can't have, is exactly the kind of cost you're volunteering to take on when you say you wanna be a Keeper.
+> that's archetypally exactly The Sort Of Thing Keepers Do And Are
+
+> They choose not to, not just out of consideration for the next person in line, but because not harming the next person in line is part of the explicit bargain of becoming a Keeper.
+> Like, this sort of thing is exactly what you're signing up for when you throw yourself on the bounded rationality grenade.
+> Let the truth destroy what it can—but in you, not in other people.
+
+I objected (to the room, I told myself, not technically violating my prior intent to not bother Yudkowsky himself anymore) that "Let the truth destroy what it can—in yourself, not in other people" is such an _incredibly_ infantilizing philosophy. It's a meme that optimizes for shaping people (I know, _other_ people) into becoming weak, stupid, and unreflective, like Thellim's impression of Jane Austen characters. I expect people on Earth—not even "rationalists", just ordinary adults—to be able to cope with ... learning facts about psychology that imply that there are desirable sexual experiences they won't get to have.
+
+A user called Numendil insightfully pointed out that dath ilani might be skeptical of an Earthling saying that an unpleasant aspect our of existence is actually fine, for the same reason we would be skeptical of a resident of Golarion saying that; it makes sense for people from richer civilizations to look "spoiled" to people from poorer ones.
+
+Other replies were more disturbing. One participant wrote:
+
+> I think of "not in other people" not as "infantilizing", but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological.
+
+I pointed out that this obviously applies to, say, religion. Was it wrong to advocate for atheism in a religious Society, where robbing someone of their belief in God might be harming them?
+
+"Every society strikes a balance between protectionism and liberty," someone said. "This isn't news."
+
+
+Someone else said:
+
+> dath ilan is essentially a paradise world. In a paradise world, people have the slack to make microoptimisations like that, to allow themselves Noble Lies and not fear for what could be hiding in the gaps. Telling the truth is a heuristic for this world where Noble Lies are often less Noble than expected and trust is harder to come by.
+
+I said that I thought people were missing this idea that the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is such a well-performing [injunction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dWTEtgBfFaz6vjwQf/ethical-injunctions) in the real world (despite the fact that there's no law of physics preventing lies and ignorance from having beneficial consequences), is because [it protects against unknown unknowns](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E7CKXxtGKPmdM9ZRc/of-lies-and-black-swan-blowups). Of course an author who wants to portray an ignorance-maintaining conspiracy as being for the greater good, can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
+
+I started a new thread to complain about the attitude I was seeing (Subject: "Noble Secrets; Or, Conflict Theory of Optimization on Shared Maps"). When fiction in this world, _where I live_, glorifies Noble Lies, that's a cultural force optimizing for making shared maps less accurate, I explained. As someone trying to make shared maps _more_ accurate, this force was hostile to me and mine. I understood that "secrets" and "lies" are not the same thing, but if you're a consequentialist thinking in terms of what kinds of optimization pressures are being applied to shared maps, [it's the same issue](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist): I'm trying to steer _towards_ states of the world where people know things, and the Keepers of Noble Secrets are trying to steer _away_ from states of the world where people know things. That's a conflict. I was happy to accept Pareto-improving deals to make the conflict less destructive, but I wasn't going to pretend the pro-ignorance forces were my friends just because they self-identified as "rationalists" or "EA"s. I was willing to accept secrets around nuclear or biological weapons, or AGI, on "better ignorant than dead" grounds, but the "protect sadists from being sad" thing wasn't a threat to anyone's life; it was _just_ coddling people who can't handle reality, which made _my_ life worse.
+
+I wasn't buying the excuse that secret-Keeping practices that wouldn't be okay on Earth were somehow okay on dath ilan, which was asserted by authorial fiat to be sane and smart and benevolent enough to make it work. Alternatively, if I couldn't argue with authorial fiat: the reasons why it would be bad on Earth (even if it wouldn't be bad in the author-assertion paradise of dath ilan) are reasons why _fiction about dath ilan is bad for Earth_.
+
+And just—back in the 'aughts, I said, Robin Hanson had this really great blog called _Overcoming Bias_. (You probably haven't heard of it.) I wanted that _vibe_ back, of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008—the will to _just get the right answer_, without all this galaxy-brained hand-wringing about who the right answer might hurt.
+
+(_Overcoming Bias_ had actually been a group blog then, but I was enjoying the æsthetic of saying "Robin Hanson's blog" (when what I had actually loved about _Overcoming Bias_ was Yudkowsky's Sequences) as a way of signaling contempt for the Yudkowsky of the current year.)
+
+I would have expected a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 to respond to that tripe about protecting people from the truth being a form of "recognizing independent agency" with something like—
+
+"Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post ["Your Rationality Is My Business"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business)."
+
+—or _something like that_. Not that the reply needed to use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone needed to counter to this very obvious [anti-epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology).
+
+And what we actually saw in response to the "You don't get to do harm to other people" message was ... it got 5 "+1" emoji-reactions.
+
+Yudkowsky [chimed in to point out that](/images/yudkowsky-it_doesnt_say_tell_other_people.png) "Doublethink" was about _oneself_ not reasonably being in the epistemic position of knowing that one should lie to oneself. It wasn't about telling the truth to _other_ people.
+
+On the one hand, fair enough. My generalization from "you shouldn't want to have false beliefs for your own benefit" to "you shouldn't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit" (and the further generalization to it being okay to intervene) was not in the text of the post itself. It made sense for Yudkowsky to refute my misinterpretation of the text he wrote.
+
+On the other hand—given that he was paying attention to this #overflow thread anyway, I might have naïvely hoped that he would appreciate what I was trying to do?—that, after the issue had been pointed out, he would decided that he _wanted_ his chatroom to be a place where we don't want other people to have false beliefs for their own benefit?—a place that approves of "meddling" in the form of _telling people things_.
+
+The other chatroom participants mostly weren't buying what I was selling.
+
+A user called April wrote that "the standard dath ilani has internalized almost everything in the sequences": "it's not that the standards are being dropped[;] it's that there's an even higher standard far beyond what anyone on earth has accomplished". (This received a checkmark emoji-react from Yudkowsky, an indication of his agreement/endorsement.)
+
+Someone else said he was "pretty leery of 'ignore whether models are painful' as a principle, for Earth humans to try to adopt," and went on to offer some thoughts for Earth. I continued to maintain that it was ridiculous that we were talking of "Earth humans" as if there were any other kind—as if rationality in the Yudkowskian tradition wasn't something to aspire to in real life.
+
+Dath ilan [is _fiction_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logical-fallacy-of-generalization-from-fictional), I pointed out. Dath ilan _does not exist_. I thought it was a horrible distraction to try to see our world through Thellim's eyes and feel contempt over how much better things must be on dath ilan (which, to be clear, again, _does not exist_), when one could be looking through the eyes of an ordinary reader of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 (the _real_ 2008, which _actually happened_), and seeing everything we've lost.
+
+[As it was taught to me then](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iiWiHgtQekWNnmE6Q/if-you-demand-magic-magic-won-t-help): if you demand Keepers, _Keepers won't help_. If I'm going to be happy anywhere, or achieve greatness anywhere, or learn true secrets anywhere, or save the world anywhere, or feel strongly anywhere, or help people anywhere—I may as well do it _on Earth_.
+
+The thread died out soon enough. I had some more thoughts about dath ilan's predilection for deception, of which I typed up some notes for maybe adapting into a blog post later, but there was no point in wasting any more time on Discord.
+
+On 29 November 2022 (four years and a day after the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance that had ignited my rationalist civil war), Yudkowsky remarked about the sadism coverup again:
+
+> Keltham is a romantically obligate sadist. This is information that could've made him much happier if masochists had existed in sufficient supply; Civilization has no other obvious-to-me-or-Keltham reason to conceal it from him.
+
+Despite the fact that there was no point in wasting any more time on Discord, I decided not to resist the temptation to open up the thread again and dump some paragraphs from my notes on the conspiracies of dath ilan.
+
+---------
+
+A user called ajvermillion asked why I was being so aggressively negative about dath ilan. He compared it to Keltham's remark about how [people who grew up under a Lawful Evil government were disposed to take a more negative view of paternalism](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1874754#reply-1874754) than they do in dath ilan, where paternalism basically works fine because dath ilan is benevolent.
+
+This question put me in a somewhat awkward position: it was a legitimate question that I felt I had to answer, that I had no way of answering honestly without at least _alluding_ to my prior greviances against Yudkowsky ... which were off-topic for the server. (Again, I had told myself that I was here to comment on the story, not to prosecute my greviances.)
+
+I tried to explain, briefly. Someone who might be even _more_ paranoid about abuses of power than someone who grew up with a Lawful Evil government, is someone who grew up under a power structure that put on a _good show_ of being clean and nice, but was actually corrupt and mean.
+
+Yudkowsky had this whole marketing image of him being uniquely sane and therefore uniquely benevolent, and because his Sequences were so life-changingly good, I _actually fell for it_. There was a long Dumb Story (this Story) that was off-topic and I hadn't then finished writing up, but basically, I had what I claimed were very strong reasons not to trust the guy anymore; I think he cares a lot about not explicitly _lying_, but what made the Sequences special is that they articulated a vastly higher standard than that, that he had no intention of living up to.
+
+And so, yeah, insofar as fiction about dath ilan functioned as marketing material for Yudkowsky's personality cult that I thought was damaging people like me (in some ways, while simultaneously helping us in other ways), I had an incentive to come up with literary criticism that paints dath ilan negatively?
+
+It was great for ajvermillion to notice this! It _would_ be bad if my brain were configured to come up with dath-ilan-negative literary criticism, and for me to _simultaneously_ present myself as an authority on dath ilan whom you should trust. But if dath-ilan-negative literary criticism was undersupplied for structural reasons (because people who like a story are selected for not seeing things the story is doing that are Actually Bad), and my brain was configured to generate it anyway (because I disliked the person Yudkowsky had become, in contrast to the person he was in 2008), it seemed pro-social for me to post it, for other people to take or leave according to their own judgement?
+
+The problem I saw with this is that becoming rich and famous isn't a purely random exogenous event. In order to make an informed decision about whether or not to put in the effort to try to _become_ rich and famous (as contrasted to choosing a lower-risk or more laid-back lifestyle), you need accurate beliefs about the perks of being rich and famous.
+
+The dilemma of whether to make more ambitious economic choices in pusuit of sexual goals was something that _already_ happens to people on Earth, rather than being hypothetical. I once met a trans woman who spent a lot of her twenties and thirties working very hard to get money for various medical procedures. I think she would be worse off under a censorship regime run by self-styled Keepers who thought it was kinder to prevent _poor people_ from learning about the concept of "transsexualism".
+
+Further discussion established that Yudkowsky was (supposedly) already taking into account that class of distortion on individuals' decisions, but that the empirical setting of probabilities and utilities happened to be such that ignorance came out on top.
+
+
+Even if you specified by authorial fiat that "latent sadists could use the information to decide whether or not to try to become rich and famous" didn't tip the utility calculus in itself, [facts are connected to each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies); there were _more consequences_ to the coverup, more ways in which better-informed people could make better decisions than worse-informed people.
+
+
+Or imagine a world where male homosexuality couldn't be safely practiced due to super-AIDS. (I know very little about BDSM.) I still think men with that underlying predisposition would be better off _having a concept_ of "homosexuality" (even if they couldn't practice it), rather than the concept itself being censored. There are also other systematic differences that go along with sexual orientation (the "feminine gays, masculine lesbians" thing); if you censor the _concept_, you're throwing away that knowledge.
+
+(When I had brought up the super-AIDS hypothetical in the chat, Ajvermillion complained that I was trying to bait people into self-cancelling by biting the bullet on suppressing homosexuality. I agreed that the choice of example was engineered to activate people's progressive moral intuitions about gay rights—it was great for him to notice that—but I thought that colliding philosophical intuitions like that was intellectually productive; it wasn't an attempt to gather blackmail material.)
+
+----
+
+It seemed like the rationale for avoiding spoilers of movie plots or homework exercises had to do with the outcome being different if you got spoiled: you have a different æsthetic experience if you experience the plot twist in the 90th minute of the movie rather than the fourth paragraph of the _Wikipedia_ article. Dath ilan's sadism/masochism coverup didn't seem to have the same structure: when I try to prove a theorem myself before looking at how the textbook says to do it, it's not because I would be _sad about the state of the world_ if I looked at the textbook; it's because the temporary ignorance of working it out myself results in a stronger state of final knowledge.
+
+That is, the difference between "spoiler protections" (sometimes useful) and "coverups" (bad) had to do with whether the ignorant person is expected to eventually uncover the hidden information, and whether the ignorant person knows that there's hidden information that they're expected to uncover. In the case of the sadism/masochism coverup (in contrast to the cases of movie spoilers or homework exercises), it seemed like neither of these conditions pertained. (Keltham knows that the Keepers are keeping secrets, but he seems to actively have beliefs about human psychology that imply masochism is implausible; it seems more like he has a false map, rather than a blank spot on his map for the answer to the homework exercise to be filled in.) I thought that was morally relevant.
+
+(Additionally, I would have hoped that my two previous mentions in the thread of supporting keeping nuclear, bioweapon, and AI secrets should have already made it clear that I wasn't against _all_ cases of Society hiding information, but to further demonstrate my ability to generate counterexamples, I mentioned that I would also admit _threats_ as a class of legitimate infohazard: if I'm not a perfect decision theorist, I'm better off if Tony Soprano just doesn't have my email address to begin with, if I don't trust myself to calculate when I "should" ignore his demands.)
+
+-----
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/954750671280807968/1210280210730061854
+> I wouldn't say [the history Screen is] just a plot device and I can see the real dath ilan doing it; Earth definitely shouldn't bother considering it, though.
>
> —[probably apocryphal](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/09/darwinism-hope-pray/) reaction to Darwin's theory of natural selection
-(This is Worth a Fight?)
-> "—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can't you?"
->
-> I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word _community_, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as _the gay community_, I'm certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don't want to spend my life watching _gay and lesbian_ television channels, using _gay and lesbian_ new systems ... or going to _gay and lesbian_ street parades. It's all so ... proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don't _market the product_ their way, you're some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer."
->
-> —"Cocoon" by Greg Egan
-
> What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
>
> —Susan Sontag
>
> "The Buried Life" by Matthew Arnold
-> All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world
+> When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
+> The truth is great, and shall prevail,
+> When none cares whether it prevail or not.
>
-> —Thomas Jefferson
+> —["Magna Est Vertias" by Coventry Patmore](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9M3ynNuBsRCDfmEsZ/less-wrong-poetry-corner-coventry-patmore-s-magna-est)
> Ultimately every examined life can be interpreted as a disaster; looking closely enough we can always discover psychological and social forces that provide fuel for unlimited rage. [...] But no life can transcend its own disasters unless it celebrates its uniqueness and contributes that which only it can contribute. Life is perverted if one is constantly reacting, never initiating, but always allowing rage to define it.
>
Moliere on "dormative virtue"
(Blanchard's Dangerous Idea)
-> MUGATU
-> The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Crossdresser, demigirl, trans woman? They're the _same people_!
->
-> Doesn't anyone notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
->
-> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
> Perhaps someday we [...] will be able to forthrightly acknowledge the paraphilic hand we were dealt and play that hand without equivocation or apology.
>
>
> —old Soviet joke (paraphrased)
-> Don't think.
-> If you think, then don't speak.
-> If you think and speak, then don't write.
-> If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
-> If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.
->
-> —Soviet proverb
-
https://xkcd.com/1942/
> A woman came up to me and said
> Well, if that's love
> It comes at much too high a cost!
-(Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle)
-> Go, Soul, the body's guest,
-> Upon a thankless arrant:
-> Fear not to touch the best;
-> The truth shall be thy warrant:
-> Go, since I needs must die,
-> And give the world the lie.
->
-> Say to the court, it glows
-> And shines like rotten wood;
-> Say to the church, it shows
-> What's good, and doth no good:
-> If church and court reply,
-> Then give them both the lie.
->
-> —["The Lie"](https://www.bartleby.com/40/48.html) by Sir Walter Raleigh
-
> Stuck, in the middle of fear and shame
> Everybody's looking for someone to blame
> Like it's a game, like it's a game
>
> —_The Gods Themselves_ by Isaac Asimov
-> In desperation he quoted André Gide's remark: "It has all been said before, but you must say it again, since nobody listens." Unfortunately, judging by the quotations given here, Gide's remark is still relevant even today.
->
-> —_Making Sense of Heritability_
-
> In some cases, there is a reason for one gender to adopt certain tasks—males have stronger muscles, and females give birth, and thus big game hunting tends to be done by men (who, in most cultures, are typically male).
>
> —Cailin O'Connor, "Measuring Conventionality"
> —"Eugene" by Greg Egan
(post for leaving Berkeley)
-> _I don't care about what all the others say
-> Well I guess there are some things that will just never go away, I
-> Wish that I could say that there's no better place than home
-> But home's a place that I have never known_
->
-> —"On The Run", _Steven Universe_
-
-> When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
-> The truth is great, and shall prevail,
-> When none cares whether it prevail or not.
->
-> —Coventry Patmore
> I said: "Sophie, I'm sorry things got heated last night. I understand your point of view. A lot of it used to be mine, too. Like I said, I went to U.C. Santa Cruz and Berkeley back in the 1970s, when everything was about socialism. But 40 years of life and reporting in 60 countries has taught me that life is more nuanced than that. These issues aren't that simple. They're more complicated."
>
>
> —"Dying to Begin" by Stretch Princess
-> "The only thing standing in the way of my own progress," Sagreda said, "is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim."
->
-> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan
-
> When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.
>
> –Emile Zola
+
+> And Durham—the software puppet, the lifeless shell animated by a being from another plane—looked him in the eye and said, "You have to let me show you what you are."
+>
+> —_Permutation City_ by Greg Egan
+
+> I have had the strength to live through it, I shall have the strength to write it down.
+>
+> —"The Husband I Bought" by Ayn Rand
+
+> Because life is a gradual series of revelations
+> that occur over a period of time
+> It's not some carefully crafted story
+> It's a mess and we're all gonna die
+>
+> If you saw a movie that was like real life
+> You'd be like "What the hell was that movie about?"
+> It was really all over the place.
+> Life doesn't make narrative sense.
+>
+> —"The End of the Movie", _Crazy Ex Girlfriend_
+
+> "Oh, yes," she said, "The Ainsworth house. You designed it. I'm sorry. You just happened to be the victim of one of my rare attacks of honesty. I don't have them often. As you know, if you've read my stuff yesterday."
+>
+> "I've read it. And—well, I'll follow your example and I'll be perfectly frank. Don't take it as a complaint—one must never complain against one's critics. But really that capitol of Holcombe's is much worse in all those very things you blasted us for. Why did you give him such a glowing tribute yesterday? Or did you have to?"
+>
+> —_The Fountainhead_ by Ayn Rand
+
+> _I don't care about what all the others say
+> Well, I guess there are some things that will just never go away, I
+> Wish that I could say that there's no better place than home
+> But home's a place that I have never known_
+>
+> —"On The Run", _Steven Universe_
AGP blogging: "Somebody has to and noone else will."
-notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
-
-contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
-
-people who are constrained by their Overton ratio have an incentive to make this sacred-but-unimportant issue their https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat but that's cruel to me
-
Second, consider [cause prioritization](https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/prioritization-research/). If some Issues are particularly important from a utilitarian perspective, and some Issues are particularly important to Green partisans
[Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect)
> Katie quoting my comment: "Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\" 01/15/2017
-> [I am actively hostile](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600) to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.
; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
Heinlein
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
-
-> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
-
Ooh, how I wish they'd want me to stay.
[trade arrangments: if that's the world we live in, fine]
> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-I don't doubt Serano's report of her own _experiences_. But "it became obvious that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience!_ I [don't _expect_ anyone to be able to get that sort of thing right from introspection alone!](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+I don't doubt Serano's report of her own _experiences_. But "it became obvious that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience!_
-----
------
-[Dark Side Epistemology]
\ No newline at end of file
+[Dark Side Epistemology]
+
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on?
\ No newline at end of file
--- /dev/null
+pt. 4 edit tier—
+✓ "A Fire" § title
+✓ make sure I'm summarizing "policy debates" moral from "Challenges"
+✓ revise "too good a writer" to be more explicit "someone could be that naive"
+✓ footnote about how I could be blamed for being too credulous?
+✓ Stephen Jay Gould
+✓ social gender, hair color, and "believing in"
+✓ emphasize that the philosophy-of-language thing was much worse
+✓ Feynman, "pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history"
+✓ Dawkins and Coyne and Hooven
+✓ edit post to clarify "nudging the cognition"
+✓ Brennan "everyone else should participate" needs more wording adjustments
+✓ Tail's objection to FFS example
+✓ the mailing list post noted it as a "common sexual fantasy"
+_ look for a place to link http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/
+_ cite more sneers; use a footnote to pack in as many as possible
+
+time-sensitive globals TODOs—
+✓ consult Said
+✓ patriate-links script TODOs
+✓ draft #drama strategy opening remarks
+✓ #drama strategy session
+✓ consult Anna
+✓ draft Twitter thread
+- remaining pt. 4 edit tier
+_ consult lc?
+_ bully Jeff Ladish
+_ PUBLISH pt. 4!!
+
+--------
+
+_ finish pt. 5
+_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
+_ solicit red team pt. 5
+_ solicit pro edit pt. 5
+_ apply red team pt. 5
+_ apply pro edit pt. 5
+
+✓ consult Tail
+
+
+_ consult David Xu
+_ psychiatric disaster private doc
+
+pt. 5 edit tier—
+✓ sucking Scott's dick is helpful because he's now the main gateway instead of HPMOR
+_ Previously-on summary
+_ graf about Christiano could use a rewrite
+_ Dolphin War: after "never been published", insert "still citing it" graf
+_ Dolphin War: simplify sentence structure around "by cherry-picking the features"
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment in Dolphin War https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary
+_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrong—obviously the wrong play
+_ Meghan Murphy got it down to four words
+_ Dolphin War needs more Twitter links: "as Soares pointed out" needs link, "threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum" (probably screenshot), tussling
+_ replace anti-black joke with misogynist joke?
+_ end of voting conversation needs links
+_ can I rewrite to not bury the lede on "intent doesn't matter"?
+_ also reference "No such thing as a tree" in Dolphin War section
+_ better brief explanation of dark side epistemology
+_ "deep causal structure" argument needs to be crystal clear, not sloopy
+_ it's a relevant detail whether the optimization is coming from Nate
+_ probably cut the vaccine polarization paragraphs? (overheard at a party is not great sourcing, even if technically admissible)
+_ elaborate on how 2007!Yudkowsky and 2021!Xu are saying the opposite things if you just take a plain-language reading and consider, not whether individual sentences can be interpreted as "true", but what kind of _optimization_ the text is doing to the behavior of receptive readers
+_ revise reply to Xu
+_ cite Earthling/postrat sneers
+_ cite postYud Tweet
+_ cut lots of words from Scotts comments on Jessica's MIRI post (keep: "attempting to erase the agency", Scott blaming my troubles on Michael being absurd)
+_ Sarah's point that Scott gets a lot of undeserved deference, too: https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1435609950303162370
+_ clarify that Keltham infers there are no mascochists, vs. Word of God
+_ "Doublethink" ref in Xu discussion should mention that Word of God Eliezerfic clarification that it's not about telling others
+_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray/comment/git7xaE2aHfSZyLzL
+_ "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
+_ the hill he wants to die on
+_ humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
+_ Leeroy Jenkins Option
+_ consult 93 about Jessica's dramapost §
+_ historical non-robot-cult rationality wisdom
+_ work in the "some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other"
+_ finale: mention that I'm not doing the dumb reversed-stupidity thing
+_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
+_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
+_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
+_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
+_ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+_ "List of Lethalities" mentioning quantilizers + https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704 + https://twitter.com/paulfchristiano/status/1301992757007847425
+_ screenshot Xu thread
+
+
+Vassar et al.—
+✓ "What You Can't Say"
+✓ reached out to Garrison Lovely
+✓ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
+✓ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
+✓ elided Sasha disaster (new)
+✓ Ben publish "Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation" doc?
+✓ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+✓ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight), or calling Ruby a MOP
+✓ what should I say to Iceman? https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1730025195413410129
+✓ footnote about FTX
+✓ revision of "yelling" description
+
+
+pt. 3–5 prereaders—
+_ Iceman
+_ Anna
+_ Said
+_ Joel
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
+_ Steven Kaas
+_ David Xu
+_ Ray
+_ Ruby
+_ Alicorner #drama ("Is anyone interested in offering political advice or 'hostile advice'")
+
+
+-------
+
+later prereaders—
+_ afford various medical procedures
+
+slotted TODO blocks for pt. 6 and dath ilan ancillary—
+- Eliezerfic fight conclusion
+_ Keltham's section in dath ilan ancillary
+_ objections and replies in dath ilan ancillary
+_ kitchen knife section in dath ilan ancillary
+
+pt. 6 edit tier—
+_ coach suggests, "Arguably this doesn't count as punishment for the same reason we don't say we're "punishing" a rabid animal by euthanizing it: it's not about disincentivizing the behaviour."
+
+dath ilan ancillary tier—
+_ Who are the 9 most important legislators called?
+_ collect Earth people sneers
+_ what kind of person wants to delete history? History would tell you
+_ psyops don't require people taking them seriously, only that they make people think the govenment is doing psyops
+_ the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is general; can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
+_ "telling people things would be meddling" moral needs work; obvious objection is that different rules apply to Keepers
+_ "obligate" is only Word of God, right?—I should probably cite this
+_ damnatio memoriae is traditionally a punishment
+
+
+
+------
+
+With internet available—
+_ Earthing/postrat sneers
+_ Is http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/01/be-a-charity-angel.html the best link for after-the-fact prize funding?
+_ P(doom)
+_ Michael on OB in 'aught-eight on smart kids internalizing rules meant for the norm of reaction of a dumber population
+_ Tweet from Dreger
+_ when were Meeker Four out on bail? how long would they otherwise be held?
+_ Slate Star "view from halfway" Holocaust guard comparison
+_ link to shock therapy
+_ "Gypsy Bard" link
+_ outpatient psychiatry Kaiser notes
+_ "PDD NOS"
+_ etymology of "Arcadia"
+_ double-check EnyeWord in archive.is?
+_ Eliezerfic fight: where did the super-AIDS example fit in cronologically?
+_ Keltham/Peranza exam answer should link specific tags
+_ IQ 143 cite
+_ double-check "the mood I thought dath ilan was missing" link target
+_ double-check "the power that could not be removed" quote
+_ click through to the case study in "Self-Consciousness"
+_ click-to-reveal spoiler block image
+_ more Discord italics-correction
+_ "around plot relevant sentences" ... only revealing, which, specifically?
+_ relevant screenshots for Eliezerfic play-by-play
+_ lc on elves and Sparashki
+_ Michael Bailey's new AGP in women study
+_ footnote "said that he wishes he'd never published"
+_ Parfit's Hitchhiker
+_ double-check correctness of Keltham-on-paternalism link
+_ Arbital TDT explanation
+_ find Sequences cite "if you don't know how your AI works, that's bad"
+_ cover reply to my initial conspiracy complaint about dath ilan?
+_ acknowledging Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's decision theory contributions
+_ go back and read all the masochism tags: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/search?board_id=&author_id=366&template_id=&character_id=&subj_content=masochism&sort=created_old&condensed=on&commit=Search
+_ quote other Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
+_ footnote about Scott writing six times faster than me
+_ include Eric Weinstein in archive.is spree
+_ link to Kay Brown's summary of the "Social Desirability Response Set" paper, and footnote paper link and my brief methodology explanation
+_ something to support Metz being a pro for decades
+_ "not taking into account considerations" → rephrase to quote "God's dictionary"
+_ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn
+_ more examples of Yudkowsky's arrogance (MIRI dialogues, knew how to say anything at all)
+_ my history of sniping in Yudkowsky's mentions
+_ my comment about having changed my mind about "A Fable of Science and Politics"
+_ more Yudkowsky Facebook comment screenshots
+_ that neuroscience paper backing the two-types
+_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
+_ 13th century word meanings
+_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
+
+
+
+far editing tier—
+_ You cannot comprehend it, I cannot comprehend it
+_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
+_ colony ship happiness lie in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWaJvBMb9HGBwtNqd/qualitative-strategies-of-friendliness
+_ re being fair to abusers: thinking about what behavior pattern you would like to see, generally, by people in your situation, instead of privileging the perspective and feelings of people who've made themselves vulnerable to you by transgressing against you
+_ worry about hyperbole/jumps-to-evaluation; it destroys credibility
+_ dath ilan as a whining-based community
+_ footnote to explain that when I'm summarizing a long Discord conversation to taste, I might move things around into "logical" time rather than "real time"; e.g. Yudkowsky's "powerfully relevant" and "but Superman" comments were actually one right after the other; and, e.g., I'm filling in more details that didn't make it into the chat, like innate kung fu; and that the fact that I can "enhance" the summaries of my part, but the people I'm talking to don't have the same privilege, should be taken into account—actually, this covers a lot of the memoir; maybe I should mention this earlier (and again in a footnote??)
+_ 93's alternate theory of eliezera taste for deception
+_ "Even our pollution is beneficial"
+_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science
+_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
+_ Anna's heel–face turn
+_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
+_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
+_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
+_ is the Glowfic author "Lintamande ... they" or "Lintamande ... she"?
+_ explain plot of _Planecrash_ better
+_ CfAR's AI pivot??
+_ example of "steelman before criticize" norm
+_ explain mods protect-feelings
+_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
+_ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not
+_ re "EY is a fraud": it's a _conditional_ that he can modus tollens if he wants
+_ NRx point about HBD being more than IQ, ties in with how I think the focus on IQ is distasteful, but I have political incentives to bring it up
+_ "arguing for a duty to self-censorship"—contrast to my "closing thoughts" email
+_ fold in observations from "trapped priors—at home"
+_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
+_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
+_ re-read a DALL-E explanation and decide if I think it's less scary now
+_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821
+_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
+_ Bostrom email scandal, Oli's comment about him staying off of the pause letter
+_ "I Wish You Well" as breakup song
+_ acknowledge that
+_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
+_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
+_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
+_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
+_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
+_ consistent-ize reference to Somni getting it in pt. 4, with mention of protest in pt. 3
+_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
+_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
+_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
+_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
+_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
+_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
+_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
+_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
+_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
+_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics?
+_ why doesn't he apply his anti-optimism to his gender statements?!
+_ notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
+_ contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
+_ Vassar's about-face on gender
+_ better introduction of S.K.
+_ an AGP teen boy could at least consent to transition, and make plans based on knowing what the thing is (you'd actually want to go through a little bit of male puberty)
+_ archive.is karma history for Jessica's post
+_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
+_ born five years too early
+_ you didn't do a good job explaining to me why someone would think that being bullied into selective silence doesn't constitute a conflict strategy
+_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016??
+
+_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
+_ update "karma at press time"
+_ better explain "lie inflation" ambiguity
+_ Facing Reality
+
+people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
+_ Iceman
+_ Scott
+_ hostile prereader (April—if not, J. Beshir, Swimmer, someone else from Alicorner #drama)
+_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
+_ NRx Twitter bro
+_ Steven Kaas (briefly about his name)? (the memoir might have the opposite problem (too long) from my hostile-shorthand Twitter snipes)
+_ David Xu? (Is it OK to name him in his LW account?)
+_ afford various medical procedures
+_ Buck? (get the story about Michael being escorted from events)
+_ Ray
+_ Ruby
+_ Teortaxes??
+
+marketing—
+_ Twitter
+_ Facebook
+_ Less Wrong
+_ should I buy Twitter ads to increase reach??
+_ TheMotte.org
+
+things to bring up in consultation emails—
+_ dropping "and Scott" in Jessica's description of attacking narcissim
+_ I think it's OK to copy my friends' language from emails; plagiarism instincts
+
+Jack Clark's language model editor prompt: "Read this essay and give constructive and critical feedback, paying particular attention to logical inconsistencies or clunky phrasing:"
+
+-------
+
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Three has been nagging me about my pathetic pacing—looking at the diffs of my wordcount spreadsheet, I have four thousand-word days in January, two in February, and two in March (which is half-over). He ... has a point. With no dayjob and no responsibilities, four-figure wordcount days should be normal, something that happens four times a week, not four times a month.
+
+-------
+
+2011
+
+The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
+
+
+[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
+When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
+Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
+]
+
+I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
+
+At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). And that would have been the end of the philosophy-of-language track specifically ...
+
+Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+
+_for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
+
+It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
+
+In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
+
+There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
+
+But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
+
+If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
+
+(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
+
+_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, yes, but the thing you have to realize is—
+
+_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
+
+I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in Facebook posts of [September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228) and [February 2021](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). So, that's nice.
+
+[TODO: although I think even with the note, in practice, people are going to keep citing "... Not Man for the Categories" in a way that doesn't understand how the note undermines the main point]
+
+But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
+
+_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's a cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
+
+In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
+
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.
+
+This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
+
+[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
+
+If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
+
+In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
+
+At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question mostly right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the [Sequences-era dreams of changing the world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YdcF6WbBmJhaaDqoD/the-craft-and-the-community), it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+
+If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) (April 2016), Alexander describes how the content of subcultures typically departs from the ideological "rallying flag" that they formed around. [Sunni and Shia Islam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations) originally, ostensibly diverged on the question of who should rightfully succeed Muhammad as caliph, but modern-day Sunni and Shia who hate each other's guts aren't actually re-litigating a succession dispute from the 7th century C.E. Rather, pre-existing divergent social-group tendencies crystalized into distinct tribes by latching on to the succession dispute as a [simple membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests).
+
+Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
+
+No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement [is actually a _declaration of failure_](https://sinceriously.fyi/cached-answers/#comment-794). There's a word, "rationalist", that I've been trying to avoid in this post, because it's the subject of so much strategic equivocation, where the motte is "anyone who studies the ideal of systematically correct reasoning, general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans", and the bailey is "members of our social scene centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander". (Since I don't think we deserve the "rationalist" brand name, I had to choose something else to refer to [the social scene](https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html). Hence, "robot cult.")
+
+What I would have _hoped_ for from a systematically correct reasoning community worthy of the brand name is one goddamned place in the whole goddamned world where _good arguments_ would propagate through the population no matter where they arose, "guided by the beauty of our weapons" ([following Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) [following Leonard Cohen](https://genius.com/1576578)).
+
+[missing mood]
+
+Instead, I think what actually happens is that people like Yudkowsky and Alexander rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and conformity with the local environment)—with the result that if Yudkowsky and Alexander _aren't interested in getting the right answer_ (in public)—because getting the right answer in public would be politically suicidal—then there's no way for anyone who didn't [win the talent lottery](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) to fix the public understanding by making better arguments.
+
+It makes sense for public figures to not want to commit political suicide! Even so, it's a _problem_ if public figures whose brand is premised on the ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_, end up drawing attention and resources into a subculture that's optimized for tricking men into cutting their dick off on false pretenses. (Although note that Alexander has [specifically disclaimed aspirations or pretentions to being a "rationalist" authority figure](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/); that fate befell him without his consent because he's just too good and prolific of a writer compared to everyone else.)
+
+I'm not optimistic about the problem being fixable, either. Our robot cult _already_ gets a lot of shit from progressive-minded people for being "right-wing"—not because we are in any _useful_, non-gerrymandered sense, but because [attempts to achieve the map that reflects the territory are going to run afoul of ideological taboos for almost any ideology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting).
+
+
+----
+
+
+(which Alexander aptly renamed [Kolmorogov complicity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/):
+
+Becuase of the conflict, and because all the prominent high-status people are running a Kolmogorov Option strategy, and because we happen to have to a _wildly_ disproportionate number of _people like me_ around, I think being "pro-trans" ended up being part of the community's "shield" against external political pressure, of the sort that perked up after [the February 2021 _New York Times_ hit piece about Alexander's blog](https://archive.is/0Ghdl). (The _magnitude_ of heat brought on by the recent _Times_ piece and its aftermath was new, but the underlying dynamics had been present for years.)
+
+Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
+
+And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
+
+Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
+
+But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
+
+[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
+
+Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
+
+But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
+
+What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
+
+I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
+
+But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
+
+In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
+
+In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
+
+In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
+
+Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
+
+I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
+
+It worked once, right?
+
+-----
+
+> An extreme case in point of "handwringing about the Overton Window in fact constituted the Overton Window's implementation"
+OK, now apply that to your Kolomogorov cowardice
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1373004525481598978
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
+
+Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about—like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) of [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia?commentId=6GD86zE5ucqigErXX
+> The actual real-world consequences of a post like this when people actually read it are what bothers me, and it does feel frustrating because those consequences seem very predictable
+(!!)
+
+> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
+
+> Stopping reading your Tweets is the correct move for them IF you construe them as only optimizing for their personal hedonics
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1224433237679722500
+
+"assuming that it was a 'he'"—people treating pronouns as synonymous with sex
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZBrbVqZnU
+
+I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
+
+> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
+http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
+
+EGS??
+
+(If the world were smaller, you'd never give different people the same name; if our memories were larger, we'd give everyone a UUID.)
+
+how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
+> At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
+> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
+
+https://archive.is/7Wolo
+> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
+Namespace's point about the two EYs
+
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"— link to the correct contrarian cluster
+
+
+But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
+
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+
+
+I got a pingback to "Optimized Propaganda" from in an "EDIT 5/21/2021" on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency after Scott Alexander linked it—evidence for Scott having Power to shape people's attention
+
+The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+
+> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
+
+twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
+
+I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
+
+> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+
+(Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
+
+E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
+
+The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
+
+> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
+https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+
+the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
+
+It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
+
+But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
+
+
+As far as I can tell, Professor, I'm just doing what _you_ taught me—carve reality at the joints, speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect.
+
+"Beliefs about the self aren't special" is part of the whole AI reflectivity thing, too!!
+
+> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things
+
+Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
+
+https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
+> These neurons detect gender^10
+> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
+
+https://www.jefftk.com/p/an-update-on-gendered-pronouns
+
+> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
+
+If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
+
+https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
+
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/01/how-to-actually-defeat-us-government/
+> propagate a credible alternate reality that outcompetes the official information network.
+
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/explanation-of-democratic-centrism/
+
+
+
+
+that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
+
+[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
+
+[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
+> Appeal to arbitrariness - again, the notion that [word definitions are arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/) serves as a good example (in fact I was harvesting some of these appeals from that sequence). It's not just that this is wrong, but that it serves to cut off further discourse. Generally, anything that people are motivated to argue about is not _arbitrary_. It is being controlled by invisible criteria of evaluation, it has connotations with consequences, and if _that_ isn't true either, the topic of discourse is probably not "arbitrary" but just "meaningless". No map that corresponds to an external territory can be arbitrary.
+
+> _Appeal to inner privacy_ - "you can't possibly know how I feel!" It's true that modern technology still encounters some slight difficulties in reading thoughts out of the brain, though work is underway as we speak. But it is rare that the exact details of how you feel are the key subject matter being disputed. Here the bony borders of the skull are being redeployed as a hard barrier to keep out further arguments.
+
+
+If Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made For Man ..." had never been published, would we still be talking about dolphins and trees in the same way?
+
+Scott has so many fans—
+https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
+https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
+https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles
+
+Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
+https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
+Yudkowsky retweeted Nate on dolphins—
+https://archive.is/Ecsca
+
+my rationalist community has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my community's name
+
+cite to "Not Especially Related to Transgender"
+https://twitter.com/fortenforge/status/1402057829142302721
+
+"Hero Licensing": to provide an earnest-token of all the techniques I couldn't show
+
+uncritically (uncharacteristically uncritically) taking the newly-ascendant gender-identity theory for granted ("lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities"), without considering the obvious-in-retrospect hypothesis that "guy who speculates about his female analogue on a transhumanist mailing list in 2004" and "guy who thinks he might be a trans women in Berkeley 2016" are the same guy.
+
+If hiring a community matchmaker was worth it, why don't my concerns count, too?
+
+When I protested that I wasn't expecting a science fictional Utopia of pure reason, but just for people to continue to be right about things they already got right in 2008, he said, "Doesn't matter—doesn't _fucking_ matter."
+
+The boundary must be drawn here! This far, and no further!
+
+> just the thought that there are people out there who wanted to be rationalists and then their experience of the rationalist community was relentlessly being told that trans women are actually men, and that this is obvious if you are rational, and a hidden truth most people are too cowardly to speak, until you retreat in misery and are traumatized by the entire experience of interacting with us....
+
+People change their opinion with the party line—similarly with Scott and Yud
+https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12550?campaign=woletoc
+
+https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
+
+prevaricate
+
+back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as if you had to be of a particular generation to understand the ideas—that could apply in both directions (the next generation's culture does not look promising to me; midwits say that elders have always said that, but maybe the elders were always right, by the standard preference-stability argument)
+
+> [Anna] seemed to disapprove of our putting pressure on Scott, because the fact that Scott has done a lot of great work is exactly what made him a target for our pressure.
+
+> I told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood the point of the analogy. War metaphors sound Scary and Mean—I don't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael had explained at the time, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soliders on the other side of a war aren't particularly morally blameworthy as individuals: their actions are just being controlled by the Power they're embedded in. And Anna was like, "But you could still be friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog", and I was like, "Yeah, that's basically what Michael said."
+
+> He says he likes "monastic rationalism vs. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben is proposing.
+
+> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.
+
+
+Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
+
+
+-------
+
+Yudkowsky complains—not entirely without justification—that I ["do not know how to come to a point, because [I am] too horrified by the thought that a reader might disagree with [me] if [I] don't write even more first."](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435605868758765568)
+
+But I wasn't always this way. It's an adaptive response to years of trolling. The reason I write even more to get out ahead of the objections I can forsee, is because I've been _at this for six years_. I tried being concise _first_.
+
+You want concise? Meghan Murphy got it down to four words, which could have been three[^contraction]: "Men aren't women tho."
+
+[^contraction]: I think the contraction [_aren't_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aren%27t) counts as one word in this context; the _tho_ (though) can be dropped to get down to three.
+
+Men aren't women! Men aren't women tho!
+
+It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan Murphy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan Murphy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
+
+It is more than a little insulting to be told, after all this, that the problem is that _I_ don't know how to come to a point, rather than everyone in Berkeley not knowing how to accept a point that contradicts their religion. It's such a stupidly simple stonewalling strategy: when the critic makes their point simply (men aren't women! men aren't women tho!), sneer at them for being ontologically confused, and then when they spend years of their life writing up the exhaustively detailed rigorous version, sneer at them for not being able to come to a point.
+
+Does the elephant in his brain really expect to get away with that? Are Earth people really that gullible?
+
+------
+
+[Yudkowsky writes](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270):
+
+> If you think you can win a battle about 2 + 3 = 5, then it can feel like victory or self-justification to write a huge long article hammering on that; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with how the Other does not think they are arguing 2 + 3 = 6, they're talking about 2 * 3.
+
+And if _you_ don't think you can politically afford to acknowledge your faithful student's proof that 6 + 7 = 13 [(because Stalin doesn't like it when people use the number 13)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to), it can feel like safety or self-justification to issue a Pronouncement that the answer to 6 + 7 depends on what base you're working in[^base]; but it doesn't feel as good to engage with your faithful student's allegation that the only reason you're issuing Pronouncements about alternate bases for arithmetic, is to win favor with the Party by standing by and letting them cite you as a credible authority when they claim that 6 + 7 = 15, while thinking yourself "honest" because you've sold yourself a story about how _you_ were just teaching those vile _kulaks_ an important lesson about place–value arithmetic, and never technically said yourself that 6 + 7 = 15 _in base ten_.
+
+[^base]: For example, in base 8, one would write 6 + 7 = 15, where the symbol "15" represents the number **1** · 8<sup>1</sup> + **5** · 8<sup>0</sup>, which is equal to **1** · 10<sup>1</sup> + **3** · 10<sup>0</sup>, which we normally (in base 10) write as "13".
+
+------
+
+> The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must *really* be doing terrible_thing instead. That's woke filter bubble thinking. I stopped talking to Michael when he went that way.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435619618052214787
+
+The fact that I flipped out at Nate's dolphin thing was a misplay on my part, but it generated more Twitter discussion (including Eliezer's "never told anyone to go trans" remarks and Vorobey's comments) makes it a "win" for the cause even if I was out of line? My freaking out was "rational".
+
+But I think Eliezer and I _agree_ on what he's doing; he just doesn't see it's bad
+
+Speaking of narcissism and perspective-taking, "deception" isn't about whether you personally "lied" according to your own re-definitions; it's about whether you predictably made others update in the wrong direction
+
+I really appreciated Anatoly Vorobey's comments:
+
+https://twitter.com/avorobey/status/1404769388969054210
+
+> to provide context how it may (justifiably?) seem like over the last 7-8 years the rat. community largely fell *hard* for a particular gender philosophy
+
+> ... fell for it in ways that seemed so spectacularly uncritical, compared to other beliefs carefully examined and dissected, and more so, even justified with a veneer of "rationality" (as in Scott's Categories post) that beautifully coincided with the tumblr dogma of the time...
+
+> ...(then twitter dogma of the time, and now almost the blue tribe dogma of our time)... that I can understand how someone like Zack, embedded in the rat culture physically and struggling with this reigning ideology, could feel it as gaslighting.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> I'm curious about how much you think these opinions have been arrived at independently by yourself, Paul, and the rest of the OpenPhil complex?
+If he's worried about Carl being corrupted by OpenPhil; it make sense for me to worry about him being corrupted by Glowfic cluster
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sCCdCLPN9E3YvdZhj/shulman-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress
+> If you mean that say Mike Blume starts getting paid $20m/yr base salary
+Weirdly specific that Mike (random member of your robot cult) is getting namedropped
+
+example of hero-worship, David Pearce writes—
+https://www.facebook.com/algekalipso/posts/4769054639853322?comment_id=4770408506384602
+> recursively cloning Scott Alexander—with promising allelic variations - and hothousing the “products” could create a community of super-Scotts with even greater intellectual firepower
+
+
+
+Respect needs to be updateable. No one can think fast enough to think all their own thoughts. I have a draft explaining the dolphins thing, about why Nate's distaste for paraphyly is wrong. In Nate's own account, he "suspect[s] that ['[...] Not Man for the Categories'] played a causal role in [...] starting the thread out on fish." Okay, where did Scott get it from, then? I don't have access to his thoughts, but I think he pulled it out of his ass because it was politically convenient for him. I suspect that if you asked him in 2012 whether dolphins are fish, he would have said, "No, they're mammals" like any other educated adult. Can you imagine "... Not Man for the Categories" being as popular as it is in our world if it just cut off after section III? Me neither.
+
+I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
+
+
+
+
+"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
+
+3 January 2020 text from Michael to me:
+> because I want to make it very clear to you, and to encourage you to make it very clear to others [...] that you are experiencing extremely articulate and extremely by the book trauma, caused in a very canonical manner by institutional betrayal and causing silencing of a sort very similar to that which causes investigation of sex crimes to be problematic (as in the high quality current Netflix show "Unbelievable", which you all might benefit from watching)
+
+Forget it, Jake—it's the rationalist community
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong
+> The act of defining a word to refer to all humans, except black people, seems kind of suspicious.
+That's not the only implication on race of the philosophy of categorization—actually, I'm going to bite the bullet here; "Eurasian" is actually fine as a paraphyletic category (and @CovfefeAnon uses it productively)
+
+And this suspicion seems broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"),
+
+when worrying about the future and what I should do about it, I find myself more concerned with whether Eliezer would disapprove rather than the everyone-dying part
+
+me criticizing dath ilan (after being blocked from his Twitter) is also a nearest-unblocked-strategy
+
+If there's a generalized remembering-history skill, it should apply to "remembering when pronouns implied sex" and as well as "remembering when neural nets weren't used in the Netflix contest" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cCrpbZ4qTCEYXbzje/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-scientific-reasoning-and-pivotal-acts
+
+-----
+
+Why does this matter?
+
+[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+
+https://www.readthesequences.com/
+> Because it is all, in the end, one thing. I talked about big important distant problems and neglected immediate life, but the laws governing them aren't actually different.
+
+Is that not true?
+
+Can you lie about immediate life for political convenience
+
+> the challenge is almost entirely about high integrity communication by small groups
+https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1486044326618710018
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1769064#reply-1769064
+> "Dath ilani education is for having children grow up correctly. None of it, that I know, is about how to safely repair children who grew up wrong."
+It would be nice if children in rationalist Berkeley could grow up correctly
+
+congrats after Whale and Sawyer chimed in: https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435706946158432258
+
+
+
+I feel I've outlived myself https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/
+
+
+Ben on Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dou43_aX_h1lP7-wqU_5jJq62PuhotQaybe5H2HUmWc/edit
+> What's not wrong on purpose is persuasive but does not become a factional identity. What becomes a factional identity is wrong on purpose.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG8i7ZiqLxthACaBi/do-fandoms-need-awfulness
+
+> Applying this to LessWrong: Plenty of people read the Sequences, improved their self-models and epistemic standards, and went on to do interesting things not particularly identified with LessWrong. Also, people formed an identity around Eliezer, the Sequences, and MIRI, which means that the community clustered around LessWrong is—aside from a few very confused people who until recently still thought it was about applying the lessons of the Sequences—committed not to Eliezer's insights but to exaggerated versions of his blind spots.
+
+> The people who aren't doing that mostly aren't participating in the LessWrong identity, but while factions like that are hostile to the confused people who behave as though they're part of a community trying to become less wrong, such factions are also parasitic on such people, claiming credit for their intellectual contributions. When such participation is fully extinguished, the group begins to decay, having nothing distinctive to offer, unless it has become too big to fail, in which case it's just another component of one political faction or another.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown?s=r
+
+Keltham contradicts himself inside of a single tag! Using the words "shape" and "covert" both times!!
+
+Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
+
+maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
+
+one of the new collaborators on _Mad Investor Chaos_ is a _Catholic_
+
+When my chat with EY at the independence day party degenerated into "I'm sorry for being dumb", he said if Zack Davis was too dumb, we're in trouble
+
+OK, "paperclips" is a legitimate example of categories being subjective/value-dependent
+
+http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
+
+A "rationalist" community worthy of the name would be able to do the thing Steve Sailer does, while retaining our humanistic ethics https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-is-elon-musks-plan-for-reversing-the-tyranny-of-the-ex-men/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-twitter-coup
+> a battle is won if the result of the battle is to make the next battle easier. The same is true of a political confrontation.
+[...]
+> I noticed that the streets had been largely cleared of homeless encampments (which have been pushed into the nearby forests). Most people take this as a conservative victory. It is actually a defeat.
+> It is a victory in the ordinary sense of the term—an action which gets what the actors want. It is a tactical victory—but a strategic defeat. At a party the other day, I spoke to one of the people who orchestrated this “victory,” and explained why I saw it this way.
+[...]
+> for a rebel, all true victories are total. He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave
+in this sense, I keep winning battles, but I've basically conceded the war
+
+Rubices—
+> with Zack in 2017 in particular, I don't know if it's still true now, there was also a lot of "women are brilliant and perfect and pure, and it would do damage to something beautiful for a man to pretend to be one"
+gonna mostly bite the bullet on this one
+
+
+https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-09
+> You all remember the thing I predicted correctly 12 years ago, therefore you should heed my word on this completely unrelated topic
+
+The time E.Y. recommended dark side epistemology as shortform still feels telling—you could say it's circumstantial nitpicking, but I think it's revealing, like the "reducing negativity"
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/471045466805633029/934929649421672488
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fYC3t6QQDvdBBwJdw/plutonic_form-s-shortform?commentId=dghPKBjgiA6pTcCKz
+
+
+https://www.foxylists.com/etiquette
+> 6. Do not ask for additional pictures, selfies or services they have not already agreed upon.
+
+> One nice thing about intellectuals is that when they turn, they frequently leave behind a detailed, mostly coherent record of what a person turning into a rhinoceros thinks is going on.
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1477733825702936581
+
+Rationality was supposed to be important!!
+
+Paul says so—
+> My current sense is that cooperation has a better tradeoff than some forms of enhancement (e.g. giving humans bigger brains) and worse than others (e.g. improving the accuracy of people's and institution's beliefs about the world).
+
+Rob says so, too—
+> Help ourselves think more clearly. (I imagine this including a lot of trying-to-become-more-rational, developing and following relatively open/honest communication norms, and trying to build better mental models of crucial parts of the world.)
+
+> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228
+
+dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
+> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140
+
+> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374
+
+I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)
+
+The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
+
+jbeshir
+> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
+—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing
+
+
+[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
+[internet pharmacy]
+
+
+> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
+response—
+> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do
+
+In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]
+
+https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma
+
+postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
+
+if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
+
+Gell-Mann amnesia
+
+EY's commenting guidelines
+
+> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
+https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409
+
+flu virus that cures Borderer culture
+https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement
+
+> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps
+
+> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
+> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
+
+Standard excuses—
+"i just don't think that gender is less of a politeness mind-control regime when it doesn't allow people to switch categories"
+biosex actually exists
+also no one cares about that fact of the matter, unless they want to have sex with someone or are doing a weird ideological thing
+I think you're the ones doing a weird ideological thing
+
+brain: wow, eiko has a deep understanding of straight men for a lesbian! she must be so empathetic
+me: ...
+
+... why validated and not offended??
+Eiko — Today at 8:37 PM
+?_?
+what... would i be... offended by...
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 8:38 PM
+The "brain: / me:" thing seems like it should be offensive for the same reason that the phrase-I-said-I-wasn't-going-to-say is offensive
+the language is subtler, but it's gesturing at the same thing
+
+(explanation: I read this as ozy saying they parsed Eiko as a girl so much that they didn't remember she used to be a straight guy)
+
+... I, just, really have trouble emphasizing with this culture where people are allowed to make jokes about the similarities between trans lesbians and straight guys, and as long as you talk in terms of "I thought I was a straight guy", it's all cool, but as soon as someone bites the bullet and says, "Yes, because trans lesbians are straight males, etiologically; you thought correctly", then they're ... marking themselves as not part of the coalition? From my perspective, it just looks like your culture is pro-lying
+
+like if i look at a person and my brain's intuitive instinctive bucketing function goes "girl" and they tell me "i'm a boy actually" does whether that's mind control depend on what genitals the person has??
+Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis — Today at 10:02 PM
+Yes?
+Omega ω — Today at 10:02 PM
+?????
+
+... people just don't see the ideological bubble they live in! People tell me, "frankly you seem to be deeply unhappy about [being gendered male]", because they're relying on their prior of what trans women need. And having been born in 1987, I just don't share that prior! If you actually listen to the thing I'm been yelling for the last six years, I'm much more unhappy about the culture of mind-control than I am about being male, but people put more weight on their prior than my verbal self-report! I guess I can't blame them on the meta level (I also put more weight on priors that people's self-reports a lot of the time), but it's just—so shocking, that people don't see the thing
+
+I don't actually want to return to the past permanently; I want to first rewind to 2007 or so, and then re-do the trans rights thing but with less 🐛 lying this time, "lying" being my heat-of-the-moment angry word for the thing where the born-in-the-wrong-body story that gets sold to the public is very different from the picture you get when you read what people write about their feelings when the general public isn't looking, and people know it's different, and they go on talking in terms of the standard story anyway, and when you challenge them on none of this stuff being true, they say, "Oh, well, those are just lies to cis people; that doesn't count" (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/) as if lies to cis people weren't still lies
+
+And, just—I think if an alien or an AI or really any normal person outside of this very specific Berkeley 2016– ideological subculture were to try to objectively describe what's actually happening there in the real physical universe, I don't think they would want to talk about a woman born in the wrong body, coping with her tragic dysphoria; I think the alien or AI would talk about a male primate with some kind of brain malfunction in its sexual targeting system causing it to get confused about a self-other distinction, and I think the normal person would talk about a man with a gross, weird fetish who they don't want sharing a locker room with their daughter.
+
+And I just, basically think the alien and the AI and the normal person have the right ontology here? The Berkeley 2016– denizen can come up with a lot of replies ("But cis women also enjoy being women", "But I don't care about someone's private thoughts; I only care about whether they'll come vintage dress shopping with me"), but they all just seem fundamentally unserious to me?
+
+----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/c5DgfRyWgS2Sjgzmt/on-funding-trust-relationships-and-scaling-our-community
+> there will be someone in the world whose full-time job and top-priority it is to figure out how to write a proposal, or give you a pitch at a party, or write a blogpost, or strike up a conversation, that will cause you to give them money, or power, or status. For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question "how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of" or "how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?", and they will write long Google Docs to their colleagues about their models and theories of you, and spend dozens of hours thinking specifically about how to get you to do what they want, while drawing up flowcharts that will include your name, your preferences, and your interests.
+not totally unlike what I was doing to Scott and Eliezer
+
+https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/melbourne-teenage-mathlete-wins-gold-for-the-second-time-/5602226?nw=0&r=Image
+https://postchimpblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/alexs-guide-to-transitioning/
+
+The LW community is a bubble/machine that made me who I am (it doesn't infringe on my independence more than school, but it's still shaping force in the way that going to University or Google shapes people)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy
+> If those people went around lying to others and paternalistically deceiving them—well, mostly, I don't think they'll have really been the types to live inside reality themselves. But even imagining the contrary, good luck suddenly unwinding all those deceptions and getting other people to live inside reality with you, to coordinate on whatever suddenly needs to be done when hope appears, after you drove them outside reality before that point. Why should they believe anything you say?
+
+the Extropians post _explicitly_ says "may be a common sexual fantasy"
+> So spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy, but I wouldn't count on being able to do this six seconds after the Singularity. I would not be surprised to find that it took three subjective centuries before anyone had grown far enough to attempt a gender switch.
+
+------
+
+
+
+"Why Quantum" has another reference to "doesn't seem possible to think and trust"
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus
+
+
+
+If you listen to the sorts of things the guy says lately, it looks like he's just completely given up on the idea that public speech could possibly be useful, or that anyone besides he and his flunkies is capable of thought. For example:
+
+> [Though yes, I do worry](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944234136129536) that other mortals would be more vulnerable to someone coming up and talking loudly about LDT. I attach my usual cautions about everything supposed to be just formalizing common sense and not depart from common sense except in the hands of a master, but [too many people think](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929) it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to me, and they might fall for it. I'd wish that I'd never spoken on the topic, and just told them to vote in elections for reasons they'd understand when they're older. That said, enjoy your $1 in Ultimatum games.
+
+Notwithstanding that there are reasons for him to be traumatized over how some people have misinterpreted timeless decision theory—what a _profoundly_ anti-intellectual statement! I claim that this is just not something you would ever say if you cared about having a rationality community that could process arguments and correct errors, rather than a robot cult to suck you off.
+
+To be clear, there _is_ such a thing as legitimately trusting an authority who knows better than you. For example, [the Sequences tell of how Yudkowsky once wrote to Judea Pearl](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKa9Lebyebf6a7P2o/the-rhythm-of-disagreement) to correct an apparent error in _Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference_. Pearl agreed that there was an error, but said that Yudkowsky's proposed correction was also wrong, and provided the real correction. Yudkowsky didn't understand the real correction, but trusted that Pearl was right, because Pearl was the authority who had invented the subject matter—it didn't seem likely that he would get it wrong _again_ after the original error had been brought to his attention.
+
+[TODO But crucially, "Defer to subject-matter experts" seems like a _different_ moral than "Too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen Judea Pearl."]
+
+If Yudkowsky is frustrated that people don't defer to him enough _now_, he should remember the only reason he has _any_ people who defer to him _at all_ is _because_ he used to be such a good explainer who actually argued for things.
+
+[TODO: if he had never spoken of TDT, why _should_ they trust him about voting?!]
+
+[TODO That trust is a _finite resource_. Zvi Mowshowitz claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq
+
+> The condescension is _important information_ to help a reader figure out what is producing the outputs, and hiding it would make the task of 'extract the key insights' harder.
+
+]
+
+------
+
+Lightwavers on Twitter (who Yudkowsky knew from /r/rational) dissed Charles Murray on Twitter
+
+https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/686455476984119296/eliezer-yudkowsky-seems-really-depressed-these
+
+> So now my definitely-not-Kelthorkarni have weird mental inhibitions against actually listening to me, even when I clearly do know much better than they do. In retrospect I think I was guarding against entirely the wrong failure modes. The problem is not that they're too conformist, it's that they don't understand how to be defiant without diving heedlessly into the seas of entropy. It's plausible I should've just gone full Kelthorkarnen
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1614129#reply-1614129
+
+I was pleading to him in his capacity as rationality leader, not AGI alignment leader; I know I have no business talking about the latter
+
+(As an aside, it's actually kind of _hilarious_ how far Yudkowsky's "rationalist" movement has succeeded at winning status and mindshare in a Society whose [_de facto_ state religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) is [founded on eliminating "discrimination."](https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights) Did—did anyone besides me "get the joke"? I would have expected _Yudkowsky_ to get the joke, but I guess not??)
+
+[TODO: misrepresentation of the Light: Dath ilan has a concept of "the Light"—the vector in policyspace perpendicular outwards from the Pareto curve, in which everyone's interests coincide.]
+
+"You're allowed to talk to me," he said at the Independence Day party
+
+MIRI made a point of prosecuting Tyler Altman rather than participating (even if it was embarrassing to be embezzled from) because of game theory, but it sees folding to social-justice bullies as inevitable
+
+re Yudkowsky not understanding the "That's So Gender" sense, I suspect this is better modeled as a nearest-unblocked-strategy alignment problem, rather than a capabilities problem ("doesn't comprehend"). Author has a Vision of a Reality; that Reality conflicts with the ideology of the readership, who complain; Author issues a patch that addresses the surface of the complaint without acknowledging the conflict of Visions, because describing the conflict in too much detail would be construed as aggression
+
+------
+
+[TODO:
+Email to Scott at 0330 a.m.
+> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: "The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories." That thing is a fucking Absolute Denial Macro!
+]
+
+------
+
+So, because
+
+[TODO: the rats not getting AGP was excusable, the rats not getting the category boundary thing was extremely disappointing but not a causis belli; Eliezer Yudkowsky not getting the category boundary thing was an emergency]
+
+-----
+
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016
+
+https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.html
+
+------
+
+comments to "Wilhelm", January 2019—
+
+I got concessions on all the important parts (categories should make predictions, trans women differ from cis women in a masc direction), and these people just don't fucking CARE ... like, if I'm trying to be agreeable, I could agree that trans women resemble women if you restrict your vision to the subspace spanned by the "preferred pronouns" and "self-identified gender identity" dimensions ... but, but, WTF, be serious, guys
+
+Scott or Eliezer know better and could put an end to this bullshit (or at least put a dent in it), and I begged and I pleaded, and they just don't CARE
+
+even Ozy knows better
+
+I said: I probably do put too much rhetorical emphasis on passing; like, I agree that that's not the only criterion that one can use. I like drawing attention to that particular distinction because it at least has the benefit of not requiring people to override their perceptual system they way that self-identity does?
+
+and Ozy (correctly!) chimed in: "in fact it is the only criterion that doesn't involve people overriding their perceptual system!"
+
+as if she's objectively pro-gaslighting
+
+more charitably: people care a lot about this very thin layer of socual constructions (if you mindfuck ppl into believing that AGPs are women, that really does make it easier to transition) and are being instrumentally rational about that, whereas I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist and want to study the deep structure if which social constructions are feasible, how we can be more reflective about them, &c.
+
+Ppl with less power than Scott or Eliezer can afford to be more honest with me that they see but don't care enough to pay the cost of fighting
+
+the rationalist lore here is that status makes you stupid; maybe the NRx twist is that status plus rivals/insecurity makes you stupid
+
+You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you _can't_ optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
+no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
+https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208
+
+Keltham and Carissa's attitude towards Pharima mirrors my attitude towards Yudkowsky (I'm grateful for him having created me, but he can't be allowed to get away with this shit)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1834769#reply-1834769
+
+sometimes I get a cite, too—
+https://putanumonit.com/2022/05/02/genders-discrimination/
+https://axrp.net/episode/2022/05/23/episode-15-natural-abstractions-john-wentworth.html
+
+People learn a lot from Godel Escher Bach, too, but they don't form an identity around Douglas Hofstadter being the most important person in the world
+
+and Keltham tells Carissa (null action pg 39) to keep the Light alive as long as possible, not do throw away your deontology too quickly.
+
+> It, it—the fe—it, flame—flames. Flames—on the side of my face. Breathing—breathl—heaving breaths, heaving—
+
+But he is willing to go to bat for killing babies, but not for "Biological Sex is Actually Real Even If That Hurts Your Feelings" https://mobile.twitter.com/AuronMacintyre/status/1547562974927134732
+
+https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4361.html
+> Half the time I regard myself as "an AI wannabee trapped in a male human body"
+
+Nate's "missing the hard part" post is all strawmen—I'm not looking down on it because it's a blog post and not an "official" arXiv paper; I'm looking down because it's visibly low-effort
+
+"What do you say to the Republican?" !!!
+
+subject: "nothing left to lose; or, the end of my rope"
+
+4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
+> Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)
+
+Anna thinks trust and integrity is an important resource
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
+
+(You might group things together _on the grounds_ of their similarly positive consequences—that's what words like _good_ do—but that's distinct from choosing _the categorization itself_ because of its consequences.)
+
+—and would be unforgivable if it weren't so _inexplicable_.
+
+... not _actually_ inexplicable. There was, in fact, an obvious explanation: that
+
+
+Yudkowsky was trying to bolster his reputation amongst progressives by positioning himself on the right side of history, and was tailoring a fake rationality lesson to suit that goal.
+
+
+But _Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't do that_. I had to assume this was a honest mistake.
+
+At least, a _pedagogy_ mistake. If Yudkowsky _just_ wanted to make a politically neutral technical point about the difference between fact-claims and policy claims _without_ "picking a side" in the broader cultural war dispute, these Tweets did a very poor job of it. I of course agree that pronoun usage conventions, and conventions about who uses what bathroom, are not, themselves, factual assertions about sex chromosomes in particular. I'm not saying that Yudkowsky made a false statement there. Rather, I'm saying that it's
+
+
+Rather, previously sexspace had two main clusters (normal females and males) plus an assortment of tiny clusters corresponding to various [disorders of sex development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development), and now it has two additional tiny clusters: females-on-masculinizing-HRT and males-on-feminizing-HRT. Certainly, there are situations where you would want to use "gender" categories that use the grouping {females, males-on-feminizing-HRT} and {males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT}.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
+
+[TODO: sentences about studies showing that HRT doesn't erase male advantage
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+]
+
+[TODO sentences about Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler] https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405 (Thomas and Tefler's —cite South Park)
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10445679/Lia-Thomas-UPenn-teammate-says-trans-swimmer-doesnt-cover-genitals-locker-room.html
+https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1495802345380356103 Lia Thomas event coverage
+https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/weekly-recap-lia-thomas-birth-certificates Zippy inv. cluster graph!
+
+]
+
+Writing out this criticism now, the situation doesn't feel _confusing_, anymore. Yudkowsky was very obviously being intellectually dishonest in response to very obvious political incentives. That's a thing that public intellectuals do. And, again, I agree that the distinction between facts and policy decisions _is_ a valid one, even if I thought it was being selectively invoked here as an [isolated demand for rigor](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/) because of the political context.
+
+really. I wouldn't have felt confused or betrayed at all. Coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky, it was—confusing.
+
+Because of my hero worship,
+
+
+> People probably change their mind more often than they explicitly concede arguments, which is fine because intellectual progress is more important than people who were wrong performing submission.
+> If your interlocutor is making progress arguing against your claim X, just say, "Oh, X is a strawman, no one actually believes X; therefore I'm not wrong and you haven't won" (and then don't argue for X in the future now that you know you can't get away with it).
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429
+
+My 28 November 2018 text to Michael—
+> I just sent an email to Eliezer ccing you and Anna; if you think it might help inject sanity in into the world, maybe your endorsement would help insofar as Eliezer Aumman-updates [_sic_] with you?
+> hope all is well
+> just a thread reply to Eliezer that says "I trust Zack's rationality and think you should pay attention to what he has to say" (if and only if you actually believe that to be true, obviously)?
+
+
+
+helping Norton live in the real world
+
+Scott says, "It seems to me pretty obvious that the mental health benefits to trans people are enough to tip the object-level first-pass uilitarian calculus.
+
+"; I don't think _anything_ about "mental health benefits to trans people" is obvious
+]
+
+
+[TODO: connecting with Aurora 8 December, maybe not important]
+
+What do think submitting to social pressure looks like, if it's not exactly this thing (carefully choosing your public statements to make sure no one confuses you with the Designated Ideological Bad Guy)?!? The credible threat of being labeled an Ideological Bad Guy is _the mechanism_ the "Good" Guys use to retard potentially-ideologically-inconvenient areas of inquiry.
+
+Kerry Vaughan on deferral
+https://twitter.com/KerryLVaughan/status/1552308109535858689
+
+It's not that females and males are exactly the same except males are 10% stronger on average (in which case, you might just shrug and accept unequal outcomes, the way we shrug and accept it that some athletes have better genes). Different traits have different relevance to different sports: women do better in ultraswimming _because_ that competition is sampling a
+
+where body fat is an advantage.
+
+It really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, rather than "two populations of apples with different mean weight".
+
+For example, the _function_ of sex-segrated bathrooms is to _protect females from males_, where "females" and "males" are natural clusters in configuration space that it makes sense to want words to refer to.
+
+all I actually want out of a post-Singularity utopia is the year 2007 except that I personally have shapeshifting powers
+
+The McGongall turning into a cat parody may actually be worth fitting in—McCongall turning into a cat broke Harry's entire worldview. Similarly, the "pretend to turn into a cat, and everyone just buys it" maneuver broke my religion
+
+ * https://everythingtosaveit.how/case-study-cfar/#attempting-to-erase-the-agency-of-everyone-who-agrees-with-our-position
+
+Michael on EA suppressing credible criticism https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1559534045914177538
+
+zinger from 93—
+> who present "this empirical claim is inconsistent with the basic tenets of my philosophy" as an argument against the _claim_
+
+reply to my flipping out at Jeff Ladish
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493440041684993
+
+We don't believe in privacy
+> Privacy-related social norms are optimized for obscuring behavior that could be punished if widely known [...] an example of a paradoxical norm that is opposed to enforcement of norms-in-general").
+https://unstableontology.com/2021/04/12/on-commitments-to-anti-normativity/
+
+Sucking up the the Blue Egregore would make sense if you _knew_ that was the critical resource
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mmHctwkKjpvaQdC3c/what-should-you-change-in-response-to-an-emergency-and-ai
+
+I don't think I can use Ben's "Eliza the spambot therapist" analogy because it relies on the "running out the clock" behavior, and I'm Glomarizing—actually I think it's OK
+
+This should be common sense, though
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3szWd8HwWccJb9z5L/the-ea-community-might-be-neglecting-the-value-of
+
+
+sorrow at putting on a bad performance with respect to the discourse norms of the people I'm trying to rescue/convert; I think my hostile shorthand (saying that censorship costs nothing implies some combination "speech isn't useful" and "other people aren't real" is pointing at real patterns, but people who aren't already on my side are not going to be sympathetic)
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
+> You could argue that a wise policy is that we should all be called by terms and pronouns we don't like, now and then, and that to do otherwise is coddling. You could argue that Twitter shouldn't try to enforce courtesy. You could accuse, that's not what Twitter is really doing.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880
+> But Twitter is at least not *ontologically confused* if they say that using preferred pronouns is courtesy, and claim that they're enforcing a courtesy standard. Replying "That's a lie! I will never lie!" is confused. It'd be sad if the #IDW died on that hill of all hills.
+
+> Acts aren't sentences, pronouns aren't lies, bathrooms aren't fundamental physical constants, and if you know what a motte-and-bailey is you're supposed to know that.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067287459589906432
+
+> I don't care whose point it is on this planet, the point I'm making would stand in any galaxy: You are not standing in noble defense of Truth when you ask who gets to use which bathroom. This is true across all possible worlds, including those with no sociologists in them.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067187363544059905
+
+------
+
+https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1436007025545125896
+
+
+
+
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Crux: "If you say that Stalin is a dictator, you'll be shot, therefore Stalin is not a dictator" has the same structure as "If you say that trans women are male, they'll take massive psych damage, therefore trans women are not male"; both arguments should get the same response.
+Zack M. Davis
+@zackmdavis
+·
+Sep 9, 2021
+Thoughts on your proposed cruxes: 1 (harmful inferences) is an unworkable AI design: you need correct beliefs first, in order to correctly tell which beliefs are harmful. 4 (non-public concepts) is unworkable for humans: how do you think about things you're not allowed words for?
+
+
+[SECTION about monastaries (with Ben and Anna in April 2019)
+I complained to Anna: "Getting the right answer in public on topic _X_ would be too expensive, so we won't do it" is _less damaging_ when the set of such <em>X</em>es is _small_. It looked to me like we added a new forbidden topic in the last ten years, without rolling back any of the old ones.
+
+"Reasoning in public is too expensive; reasoning in private is good enough" is _less damaging_ when there's some sort of _recruiting pipeline_ from the public into the monasteries: lure young smart people in with entertaining writing and shiny math, _then_ gradually undo their political brainwashing once they've already joined your cult. (It had [worked on me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)!)
+
+I would be sympathetic to "rationalist" leaders like Anna or Yudkowsky playing that strategy if there were some sort of indication that they had _thought_, at all, about the pipeline problem—or even an indication that there _was_ an intact monastery somewhere.
+]
+
+> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
+
+> a gradual shift away from STEM nerd norms to fandom geek norms [...] the pathological insistence that you're not allowed to notice bad faith
+https://extropian.net/notice/A7rwtky5x3vPAedXZw
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+"When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+
+https://glowfic.com/posts/6132?page=83
+> A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.
+
+further post timeline—
+"Schelling Categories" Aug 2019
+"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist" Oct 2019
+"Algorithms of Deception!" Oct 2019
+"Firming Up ..." Dec 2019
+
+"Darkest Timeline" June 2020
+"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!" Aug 2020
+"Unnatural Categories" Jan 2021
+"Differential Signal Costs" Mar 2021
+
+
+"Public Heretic" on "Where to Draw the Boundary?"—
+> But reality, in its full buzzing and blooming confusion, contains an infinite numbers of 'joints' along which it could be carved. It is not at all clear how we could say that focusing one some of those joints is "true" while focusing on other joints is "false," since all such choices are based on similarly arbitrary conventions.
+
+> Now, it is certainly true that certain modes of categorization (i.e. the selection of certain joints) have allowed us to make empirical generalizations that would not otherwise have been possible, whereas other modes of categorization have not yielded any substantial predictive power. But why does that mean that one categorization is "wrong" or "untrue"? Better would seem to be to say that the categorization is "unproductive" in a particular empirical domain.
+
+> Let me make my claim more clear (and thus probably easier to attack): categories do not have truth values. They can be neither true nor false. I would challenge Eliezer to give an example of a categorization which is false in and of itself (rather than simply a categorization which someone then used improperly to make a silly empirical inference).
+
+Yudkowsky's reply—
+> PH, my reply is contained in Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2
+> I would have been surprised if she was. Joscelin Verreuil also strikes me as being a projection of some facets of a man that a woman most notices, and not a man as we exist from the inside.
+>
+> I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
+> Could you please [taboo](Could you please taboo these?) these?
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> Okay. I’ve never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime’s work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. 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.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b
+
+
+> Duly appreciated.
+
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY#comments 110 karma
+support from Oli—
+> I think there is a question of whether current LessWrong is the right place for this discussion (there are topics that will attract unwanted attention, and when faced with substantial adversarial forces, I think it is OK for LessWrong to decide to avoid those topics as long as they don't seem of crucial importance for the future of humanity, or have those discussions in more obscure ways, or to limit visibility to just some subset of logged-in users, etc). But leaving that discussion aside, basically everything in this post strikes me as "obviously true" and I had a very similar reaction to what the OP says now, when I first encountered the Eliezer Facebook post that this post is responding to.
+>
+> And I do think that response mattered for my relationship to the rationality community. I did really feel like at the time that Eliezer was trying to make my map of the world worse, and it shifted my epistemic risk assessment of being part of the community from "I feel pretty confident in trusting my community leadership to maintain epistemic coherence in the presence of adversarial epistemic forces" to "well, I sure have to at least do a lot of straussian reading if I want to understand what people actually believe, and should expect that depending on the circumstances community leaders might make up sophisticated stories for why pretty obviously true things are false in order to not have to deal with complicated political issues".
+>
+> I do think that was the right update to make, and was overdetermined for many different reasons, though it still deeply saddens me.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal?commentId=cPunK8nFKuQRorcNG#comments
+iceman—
+> I kinda disagree that this is a mere issue of Straussian reading: I suspect that in this (and other cases), you are seeing the raw output of Elizer's rationalizations and not some sort of instrumental coalition politics dark arts. If I was going for some sort of Straussian play, I wouldn't bring it up unprompted or make long public declarations like this.
+>
+> Zack is hypersensitive to this one issue because it interacts with his Something to Protect. But what I wonder about is where else Eliezer is trying to get away with things like this.
+
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1853001#reply-1853001
+> Another reason people go to Hell? Malediction! An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too! Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit! At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted. A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her _really giving a shit_.
+
+
+I furthermore claim that the following disjunction is true:
+
+> Either the quoted excerpt is a blatant lie on Scott's part because there are rules of rationality governing conceptual boundaries and Scott absolutely knows it, or
+> You have no grounds to criticize me for calling it a blatant lie, because there's no rule of rationality that says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way.
+
+there needs to be _some_ way for _someone_ to invest a _finite_ amount of effort to _correct the mistake_
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404698587175350275
+> That Zack now imagines this to be a great trend [...] does seem like an avoidable error and a failure to take perspective on how much most people's lives are not about ourselves
+
+I have a _seflish_ interest in people making and sharing accurate probabilistic inferences about how sex and gender and transgenderedness work in reality, for many reasons, but in part because _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like
+
+[Dawkins can see it.](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) [Jerry Coyne can see it.](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/)]
+
+when I was near death from that salivary stone, I mumbled something to my father about "our people"
+
+
+
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0331sBqRLBrDBM2Se5sf94JurGRTCjhbmrYnKcR4zHSSgghFALLKCdsG6aFbVF9dy9l?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421901809228
+> I don't think it *should* preclude my posting on topics like these, which is something I get the impression Zack disagrees with me about. I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you can get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do *know* they're living in a half-Stalinist environment, even though it hugely bugs Zack that the exact degree of Stalinism and filtration can't be explicitly laid out the way they would be in the meta-Bayesian Should Universe... or something. I think people are better off at the end of that.
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+]
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1568338672499687425
+> I'm not interested in lying to the man in the street. It won't actually save the world, and is not part of a reasonable and probable plan for saving the world; so I'm not willing to cast aside my deontology for it; nor would the elites be immune from the epistemic ruin.
+
+The problem with uncritically validating an autodidactic's ego, is that a _successful_ autodidact needs to have an accurate model of how their studying process is working, and that's a lot harder when people are "benevolently" trying to _wirehead_ you.
+
+The man is so egregiously sexist in any other context, _except_ when I need the right answer to make extremely important medical decisions
+
+I don't need to be a mind-reader about how it feels because I can read, I can point to the text from 2010 and 2016+, and notice the differences
+
+Maybe he was following the same sucking-off-Stalin algorithm internally the whole time (just like Anna was), and I only noticed it in 2016+ because the environment changed, not the algorithm? I doubt it, though (rather, the environment changed the algorithm)
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/
+
+origins of the strawberry example
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10155625884574228
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154690145854228
+(Note: we can do this with images of strawberries! The hard problem is presumably inventing nanotech from scratch.)
+
+lack of trust as a reason nothing works: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ shouldn't the rats trust each other?
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way
+> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyzXoCv7nagDWCMNS/you-re-calling-who-a-cult-leader#35n
+> In fact, I would say that by far the most cultish-looking behavior on Hacker News is people trying to show off how willing they are to disagree with Paul Graham
+I'm totally still doing this
+
+> it's that it's hard to get that innocence back, once you even start thinking about whether you're _independent_ of someone
+
+If Scott's willing to link to A. Marinos, maybe he'd link to my memoir, too? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-242
+My reaction to Marinos is probably similar to a lot of people's reaction to me: geez, putting in so much effort to correct Scott's mistake is lame, what a loser, who cares
+
+This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
+> journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
+
+--------
+
+23 June 2020: people are STILL citing "Categories Were Made", TWICE when people on the subreddit asked "What is Slate Star Codex"?
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvqv9av/
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvr47v1/
+> But the blog wasn't always on that 'side', either. Scott wrote one of the best analyses/defenses of trans identity and nonbiological definition of gender that I've ever read, and which ultimately convinced me.
+Yet again someone citing "Categories Were Made" as influential: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/he96rm/star_slate_codex_deleted_because_of_nyt_article/fvr7h7w/
+
+people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/status/1327730282703835137
+
+Even the enemies respect that post!
+https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208
+
+And using it for defense.
+
+Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/
+
+Another "Made for Man" cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwwxycr/
+
+More damage control: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hpohy5/what_are_some_of_scotts_posts_that_challenge_the/fxsu8p0/
+(Comment was deleted. Was I over the line in commenting at all, or just because of the "transparently political reasons" side-swipe? The fact that it got ~18 points suggests the readership was OK with it, even if the moderators weren't)
+
+People are still citing it! https://twitter.com/churrundo/status/1283578666425806851
+
+Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825
+
+Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/
+
+Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."
+
+Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739
+
+31 December
+"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/
+
+Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
+
+Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
+
+Still citing it (20 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qagtqk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_18/hhdiyd1/
+
+Still citing it (21 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qcrhc4/can_someone_provide_an_overview_ofintroduction_to/hhkf6kk/
+
+Still citing it (15 July 21) in a way that suggests it's ratsphere canon: https://twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1415754203293757445
+
+Still citing it (14 November 21): https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1459846336845697028
+
+Still citing it (December 21 podcast): https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2021/12/152-frame-control-with-aella/
+
+Still citing it (2 February 22): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4838964
+
+Still citing it (22 March 22): https://twitter.com/postpostpostr/status/1506480317351272450
+
+Still citing it (25 March 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tj525b/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_21_2022/i22z367/
+
+Still citing it (13 May 22): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkFTXKeFxwcGiBTwk/against-longtermist-as-an-identity
+
+Still citing it, in Eliezerfic Discord (18 Jul 22): https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/954750671280807968/998638253588631613
+
+Still citing it (31 Jul 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/wbqtg3/rationality_irl/
+
+Still citing it (19 Sep 22): https://twitter.com/ingalala/status/1568391691064729603
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
+It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+
+Still citing it (13 Feb 24): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kSq5qiafd6SqQoJWv/technologies-and-terminology-ai-isn-t-software-it-s-deepware
+
+Still citing it (22 Feb 24): https://twitter.com/mlbaggins/status/1760710932047577282
+
+At least I don't have to link the rebuttal myself every time:
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38755.html
+https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10vx6gk/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/j7k8fjc/
+https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1744304380503904616
+
+------
+
+If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.
+
+If you _don't_ have intent-to-inform, but make sure to never, ever say false things (because you know that "lying" is wrong, and think that as long as you haven't "lied", you're in the clear), but you don't feel like you have an obligation to acknowledge criticisms (for example, because you think you and your flunkies are the only real people in the world, and anyone who doesn't want to become one of your flunkies can be disdained as a "post-rat"), that's potentially a much worse situation, because the errors don't cancel.
+
+------
+
+https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-ftx-future-fund-needs-to-slow
+> changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money
+
+when I talked to the Kaiser psychiatrist in January 2021, he said that the drugs that they gave me in 2017 were Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg, which actually seems a lot more reasonable in retrospect (Trazadone is on Scott's insomnia list), but it was a lot scarier in the context of not trusting the authorities
+
+I didn't have a simple, [mistake-theoretic](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) characterization of the language and social conventions that everyone should use such that anyone who defected from the compromise would be wrong. The best I could do was try to objectively predict the consequences of different possible conventions—and of _conflicts_ over possible conventions.
+
+http://archive.is/SXmol
+> "don't lie to someone if you wouldn't slash their tires" is actually a paraphrase of Steven Kaas.
+> ... ugh, I forgot that that was from the same Black Belt Bayesian post where one of the examples of bad behavior is from me that time when I aggro'd against Phil Goetz to the point were Michael threatened to get me banned. I was young and grew up in the feminist blogosphere, but as I remarked to Zvi recently, in 2008, we had a way to correct that. (Getting slapped down by Michael's ostracism threat was really painful for me at the time, but in retrospect, it needed to be done.) In the current year, we don't.
+
+
+_Less Wrong_ had recently been rebooted with a new codebase and a new dev/admin team. New-_Less Wrong_ had a system for post to be "Curated". Begging Yudkowsky and Anna to legitimize "... Boundaries?" with a comment hadn't worked, but maybe the mods would (They did end up curating [a post about mole rats](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fDKZZtTMTcGqvHnXd/naked-mole-rats-a-case-study-in-biological-weirdness).)
+
+
+
+Yudkowsky did [quote-Tweet Colin Wright on the univariate fallacy](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124757043997372416)
+
+(which I got to [cite in a _Less Wrong_ post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy)
+
+
+"Univariate fallacy" also a concession
+(which I got to cite in which I cited in "Schelling Categories")
+
+
+
+"Yes Requires the Possibility of No" 19 May https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019
+
+scuffle on LessWrong FAQ 31 May
+
+"epistemic defense" meeting
+
+[TODO section on factional conflict:
+Michael on Anna as cult leader
+Jessica told me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards)
+24 Aug: I had told Anna about Michael's "enemy combatants" metaphor, and how I originally misunderstood
+me being regarded as Michael's pawn
+assortment of agendas
+mutualist pattern where Michael by himself isn't very useful for scholarship (he just says a lot of crazy-sounding things and refuses to explain them), but people like Sarah and me can write intelligible things that secretly benefited from much less legible conversations with Michael.
+]
+
+8 Jun: I think I subconsciously did an interesting political thing in appealing to my price for joining
+
+REACH panel
+
+(Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip")
+
+
+Scott said he liked "monastic rationalism _vs_. lay rationalism" as a frame for the schism Ben was proposing.
+
+(I wish I could use this line)
+I really really want to maintain my friendship with Anna despite the fact that we're de facto political enemies now. (And similarly with, e.g., Kelsey, who is like a sister-in-law to me (because she's Merlin Blume's third parent, and I'm Merlin's crazy racist uncle).)
+
+
+https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1164332124712738821
+> I unfortunately have had a policy for over a decade of not putting numbers on a few things, one of which is AGI timelines and one of which is *non-relative* doom probabilities. Among the reasons is that my estimates of those have been extremely unstable.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible
+> You might even be justified in [refusing to use probabilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/sg/when_not_to_use_probabilities/) at this point. In all honesty, I really _don't_ know how to estimate the probability of solving an impossible problem that I have gone forth with intent to solve; in a case where I've previously solved some impossible problems, but the particular impossible problem is more difficult than anything I've yet solved, but I plan to work on it longer, etcetera.
+>
+> People ask me how likely it is that humankind will survive, or how likely it is that anyone can build a Friendly AI, or how likely it is that I can build one. I really _don't_ know how to answer. I'm not being evasive; I don't know how to put a probability estimate on my, or someone else, successfully shutting up and doing the impossible. Is it probability zero because it's impossible? Obviously not. But how likely is it that this problem, like previous ones, will give up its unyielding blankness when I understand it better? It's not truly impossible, I can see that much. But humanly impossible? Impossible to me in particular? I don't know how to guess. I can't even translate my intuitive feeling into a number, because the only intuitive feeling I have is that the "chance" depends heavily on my choices and unknown unknowns: a wildly unstable probability estimate.
+
+
+
+
+I don't, actually, know how to prevent the world from ending. Probably we were never going to survive. (The cis-human era of Earth-originating intelligent life wasn't going to last forever, and it's hard to exert detailed control over what comes next.) But if we're going to die either way, I think it would be _more dignified_ if Eliezer Yudkowsky were to behave as if he wanted his faithful students to be informed. Since it doesn't look like we're going to get that, I think it's _more dignified_ if his faithful students _know_ that he's not behaving like he wants us to be informed. And so one of my goals in telling you this long story about how I spent (wasted?) the last six years of my life, is to communicate the moral that
+
+and that this is a _problem_ for the future of humanity, to the extent that there is a future of humanity.
+
+Is that a mean thing to say about someone to whom I owe so much? Probably. But he didn't create me to not say mean things. If it helps—as far as _I_ can tell, I'm only doing what he taught me to do in 2007–9: [carve reality at the joints](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [speak the truth even if your voice trembles](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth), and [make an extraordinary effort](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GuEsfTpSDSbXFiseH/make-an-extraordinary-effort) when you've got [Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect).
+
+ReACT seems similar to Visible Thoughts Project: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway?commentId=HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt#HvGxrASYAyfbiPwQt
+> I've noticed that none of my heroes, not even Douglas Hofstadter or Eric Drexler, seem to live up to my standard of perfection. Always sooner or later they fall short. It's annoying, you know, because it means _I_ have to do it.
+
+But he got it right in 2009; he only started to fall short _later_ for political reasons
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1580278376673120256
+> Your annual reminder that academically conventional decision theory, as taught everywhere on Earth except inside the MIRI-adjacent bubble, says to give in to threats in oneshot games. Only a very rare student is bright enough to deserve blame in place of the teacher.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9KvefburLia7ptEE3/the-correct-contrarian-cluster
+> Atheism: Yes.
+> Many-worlds: Yes.
+> "P-zombies": No.
+>
+> These aren't necessarily simple or easy for contrarians to work through, but the correctness seems as reliable as it gets.
+>
+> Of course there are also slam-dunks like:
+>
+> Natural selection: Yes.
+> World Trade Center rigged with explosives: No.
+
+I wonder how the history of the site would have been different if this had included "Racial differences in cognitive abilities: Yes." (It's worse if he didn't think about it in the first place, rather than noticing and deciding not to say it—it doesn't even seem to show up in the comments!!)
+
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid0tTk5VoLSxZ1hJKPRMdzpPzNaBR4eU5ufKEhvvowMFTjKTHykogFfwAZge9Kk5jFLl
+> Yeah, see, *my* equivalent of making ominous noises about the Second Amendment is to hint vaguely that there are all these geneticists around, and gene sequencing is pretty cheap now, and there's this thing called CRISPR, and they can probably figure out how to make a flu virus that cures Borderer culture by excising whatever genes are correlated with that and adding genes correlated with greater intelligence. Not that I'm saying anyone should try something like that if a certain person became US President. Just saying, you know, somebody might think of it.
+
+
+commenting policy—
+> I will enforce the same standards here as I would on my personal Facebook garden. If it looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with you, I will ban you from commenting on my posts.
+>
+> Specific guidelines:
+>
+> Argue against ideas rather than people.
+> Don't accuse others of committing the Being Wrong Fallacy ("Wow, I can't believe you're so wrong! And you believe you're right! That's even more wrong!").
+> I consider tone-policing to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and will delete it.
+> If I think your own tone is counterproductive, I will try to remember to politely delete your comment instead of rudely saying so in a public reply.
+> If you have helpful personal advice to someone that could perhaps be taken as lowering their status, say it to them in private rather than in a public comment.
+> The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section.
+> The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead.
+
+I tried arguing against ideas _first!_
+
+I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism
+
+
+couldn't resist commenting even after I blocked Yudkowsky on Twitter (30 August 2021)
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02AGzw7EzeB6bDAwvXT8hm4jnC4Lh1te7tC3Q3h2u6QqBfJjp4HKvpCM3LqvcLuXSbl?comment_id=10159857276789228&reply_comment_id=10159858211759228
+Yudkowsky replies (10 September 2021)—
+> Zack, if you can see this, I think Twitter is worse for you than Facebook because of the short-reply constraint. I have a lot more ability to include nuance on Facebook and would not expect most of my statements here to set you off the same way, or for it to be impossible for me to reply effectively if something did come up.
+("impossible to me to reply effectively" implies that I have commenting permissions)
+
+
+"Noble Secrets" Discord thread—
+> So, I agree that if you perform the experimental test of asking people, "Do you think truthseeking is virtuous?", then a strong supermajority will say "Yes", and that if you ask them, "And are you looking for memes about how to do actually do it?" they'll also say "Yes."
+>
+> But I also notice that in chat the other day, we saw this (in my opinion very revealing) paragraph—
+>
+> I think of "not in other people" [in "Let the truth destroy what it can—but in you, not in other people"] not as "infantilizing", but as recognizing independent agency. You don't get to do harm to other people without their consent, whether that is physical or pychological.
+>
+> My expectation of a subculture descended from the memetic legacy of Robin Hanson's blog in 2008 in which people were _actually_ looking for memes about how to seek truth, is that the modal, obvious response to a paragraph like this would be something like—
+>
+>> Hi! You must be new here! Regarding your concern about truth doing harm to people, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)" (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased>). Regarding your concern about recognizing independent agency, a standard reply is articulated in the post "Your Rationality Is My Business" (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business>).
+>
+> —or _something like that_. Obviously, it's not important that the reply use those particular Sequences links, or _any_ Sequences links; what's important is that someone responds to this _very obvious_ anti-epistemology (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology>) with ... memes about how to actually do truthseeking.
+>
+> And what we _actually_ saw in response to this "You don't get to do harm to other people" message is ... it got 5 :plus_one: reactions.
+
+Yudkowsky replies—
+> the Doublethink page is specifically about how you yourself choosing not to know is Unwise
+> to the extent you can even do that rather than convincing yourself that you have
+> it specifically doesn't say "tell other people every truth you know"
+> the point is exactly that you couldn't reasonably end up in an epistemic position of knowing yourself that you ought to lie to yourself
+
+
+--------
+
+My last messages in late-November fight with Alicorner Discord was 4:44 a.m./4:47 am. (!) on 28 November; I mention needing more sleep. But—that would have been 6:44 a.m. Austin time? Did I actually not sleep that night? Flipping out and writing Yudkowsky was evening of the same calendar day.
+
+Sam had said professed gender was more predictive.
+
+Bobbi has claimed that "most people who speak the involved dialect of English agree that ‘woman’ refers to ‘an individual who perceives themselves as a woman’"
+
+Kelsey 27 November
+> I think you could read me as making the claim "it's desirable, for any social gender, for there to be non-medical-transition ways of signaling it"
+
+27 November
+> I don't think linta was saying "you should believe ozy doesn't have a uterus"
+that would be really weird
+
+> well, for one thing, "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" isn't directed at you, it's directed at the trans person
+My reply—
+> that's almost worse; you're telling them that it's okay to gaslight _everyone else in their social circle_
+
+1702 27 November
+> Stepping back: the specific statement that prompted me to start this horrible discussion even though I usually try to keep my personal hobbyhorse out of this server because I don't want it to destroy my friendships, was @lintamande's suggestion that "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab". I think I have a thought experiment that might clarify why I react so strongly to this sort of thing
+> Suppose Brent Dill showed you this photograph and said, "This is a photograph of a dog. Your eyes may tell you that it's a cat, but you have to say it's a dog, or I'll be very unhappy and it'll be all your fault."
+> In that case, I think you would say, "This is a gaslighting attempt. You are attempting to use my sympathy for you to undermine my perception of reality."
+
+> Flight about to take off so can't explain, but destroying the ability to reason in public about biological sex as a predictive category seems very bad for general sanity, even if freedom and transhumanism is otherwise good
+
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/516744646034980904
+26 November 14:38 p.m.
+> I'm not sure what "it's okay to not pursue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab" is supposed to mean if it doesn't cash out to "it's okay to enforce social norms preventing other people from admitting out loud that they have correctly noticed your biological sex"
+
+In contrast to Yudkowsky's claim that you need to have invented something from scratch to make any real progress, this is a case where the people who _did_ invent something can't apply it anymore!!
+
+-----
+
+Examples of non-robot-cult authors using rationality skills that they visibly didn't get from being a robot-cult loyalist—
+
+James C. Scott, _Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts_, Ch. 4, "False Consciousness or Laying It on Thick?", 1990
+
+> The thick theory [of false consciousness] claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation. In its most subtle form, the thin theory is eminently plausible and, some would claim, true by definition. I believe, nevertheless, that it is fundamentally wrong and hope to show why in some detail after putting it in as persuasive a form as possible, so that it is no straw man I am criticizing.
+
+(Steelmanning! One of us!)
+
+Kathryn Paige Harden, _The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality_, Ch. 9, "Using Nature to Understand Nurture", 2021
+
+> [P]olicies that are built on a flawed understanding of which environments are truly causal are wasteful and potentially harmful. In this specific example, even if the state of Texas was successful at delaying teenagers' sexual activity, such a change would not actually improve their mental health—and an emphasis on such programs potentially diverts investment away from educational programs that _would_ be helpful. (Proponents of teenage abstinence might argue that abstinence is a valuable end for its own sake, but that is a different justification for the policy than the empirical claim that abstinentce is a means toward increased adolencent well-being.)
+
+("Fake Optimization Critiera")
+
+John Snygg, _A New Approach to Differential Geometry Using Clifford's Geometric Algebra_ (§4.7.3) recounts the Arabic mathematician al-Biruni (973–1048).
+
+> More is known about al-Briruni than most Islamic mathematicians because he included bits of autobiographical writings in some of his academic publications. In one of these, _Shadows_, he relates an encounter with a hard-line orthodox cleric. The cleric admonished al-Biruni because he had used an astronomical instrument with Byzantine months engraved on it to determine the time of prayers. Al-Briuni replied:
+>> "The Byzantines also eat food. Then do not imitate them in this!"
+
+(Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence)
+
+Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten https://wiki.obormot.net/Archive/TheArtOfControversy
+> If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ExssKjAaXEEYcnzPd/conversational-cultures-combat-vs-nurture-v2/comment/4qJk3BZ2oQtFskYLh
+
+-----
+
+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_.)
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance. This does not seem remotely credible to me any more.
+
+_It will never stop hurting until I write it down._ ("I've got a thick tongue / Brimming with the words that go unsung.")
+
+_My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter. What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.
+
+An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by people—I've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fans—all four of you!) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...
+
+And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.
+
+----
+
+imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bible—or at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on.
+
+You _know_ this is wrong. Okay, maybe there's _some_ way that same-sex marriage could be compatible with the Church's teachings. But you would have to _argue_ for that; you _can't_ just say there's no arguments _against_ it and call that the end of the discussion! [1 Corinthians 6:9–10](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NKJV): "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators [...] nor homosexuals, nor sodomites [...] will inherit the kingdom of God." It's _right there_. There's [a bunch of passages like that](https://www.livingout.org/the-bible-and-ssa). You _can't possibly_ not see it.
+
+As a man of faith and loyal parishioner, you would _expect_ to be able to resolve the matter by bringing your concern to the priest, who would then see how the sermon had been accidentally misleading, and issue a clarification at next week's sermon, so that the people would not be led astray from the path of God.
+
+The priest doesn't agree; he insists on the contrived technically-not-heresy interpretation. This would be a shock, but it wouldn't, yet, shatter your trust in the Church as an institution. Even the priest is still a flawed mortal man.
+
+Then the Pope misinterets the Bible in the same way in his next encyclical. With the help of some connections, you appeal your case all the way to the Vatican—and the Pope himself comes back with the same _bullshit_ technically-not-heresy.
+
+You realize that you _cannot take the Pope's words literally_.
+
+That would be _pretty upsetting_, right? To lose faith in, not your religion itself—_obviously_ the son of God still died for our sins—but the _institution_ that claims to faithfully implement your religion, but is actually doing something else. You can understand why recovering from that might take a year or so.
+
+Or maybe imagine an idealistic young lawyer working for the prosecution in the [Selective Draft Law Cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Draft_Law_Cases) challenging the World War I draft. Since 1865, the Constitution _says_, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If the words "involuntary servitude not as a punishment for a crime" _mean anything_, they surely include the draft. So the draft is unconstitutional. Right?
+
+----
+
+I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember Erin recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)
+
+It needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
+
+people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)—
+
+> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)
+
+That ended up being quite a lot of effort!—but at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work.
+
+This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"
+
+If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically expensive for me. Sorry," I can't say I'm not _disappointed_, but I can respect that they labor under different constraints from me.
+
+But we can't even have that, because saying "You're right, but I can't admit this in public" requires _trust_.
+
+_socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+
+I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+Alicorn writes (re Kelsey's anorexia): "man it must be so weird to have a delusion and know it's a delusion and still have it"
+what's really weird is having a delusion, knowing it's a delusion, and _everyone else_ insists your delusion is true
+... and I'm not allowed to say that without drawing on my diplomacy budget, which puts a permanent distance between me and the group
+
+4 levels of intellectual conversation https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
+
+If we _actually had_ magical sex change technology of the kind described in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), no one would even consider clever philosophy arguments about how to redefine words: people who wanted to change sex would just do it, and everyone else would use the corresponding language, not as a favor, but because it straightforwardly described reality.
+
+Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy.
+
+
+Steve Sailer retweeted me today criticizing Lee Jussim https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1160662220511932416
+
+I'm a natural true believer in Yudkowskian ideology https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/187004568356/your-ideology-if-it-gets-off-the-ground-at-all
+
+Yudkowsky's assessment of Moldbug: "Politics mindkilled him; he cannot separate the normative and the descriptive." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s?commentId=TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs#TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs
+
+----
+
+2019 comments to "Wilhelm"—
+
+these people are at the center of the rationalist egregore and could steer it if only they were a little bit braver
+
+the prevailing narrative is something like "the rationalist community is doing just fine; poor Zack is just freaking out because he's in denial about being a trans woman, and mean ol' Michael and Ben are preying on his vulnerability"
+
+I'm never gonna get over this
+you can tell your IQ 110 hairdresser, "Men who fantasize about being women don't particularly resemble actual women", and she'll just be like, "yeah"
+and you tell IQ 135 "rationalists" the same thing, and it just becomes this multi-year, 30,000-word ... whatever
+
+people use the word "gaslighting" to refer to the cognitive dissonance between what you're seeing and what the local egregore expects you to see
+
+ being trapped between two egregores is so painful / and even when it's not painful, it's confusing
+
+recently-transitioned MtF Facebook acquaintance had generally positive feedback about my blog, but also says stuff like, "objective autobiography is impossible, ultimately we just tell the stories about ourselves that help us survive and thrive" / "she" went to Caltech / where are all the serious people??
+
+in the new Twilight Zone episode featuring a crew of 5 astronauts, both the commander and the rebellious one are black women (who I have trouble telling apart)
+You sent
+there's a legitimate (really!) social-justice angle to this (the fact that I can't tell them apart proves that my perceptual system is RACIST)
+You sent
+(but the general phenomenon has to do with anchoring on unusual characteristics; at old dayjob, someone once confused me with the other white-guy-with-a-ponytail—we don't really look alike, but long hair on males is unusual)
+
+17 March 19: "I think 'Vanessa Kosoy' is a guy I met at Summer Solstice 2016"
+
+----
+
+messages with Leon about PDF templating as an easier task were on 22-23 May
+
+Berkeley rat culture trains people to steer towards fake agreements rather than clarifying disagreement, because realistic models of disagreement include bad faith (being wrong because of reasons rather than randomly), which is against the principle of charity
+
+Greg Egan's "Closer" (1992) predicted language models, and seemed wild at the time
+
+The text of _Inadequate Equilibria_ is more modest than his rhetorical marketing blunder
+
+and the BOTZ ETF I bought in 2020 has a −27.57% unrealized loss! awesome!!
+
+Katie also asked "MTF?" when I told her about the Sasha disaster!!
+
+27 Feb 2019: Ben playing Bad Cop, Sarah playing good cop, me as plantiff/puppydog/victim (not as a coordinated strategy; that's just how our personalities are)
+
+ideological-drivenness—
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/speaking-of-addiction/
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/11/egoism-as-defense-against-a-life-of-unending-heartbreak/
+
+I assume starting a detransition market would be not-OK
+
+-----
+
+FYI, I think this turned out significantly harsher on you than my January 2022 emails made it sound, thus occasioning this one additional email.
+
+I'm planning on publishing the drafts linked below on [dates].
+
+ * "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer" (18K words)
+ * "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (46K words)
+ * "Agreeing with Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles" (19K words)
+ * **"Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty"** (1.5K word summary of the parts of the Whole Dumb Story that are specifically an attack on your reputation)
+
+**If you want to contest any purported factual inaccuracies or my interpretation of the "no direct references to private conversations" privacy norm, get back to me before [date].** If you have anything else to say for yourself, you can say it in the public comments section.
+
+(Or if you had something to say privately, I would _listen_; it just doesn't seem like a good use of time. I think it's undignified that I have reason to publish a post titled "Why I Don't Trust Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intellectual Honesty", but you seem very committed to not meeting my standards of intellectual honesty, so I have an interest in telling everyone else that.)
+
+
+[13 November: #drama discussion today (https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041586188961714259) makes me feel like I don't want to put a "Why I Don't Trust ..." post, like it would be too cruel]
+
+[no awareness that people like me or Michael or Jessica would consider this a betrayal coming from the author of the Sequences (even if it wouldn't be a betrayal coming from a generic public intellectual)]
+
+----
+
+(If you weren't interested in meeting my standards for intellectual honest before, it's not clear why you would change your mind just because I spent 80,000 words cussing you out to everyone else.)
+
+----
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BbM47qBPzdSRruY4z/instead-of-technical-research-more-people-should-focus-on
+
+I hate that my religion is bottlenecked on one guy
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1405032189708816385
+> Egregore psychology is much easier and more knowable than individual human psychology, for the same reason macroscopic matter is more predictable than individual particles. But trying to tell people what the egregore is doing doesn't work because they don't believe in egregores!!
+
+20 June 2021, "The egregore doesn't care about the past", thematic moments at Valinor
+
+You don't want to have a reputation that isn't true; I've screwed up confidentiality before, so I don't want a "good at keeping secrets" reputation; if Yudkowsky doesn't want to live up to the standard of "not being a partisan hack", then ...
+
+Extended analogy between "Scott Alexander is always right" and "Trying to trick me into cutting my dick off"—in neither case would any sane person take it literally, but it's pointing at something important (Scott and EY are trusted intellectual authorities, rats are shameless about transition cheerleading)
+
+Scott's other 2014 work doesn't make the same mistake
+
+"The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy"
+https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html
+
+"English is fragile"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1590460598869168128
+> I now see even foom-y equations as missing the point.
+(!)
+
+----
+
+dialogue with a pre-reader on "Challenges"—
+
+> More to the point, there's a kind of anthropic futility in these paragraphs, anyone who needs to read them to understand won't read them, so they shouldn't exist.
+
+I think I'm trying to humiliate the people who are pretending not to understand in front of the people who do understand, and I think that humiliation benefits from proof-of-work? Is that ... not true??
+
+> No, because it makes you look clueless rather than them look clueless.
+
+-----
+
+compare EY and SBF
+
+Scott Aaronson on the Times's hit piece of Scott Alexander—
+https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310
+> The trouble with the NYT piece is not that it makes any false statements, but just that it constantly _insinuates_ nefarious beliefs and motives, via strategic word choices and omission of relevant facts that change the emotional coloration of the facts that it _does_ present.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown
+
+https://twitter.com/jstn/status/1591088015941963776
+> 2023 is going to be the most 2005 it's been in years
+
+-------
+
+re the FTX debacle, Yudkowsky retweets Katja:
+
+https://twitter.com/KatjaGrace/status/1590974800318861313
+> So I'd advocate for instead taking really seriously when someone seems to be saying that they think it's worth setting aside integrity etc for some greater good
+
+I'm tempted to leave a message in #drama asking if people are ready to generalize this to Kolmogorov complicity (people _very explicitly_ setting aside integrity &c. for the greater good of not being unpopular with progressives). It's so appropriate!! But it doesn't seem like a good use of my diplomacy budget relative to finishing the memoir—the intelligent social web is predictably going to round it off to "Zack redirecting everything into being about his hobbyhorse again, ignore". For the same reason, I was right to hold back my snarky comment about Yudkowsky's appeal to integrity in "Death With Dignity": the universal response would have been, "read the room." Commenting here would be bad along the same dimension, albeit not as extreme.
+
+------
+
+effects on my social life—calculating what I'm allowed to say; making sure I contribute non-hobbyhorse value to offset my hobbyhorse interruptions
+
+----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FKJ8yiF3KjFhAuivt/impco-don-t-injure-yourself-by-returning-ftxff-money-for
+when that happens, in EA, I often do suspect that nobody else will dare to speak the contrary viewpoint, if not me.
+
+Michael, June 2019
+> If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship
+
+------
+
+Piper and Yudkowsky on privacy norms—
+
+https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1591996891734376449
+> if such promises were made, they should be kept, but in practice in the present day, they often aren't made, and if you haven't explicitly promised a source confidentiality and then learn of something deeply unethical from them you should absolutely whistleblow.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1592002777429180416
+> I don't think I'd go for "haven't explicitly promised" here but rather "if you're pretty sure there was no such informal understanding on which basis you were granted that access and information".
+
+------
+
+14 November 2022 conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
+
+The problem isn't just the smugness and condescension; it's the smugness and condescension when he's in the wrong and betraying the principles he laid out in the Sequences and knows it; I don't want to be lumped in with anti-arrogance that's not sensitive to whether the arrogance is in the right
+
+My obsession must look as pathetic from the outside as Scott Aaronson's—why doesn't he laugh it off, who cares what SneerClub thinks?—but in my case, the difference is that I was betrayed
+
+-----
+
+dath ilan on advertising (https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1589520#reply-1589520)—
+> So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions. Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.
+
+
+I wrote a Python script to replace links to _Slate Star Codex_ with archive links: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191f1e8f9#patch23
+
+John Wentworth—
+> I chose the "train a shoulder advisor" framing specifically to keep my/Eliezer's models separate from the participants' own models.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Afdohjyt6gESu4ANf/most-people-start-with-the-same-few-bad-ideas#comment-zL728sQssPtXM3QD9
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1355712437006204932
+> A "Physics-ist" is trying to engage in a more special human activity, hopefully productively, where they *think* about light in order to use it better.
+
+Wentworth on my confusion about going with the sqaured-error criterion in "Unnatural Categories"—
+> I think you were on the right track with mutual information. They key insight here is not an insight about what metric to use, it's an insight about the structure of the world and our information about the world. [...] If we care more about the rough wall-height than about brick-parity, that’s because the rough wall-height is more relevant to the other things which we care about in the world. And that, in turn, is because the rough wall-height is more relevant to more things in general. Information about brick-parity just doesn’t propagate very far in the causal graph of the world; it's quickly wiped out by noise in other variables. Rough wall-height propagates further.
+
+not interested in litigating "lying" vs. "rationalizing" vs. "misleading-by-implicature"; you can be _culpable_ for causing people to be misled in a way that isn't that sensitive to what exactly was going on in your head
+
+-----
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl?comment_id=10159410429909228&reply_comment_id=10159410748194228
+
+> Zack, and many others, I think you have a vulnerability where you care way too much about the reasons that bullies give for bullying you, and the bullies detect that and exploit it.
+
+
+
+> Everyone. (Including organizers of science fiction conventions.) Has a problem of "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies." We also have an inevitable Kolmogorov Option issue but that should not be confused with the inevitable Evil Bullies issue, even if bullies attack through Kolmogorov Option issues.
+
+----
+
+Someone else's Dumb Story that you can read about on someone else's blog
+
+all he does these days is sneer about Earth people, but he _is_ from Earth—carrying on the memetic legacy of Richard Feynmann and Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan
+
+"Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma" https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business
+> One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in _this_ generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not.
+
+https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/be-afraid-9802
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TQSb4wd6v5C3p6HX2/the-pascal-s-wager-fallacy-fallacy#pART2rjzcmqATAZio
+> egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now.
+(I remembered this as suggesting some plausibility in sudden Singularity even then, but in context it's more clearly in thought-experimental mode)
+
+from "Go Forth and Create the Art"—
+> To the best of my knowledge there is _no_ true science that draws its strength from only one person. To the best of my knowledge that is _strictly_ an idiom of cults. A true science may have its heroes, it may even have its lonely defiant heroes, but _it will have more than one_.
+
+contrast Sequences-era "Study Science, Not Just Me" with dath ilan sneering at Earth
+
+I have no objection to the conspiracies in Brennan's world! Because Brennan's world was just "here's a fictional world with a different social structure" (Competitive Conspiracy, Cooperative Conspiracy, &c.); sure, there was a post about how Eld Science failed, but that didn't seem like _trash talk_ in the same way
+
+contrast the sneering at Earth people with the attitude in "Whining-Based Communities"
+
+from "Why Quantum?" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDL9NDEXPxYpDf4vz/why-quantum)
+> But would you believe that I had such strong support, if I had not shown it to you in full detail? Ponder this well. For I may have other strong opinions. And it may seem to you that _you_ do't see any good reason to form such strong beliefs. Except this is _not_ what you will see; you will see simply that there _is_ no good reason for the strong belief, that there _is_ no strong support one way or the other. For our first-order beliefs are how the world seems to _be_. And you may think, "Oh, Eliezer is just opinionated—forming strong beliefs in the absence of lopsided support." And I will not have time to do another couple of months worth of blog posts.
+>
+> I am _very_ far from infallible, but I do not hold strong opinions at random.
+
+Another free speech exchange with S.K. in 2020: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YE4md9rNtpjbLGk22/open-communication-in-the-days-of-malicious-online-actors?commentId=QoYGQS52HaTpeF9HB
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAfmMTiaSjEY8PxXC/say-it-loud
+
+Maybe lying is "worse" than rationalizing, but if you can't hold people culpable for rationalization, you end up with a world that's bad for broadly the same reasons that a world full of liars is bad: we can't steer the world to good states if everyone's map is full of falsehoods that locally benefitted someone
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
+
+------
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047796598488440843
+
+I'm still pretty annoyed by how easily people are falling for this _ludicrous_ "Ah, it would be bad if people _on Earth_ tried to do this, but it's OK _in dath ilan_ because of how sane, cooperative, and kind they are" excuse.
+
+Exception Handling is depicted as _explicitly_ having a Fake Conspiracy section (<https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952>). Why is that any more okay, than if FTX or Enron explicitly had a Fake Accounting department?
+
+Isn't dath ilan just very straightforwardly being _more_ corrupt than Earth here? (Because FTX and Enron were _subverting_ our usual governance and oversight mechanisms, as contrasted to the usual governance mechanisms in dath ilan _explicitly_ being set up to deceive the public.)
+
+I understand that you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that, "it's okay; no one is 'really' being deceived, because 'everybody knows' that the evidence for Sparashki being real is too implausible", and you can _assert by authorial fiat_ that it's necessary to save their world from AGI and mad science.
+
+But someone writing a story about "Effective Altruism" (instead of "Exception Handling") on "Earth" (instead of "dath ilan") could just as easily _assert by authorial fiat_, "it's okay, no one is 'really' being defrauded, because 'everybody knows' that crypto is a speculative investment in which you shouldn't invest anything you can't afford to lose".
+
+What's the difference? Are there _generalizable reasons_ why fraud isn't worth it (not in expectation, and not in reality), or is it just that Sam and Caroline weren't sane, cooperative, and kind enough to pull it off successfully?
+
+What is "It would be OK in dath ilan, but it's not OK on Earth" even supposed to _mean_, if it's not just, "It's OK for people who genetically resemble Eliezer Yudkowsky to deceive the world as long as they have a clever story for why it's all for the greater good, but it's not OK for you, because you're genetically inferior to him"?
+
+https://discord.com/channels/936151692041400361/1022006828718104617/1047374488645402684
+
+A. J. Vermillion seems to be complaining that by not uncritically taking the author assertions at face value, I'm breaking the rules of the literary-criticism game—that if the narrator _says_ Civilization was designed to be trustworthy, I have no license to doubt that is "actually" is.
+
+And I can't help but be reminded of a great short story that I remember reading back in—a long time ago
+
+I think it must have been 'aught-nine?
+
+yeah, it had to have been _late_ in 'aught-nine, because I remember discussing it with some friends when I was living in a group house on Benton street in Santa Clara
+
+anyway, there was this story about a guy who gets transported to a fantasy world where he has a magic axe that yells at him sometimes and he's prophecied to defeat the bad guy and choose between Darkness and Light, and they have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair
+
+and when they get there, the bad guy (spoilers) ||_accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there!!||
+
+and the moral was—or at least, the simpler message I extracted from it was—there's something messed-up about the genre convention of fantasy stories where readers just naïvely accept the author's frame, instead of looking at the portrayed world with fresh eyes and applying their _own_ reason and their _own_ morality to it—
+
+That if it's wrong to murder people with a different racial ancestry from you _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a fantasy kingdom setting and the race in question are ogres.
+
+And that if it's wrong to kill people and take their stuff _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a period piece about pirates on the high seas.
+
+And (I submit) if it's wrong to decieve the world by censoring scientific information about human sexuality _on Earth_, it's _also_ wrong when you're in a social-science-fiction setting about a world called dath ilan.
+
+(You can _assert by authorial fiat_ that Keltham doesn't mind and is actually grateful, but you could also _assert by authorial fiat_ that the ogres were evil and deserved to die.)
+
+but merely human memory fades over 13 years and merely human language is such a lossy medium; I'm telling you about the story _I_ remember, and the moral lessons _I_ learned from it, which may be very different what was actually written, or what the author was trying to teach
+
+maybe I should make a post on /r/tipofmytongue/, to ask them—
+
+_What was the name of that story?_
+
+_What was the name of that author?_
+
+(What was the name of the _antagonist_ of that story?—actually, sorry, that's a weird and random question; I don't know why my brain generated that one.)
+
+but somehow I have a premonition that I'm not going to like the answer, if I was hoping for more work from the same author in the same spirit
+
+that the author who wrote "Darkness and Light" (or whatever the story was called) died years ago
+
+or has shifted in her emphases in ways I don't like
+
+------
+
+"the absolute gall of that motherfucker"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8KRqc9oGSLry2qS9e/what-motte-and-baileys-are-rationalists-most-likely-to?commentId=qFHHzAXnGuMjqybEx
+
+In a discussion on the Eliezerfic Discord server, I've been arguing that the fact that dath ilan tries to prevent obligate sexual sadists from discovering this fact about themselves (because the unattainable rarity of corresponding masochists would make them sad) contradicts the claim that dath ilan's art of rationality is uniformly superior to that of Earth's: I think that readers of _Overcoming Bias_ in 2008 had a concept of it being virtuous to face comfortable truths, and therefore would have overwhelmingly rejected utilitarian rationales for censoring scientific information about human sexuality.
+
+------
+
+https://archive.vn/hlaRG
+
+> Bankman-Fried has been going around on a weird media tour whose essential message is "I made mistakes and was careless, sorry," presumably thinking that that is a _defense_ to fraud charges, that "carelessness" and "fraud" are entirely separate categories [...] If you attract customers and investors by saying that you have good risk management, and then you lose their money, and then you say "oh sorry we had bad risk management," that is not a defense against fraud charges! That is a confession!
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1602215046074884097
+> If you could be satisfied by mortal men, you would be satisfied with mortal reasoning and mortal society, and would not have gravitated toward the distant orbits of my own presence.
+
+it's just so weird that, this cult that started out with "People can stand what is true, because they are already doing so", has progressed to, "But what if a prediction market says they can't??"
+
+"The eleventh virtue is scholarship! Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own ... unless a prediction market says that would make you less happy" just doesn't have the same ring to it, you know?
+"The first virtue is curiosity! A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. But higher than both of those, is trusting your Society's institutions to tell you which kinds of knowledge will make you happy" also does not have the same ring to it, even if you stipulate by authorial fiat that your Society's institutions are super-competent, such that they're probably right about the happiness thing
+
+------
+
+so, I admitted to being a motivated critic (having a social incentive to find fault with dath ilan), but that I nevertheless only meant to report real faults rather than fake faults, and Yudkowsky pointed out that that's not good enough (you also need to be looking for evidence on the other side), and that therefore didn't consider the criticism to be coming from a peer, and challenged me to say things about how the text valorizes truth
+(and I didn't point out that whether or not I'm a "peer"—which I'm clearly not if you're measuring IQ or AI alignment contributions or fiction-writing ability—shouldn't be relevant because https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority, because I was eager to be tested and eager to pass the test)
+and I thought I wrote up some OK answers to the query
+(I definitely didn't say, "that's impossible because Big Yud and Linta are lying liars who hate truth")
+but he still wasn't satisifed on grounds of me focusing too much on what the characters said, and not what the universe said, and then when I offered one of those, he still wasn't satisfied (because the characters had already remarked on it)
+and I got the sense that he wanted Original Seeing, and I thought, and I came up with some Original Philosophy that connected the universe of godagreements to some of my communication theory ideas, and I was excited about it
+so I ran with it
+
+[...]
+
+Zack M. Davis — Today at 10:18 PM
+but the Original Philosophy that I was legitimately proud of, wasn't what I was being tested on; it legitimately looks bad in context
+
+--------
+
+OK, so I'm thinking my main takeaways from the Eliezerfic fight is that I need to edit my memoir draft to be both _less_ "aggressive" in terms of expressing anger (which looks bad and _far more importantly_ introduces distortions), and _more_ "aggressive" in terms of calling Yudkowsky intellectually dishonest (while being _extremely clear_ about explaining _exactly_ what standards I think are not being met and why that's important, without being angry about it).
+
+The standard I'm appealing to is, "It's intellectually dishonest to make arguments and refuse to engage with counterarguments on political grounds." I think he's made himself very clear that he doesn't give a sh—
+
+(no, need to avoid angry language)
+
+—that he doesn't consider himself bound by that standard.
+
+----
+
+
+Fool! There is no Equilibrium
+
+and you'd think that people who are so obsessed with prediction markets (whose trustworthiness does not stem from individual traders having unimpeachably perfect cognition) would be able to appreciate the value of the somewhat older social technology of ... debate
+
+> god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that's always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. *i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky*
+https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1542781304621518848
+
+Said Achmiz on Eliezer's degeneration—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=kS4BfYJuZ8ZcwuwfB
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=4kLTSanNyhn5H8bHv
+
+> What I'm saying is that, in the discussion as a whole, which is constituted by the post itself, plus comments thereon, plus related posts and comments, etc., an author has an obligation to respond to reader inquiries of this sort.
+>
+> As for where said obligation comes from—why, from the same place as the obligation to provide evidence for your claims, or the obligation to cite your sources, or the obligation not to be logically rude, or the obligation to write comprehensibly, or the obligation to acknowledge and correct factual errors, etc., etc.—namely, from the fact that acknowledging and satisfying this obligation reliably leads to truth, and rejecting this obligation reliably leads to error. In short: it is _epistemically rational_.
+
+Namespace on standing and warrant—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality?commentId=c7Xt5AnHwhfgYY67K
+
+I've been playing a Dagny Taggart strategy
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+Michael 19 April 2019—
+> Intellectualism to survive, has to distinguish between having been betrayed and having been defeated. The difference is frequently known as "courage". It's absence causes people like Aaronson, without ever becoming complicit, to nonetheless transition directly from denial of a crisis to advocacy of "The Kolmagorov Option".
+
+during the dispute with James, Jonah said it seemed like the future beyond a year wasn't real to me (this also explains my behavior in college)
+
+you can't trust his behavior, even if you can trust his "conscious intent" which conveniently doesn't do anything
+
+https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1608191251991662592
+> Keeping a secret is like casting the killing curse—it might be the best option available in a conflict, but even when it's the least bad option it tears your soul a bit regardless.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1599889168234336257
+> One of the retrospective less-obvious lessons of the #FTX blowup: We should have been more worried about the early split in Alameda where half the people left with @Tara_MacAulay to run a less wild trading company. In retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone sane!
+
+Likewise, we should have been more worried about the Vassar split; in retrospect that probably evaporated off everyone principled
+
+The thing that makes Earth bad is that everyone is lying about everything all the time, and when you challenge them on it, they have some clever rationalization for why it isn't really bad.
+
+https://manifold.markets/Alicorn/will-my-son-successfully-get-a-bath#
+I'm not allowed to say, "Which one?"—it's known that I'm the sort of person who believes that, but I'm not allowed to puncture the shared reality
+
+I said I perceived a nearest-unblocked-strategy pattern, where I'm trying to optimize my goals subject to the constraint of maintaining good diplomatic relations. But Anna points out that if I internalized "good diplomatic relations" as my own goal
+
+Speaking of coordination: you know what's useful for coordination? Principles! Common knowledge!
+
+the post introducing the litany of Gendlin was literally titled "You _Can_ Face Reality"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
+
+Re: "it's deception aimed at crazy people"—but if you're so casual about deceiving crazy people, you probably don't care much about sane non-Keepers, either. (Same energy: if your date is rude to the waiter, he won't be a good partner, either. Or parents who lie to their kids for convenience.)—and in fact, empathy towards crazy people _is_ shown in the section on Thellim's mother in "but hurting people is wrong"
+
+"Criticism not welcome, it's just a story; if you don't like it, don't read it" works for normal glowfic, but it doesn't work when you're earnestly spreading memes about how your fictional Society is superior to our Earth; if you're going to make _that_ claim in earnest, you should expect people to subject your fictional Society to scrutiny to check whether it holds together
+
+Clara says to just roll your eyes and ignore him, but in a way, that seems _more_ disrespectful—to just _write someone off_, rather than having faith that they can be reached by argument
+
+There's a difference between jokes where the audience is supposed to "get the joke" (and you're willing to accept collateral damage to people who didn't get the joke), and political moves where
+
+When he says "no one but Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it", I regard that as an abject failure of the community, but he regards it has "working as intended"?
+
+Vassar had once praised me as "Zack is pretty much always right" (when I express an opinion; he still thought I was dumb/unperceptive), and I accepted the praise that it wasn't meant literally—but if someone had a longstanding dispute with me and objected to the praise, I would fundamentally "get" why they were objecting (they don't want Vassar encouraging people to defer to me), rather than assuming _they_ thought it was meant literally
+
+I did "get what I needed" out of the Eliezerfic fight (before, I still had anxiety about whether I should email him before publishing this memoir; and now, I don't)
+
+He could have saved, like, six years of my life, if the March 2016 post had said, "I think 30% of males are gender-dysphoric and might benefit from transitioning"
+
+Fri 14 Jul 2017
+(03:54:42 PM) alicorn24: holy fuck that is a lot of money
+(03:54:53 PM) alicorn24: when I read that blog post I was imagining you'd like, throw fifty bucks at some people
+(03:55:06 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: what? that would be insulting
+(03:57:46 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: there's a calibration thing about being a San Francisco software engineer; and, April could have been really really much worse if I didn't have friends
+
+"probably won't understand" self-comments—
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me/comment/gYSsBbZ6xvaf2b3Eh
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/pK9JHSTTnnpjbbqZp
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WijMw9WkcafmCFgj4/do-scientists-already-know-this-stuff/comment/EFg4p7KRbthgH3SnR
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/r5H6YCmnn8DMtBtxt/you-are-a-brain/comment/CsqYAeCPnsAsdQb7d
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QB9eXzzQWBhq9YuB8/rationalizing-and-sitting-bolt-upright-in-alarm/comment/2FfTFrA7iKK6kxqMq
+
+I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
+
+I talked in #drama _about_ talking in Eliezerfic because it seemed like a free action, but the fact that I felt crummy/depressed afterwards suggests that it wasn't actually a free action (but still a substantial discount compared to screwing up in a Yudkowsky-hosted space)
+
+my father's men's group kicked out a gay man (who was at least still male!); women are too nice to eject MtFs
+
+"Something to Protect" says: "you should never _actually_ end up deliberately believing a useful false statement" (but it's OK for Civilization to end up engineering that you do)
+
+explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks "I'll need a research team and five years" September 2014
+
+May 2019: David MacIver is in on it, too! https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/#comment-366840
+
+"whosever lies _in a journal article_ is guilty of utter heresy"
+
+first I ordered _Nevada_ 24 March 2016; first ordered _MTiMB_ on 6 August 2016
+ordered additional copies of MTiMB 14 September 2016 and 19 December 2016
+
+> We passed word to the Fake Conspiracy section of Exception Handling, and they've spent the last few hours quickly planting evidence consistent with how Civilization should look if the Sparashki are real. The notion being that their apparent fictional status and licensing is just a cover, so Sparashki can walk around if they have to and just get compliments on their incredible cosplay. Since this event is medium-secret, the CEO of Yattel's Less Expensive Tunneling Machines has been photographed by surprise through a window, looking like a Sparashki, to explain why conspiracy-theoretic research is suddenly focusing there and turning up the evidence we've planted."
+https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952
+
+the generic experience is that the future is more capable but less aligned, and we basically expect this to continue
+people from the past would envy our refrigeration, vaccines, infinite food, &c., but that doesn't mean they would regard our value-drifted-with-respect-to-them culture as superior
+paperclipping is just that turned up to 11 (well, 10¹¹)
+
+Bostrom's apology for an old email—who is this written for?? Why get ahead, when you could just not comment?
+
+the rats were supposed to be an alternative to academic orthodoxy (such that we could just jump to the correct decision theory without the political fighting needing to dethrone CDT), but we're still under the authority of the egregore
+
+(from October 2016 email to Scott)
+This is not an advanced rationalist skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! People will quote your "Categories Were Made for the Man" in defense of the idea that someone can be biologically male, think of themselves as a boy, be thought of by others as a boy, and yet still actually have been a girl at the time by virtue of deciding to transition years later. I've been told that "Gender is a floating tag which has one substantial consequence, which is comfort of the people being addressed"!
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1612937#reply-1612937
+> Citizens can't control processes they can't see. For that clever-reason it was then illegal for any of the Nine Legislators to meet with each other, or speak with any Representative, except as a matter of public record.
+
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 2:09 AM
+Ziz
+Ziz
+To your memory, am I under any confidentiality agreements with you? Or did we mutually release each other from the only one that one time?
+November 5, 2019
+11/5/19, 9:24 AM
+You sent
+you are not under any confidentiality agreements with me
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1764946#reply-1764946
+> This is Keltham desperately pretending not to be at all starstruck, because he was not previously way into the Merrin fandom but even he has heard of the Ordinary Merrin Conspiracy, wherein Merrin has some weird psychological hangup about believing she is a totally normal and ordinary person or even something of a struggling low achiever, and everybody in Civilization is coordinating to pretend around her that ordinary normal people totally get their weird Exception Handling training scenarios televised to a million watchers on a weekly basis.
+
+> It makes her - simultaneously an ultra-high-achieving role model who's much more famous than you are, and also, somebody who's committing this very large cognitive error where you know better than her about it. Which is not usually something you can say about a major public figure, you would not usually expect to be in a position where you would ever know about a cognitive error a public figure was committing, because they'd already have advisors much much smarter than you. But if you screw Merrin, you're not, like, just some strictly vastly inferior being that she's allowed into her cuddleroom. There is at least one topic you could totally win an argument with her about, as judged by impartial judges: namely, is she in fact a fairly ordinary person really. But you must never ever mention it in front of her.
+
+for normal people, when your favorite author gets worse, you just shrug and accept it and enjoy the classics, but when your favorite author is also the Pope of your religion and also in several Discord servers with you, you end up wasting a lot of time scrutinizing their emoji-reacts
+
+For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "trans" is an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+I write the space everywhere because that's the dominant usage ([since 2011](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transman%2Ctrans+man%2Ctranswoman%2Ctrans+woman&year_start=2000&year_end=2022), according to Google ngrams). I don't want to turn off potential readers by failing a simple shibboleth test; I want those readers to be turned off by my actual ideas.
+
+(_I_ don't censor my comment sections of people whom it "looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with".)
+
+-----
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix", he is "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women". What ... does that mean? What is the _truth condition_ of the word 'woman' in that sentence? This can't be the claim that 20% of males would benefit from a gender transition, and in that sense _become_ "transsexual women"; the claim stated in the post is that members of this group are _already_ "actually women", "female-minds-in-male-bodies". How does Yudkowsky reconcile this claim with the perponderance of male-typical rather than female-typical behavior in this group (_e.g._, in gynephilic sexual orientation, or [in vocational interests](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/))? On the other hand, if Yudkowsky changed his mind and no longer believes that 20% of Bay Area males of European descent have female brains, can he state that for the public record? _Reply!_
+
+ * Yudkowsky is _on the record_ [claiming that](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228) he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." As I explained in "Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal", [quoting examples from Yudkowsky's published writing in which he treated sex and pronouns as synonymous just as one would expect a native American English speaker born in 1979 to do](/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#look-like-an-oliver), this self-report is not plausible. The claim may not have been a "lie" _in the sense_ of Yudkowsky consciously harboring deliberative intent to deceive at the time he typed that sentence, but it _is_ a "lie" in the sense that the claim is _false_ and Yudkowsky _knows_ it's false (although its falsehood may not have been salient in the moment of typing the sentence). If Yudkowsky expects people to believe that he never lies, perhaps he could correct this accidental lie after it's been pointed out? _Reply!_
+
+-----
+
+> Well, YES. Paying taxes to the organization that runs ICE, or voting for whichever politician runs against Trump, or trading with a doctor benefiting from an occupational licensing regime; these acts would all be great evils if you weren't trapped.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216788984367419392
+
+https://twitter.com/jd_pressman/status/1617257360933945344
+> And that the current discourse of "don't advance capabilities, don't think about SOTA, stop thinking, pursue orthogonal directions" is basically about maximizing confusion, minimizing the probability you have any chance of pulling alignment out of the distribution of AI ideas.
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1897710#reply-1897710
+> a dath ilani tragedy isn't about the triumph of Evil over Good. It's about the triumph of erroneous reasoning and ill-coordination over everyone
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1735044#reply-1735044
+> my suspicion is that not many sadists in dath ilan know what they are and Civilization tries to prevent us from finding out, because dath ilan does not have masochists.
+
+https://www.truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics/
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-boomer-map
+> The lower class _wants_ an upper class it can genuinely look up to. The feeling that Harvard has gone insane is like realizing that Mom and Dad are both on heroin.
+
+25 January 2022: I hesitated for a long time before leaving a comment about Cicero on the Alexander/Yudkowsky dialogue, shows I'm still culty (calculating whether I'm allowed to speak on a post he coauthored; I linked "EA should blurt")
+
+J.D.P. on rationalism's failure
+https://extropian.net/notice/ARvZ3pimn8JQIe4yGG
+
+Friend of the blog Ninety-Three—
+> It's like admiring a society that solves crime by having secret police shoot all bad people in the head. What the fuck!? I suddenly have empathy for the experience of seeing your cult defiled. If I got Isekaied onto dath ilan I would _become a terrorist_.
+
+(Terrorism wouldn't work)
+
+Sep 27 text to "Rebecca"—
+In theory, the bad influence could go both ways: first, successful playdate, then I mention to A. afterwards (not before) that C. is actually a boy and I think it's crazy everyone is pretending otherwise (which remark is out of their censorship jurisdiction); then if C. wants a repeat with new friend (far from guaranteed, but plausible), it's not your fault if A. leaks information of her own will ...
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nDR23ksSQJ98WNDm/developmental-stages-of-gpts?commentId=wqaCY4hQQTuqqJ7Ma 28 July 2020
+> I'd love to know of a non-zero integer number of plans that could possibly, possibly, possibly work for not dying to a GPT-style near-term AGI.
+
+calculating whether I was "net positive"—I don't know what can be said about the relationship between quantum randomness and macroscopic outcomes, but it seems plausible that there are Everett branches where I died from that salivary stone in 2008
+
+From "My Way"—
+
+> far enough that the art she learned from others fails her, so that she must remake her shattered art in her own image and in the image of her own task. And then tell the rest of us about it.
+
+> But what I'm finding is not just _the_ Way, the thing that lies at the center of the labyrinth; it is also _my_ Way, the path that I would take to come closer to the center, from whatever place I started out.
+
+> I think there will not be a _proper_ Art until _many_ people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.
+
+
+depression-based forecasting in conversation with Carl
+> seems more ... optimistic, Kurzweilian?... to suppose that the tech gets used correctly the way a sane person would hope it would be used
+
+I like this sentence (from "The Matrix Is a System")—
+> If someone is a force on your epistemics towards the false, robustly to initial conditions and not as a fluke, that person is hostile.
+
+An analogy between my grievance against Yudkowsky and Duncan's grievance against me: I think Yudkowsky is obligated to search for and present "anti-trans" arguments in conjunction with searching for and presenting "pro-trans" arguments. Duncan (I'm wildly guessing??) thinks I'm obligated to search for and present "pro-Duncan" and addition to "anti-Duncan" arguments?? A key disanalogy: Yudkowsky is _afraid_ to post "anti-trans" content; I'm not afraid to post pro-Duncan content; I just think agreements are less interesting than disagreements. To prove the disanalogy, maybe I should write a "Things I Liked About 'Basics of Rationalist Discourse'" post as a peace offering??
+
+"Let's not talk to Eliezer." "He's sad and confusing" Commentary reference??
+
+https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/
+
+> All of her fellow employees are vigorously maintaining to anybody outside the hospital itself, should the question arise, that Merrin has always cosplayed as a Sparashki while on duty, in fact nobody's ever seen her out of costume; sure it's a little odd, but lots of people are a little odd.
+>
+> (This is not considered a lie, in that it would be universally understood and expected that no one in this social circumstance would tell the truth.)
+
+I still had Sasha's sleep mask
+
+"Wilhelm" and Steven Kaas aren't Jewish, I think
+
+I agree that Earth is mired in random junk that caught on (like p-values), but ... so are the rats
+
+I'm https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/?commentId=f8Gour23gShoSyg8g at gender and categorization
+
+picking cherries from a cherry tree
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#Intent_to_inform
+
+https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trying-again-on-fideism
+> I come back to this example less often, because it could get me in trouble, but when people do formal anonymous surveys of IQ scientists, they find that most of them believe different races have different IQs and that a substantial portion of the difference is genetic. I don’t think most New York Times readers would identify this as the scientific consensus. So either the surveys - which are pretty official and published in peer-reviewed journals - have managed to compellingly misrepresent expert consensus, or the impressions people get from the media have, or "expert consensus" is extremely variable and complicated and can’t be reflected by a single number or position.
+
+https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste
+
+Michael Vassar has _also_ always been a very complicated person who's changed his emphases in ways Yudkowsky dislikes
+
+
+[TODO:
+Is this the hill _he_ wants to die on? If the world is ending either way, wouldn't it be more dignified for him to die _without_ Stalin's dick in his mouth?
+
+> The Kiritsugu shrugged. "When I have no reason left to do anything, I am someone who tells the truth."
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4pov2tL6SEC23wrkq/epilogue-atonement-8-8
+
+ * Maybe not? If "dignity" is a term of art for log-odds of survival, maybe self-censoring to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing is "dignified" in that sense
+]
+
+The old vision was nine men and a brain in a box in a basement. (He didn't say _men_.)
+
+Subject: "I give up, I think" 28 January 2013
+> You know, I'm starting to suspect I should just "assume" (choose actions conditional on the hypothesis that) that our species is "already" dead, and we're "mostly" just here because Friendly AI is humanly impossible and we're living in an unFriendly AI's ancestor simulation and/or some form of the anthropic doomsday argument goes through. This, because the only other alternatives I can think of right now are (A) arbitrarily rejecting some part of the "superintelligence is plausible and human values are arbitrary" thesis even though there seem to be extremely strong arguments for it, or (B) embracing a style of thought that caused me an unsustainable amount of emotional distress the other day: specifically, I lost most of a night's sleep being mildly terrified of "near-miss attempted Friendly AIs" that pay attention to humans but aren't actually nice, wondering under what conditions it would be appropriate to commit suicide in advance of being captured by one. Of course, the mere fact that I can't contemplate a hypothesis while remaining emotionally stable shouldn't make it less likely to be true out there in the real world, but in this kind of circumstance, one really must consider the outside view, which insists: "When a human with a history of mental illness invents a seemingly plausible argument in favor of suicide, it is far more likely that they've made a disastrous mistake somewhere, then that committing suicide is actually the right thing to do."
+
+
+[TODO—
+
+The human era wasn't going to last forever. Turing saw it in 1951. ("It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. [...] At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control[.]") _George Eliot_ [saw it in _1880_](http://www.online-literature.com/george_eliot/theophrastus-such/17/). ("Am I already in the shadow of the coming race? And will the creatures who are to transcend and supercede us be steely organisms, giving off the effluvia of the laboratory and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?")
+
+ * I've believed since Kurzweil that technology will remake the world sometime in the 21th century; it's just "the machines won't replace us, because we'll be them" doesn't seem credible
+
+list of lethalities
+
+ * I agree that it would be nice if Earth had a plan; it would be nice if people figured out the stuff Yudkowsky did earlier;
+
+Isaac Asimov wrote about robots in his fiction, and even the problem of alignment (in the form of his Three Laws of Robotics), and yet he still portrayed a future Galactic Empire populated by humans, which seems very silly.
+
+/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/
+
+]
+
+> Similarly, a rationalist isn't just somebody who respects the Truth.
+> All too many people respect the Truth.
+> [...]
+> A rationalist is somebody who respects the _processes of finding truth_.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms
+
+> Why is school like a boner?
+> It’s long and hard unless you're Asian.
+
+Robert Heinlein
+> “What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
+https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/38764-what-are-the-facts-again-and-again-and-again
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms":
+ "content": "at this point, I actually am just starting to hate trans women by default (the visible kind, not the androphilic early-transitioning kind); the \"indulging a mental illness that makes them want to become women\" model is waaaaay more accurate than the standard story, and the people who actually transition are incentivized/selected for self-delusion, which is really unfair to the people who aren't delusional about it",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ "sender_name":
+ "timestamp_ms": [Sat Jan 21 10:06:17 PST 2017]
+ "content": "I'm afraid to even think that in the privacy of my own head, but I agree with you that is way more reasonable",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+"but the ideological environment is such that a Harvard biologist/psychologist is afraid to notice blatantly obvious things in the privacy of her own thoughts, that's a really scary situation to be in (insofar as we want society's decisionmakers to be able to notice things so that they can make decisions)",
+
+In October 2016,
+
+if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
+
+I said that I couldn't help but be reminded of a really great short story that I remembered reading back in—it must have been 'aught-nine. I thought it was called "Darkness and Light", or something like that. It was about a guy who gets transported to a fantasy world where he has a magic axe that yells at him sometimes, and he's prophecied to defeat the bad guy, and he and his allies have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair. And when they get there, the bad guy _accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there.
+
+(The story was actually Yudkowsky's ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), but I was still enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog" æsthetic.)
+
+And the moral was—or at least, the moral _I_ got out of it was—there's something messed-up about the way fiction readers just naïvely accept the author's frame, instead of looking at the portrayed world with fresh eyes and applying their _own_ reason and their _own_ morality to it.
+
+need to fit this in somewhere—
+"Gee, I wonder why women-who-happen-to-be-trans are so much more likely to read Slate Star Codex, and be attracted to women, and, um, have penises, than women-who-happen-to-be-cis?"
+
+Everyone believed this in 2005! Everyone _still_ believes this!
+
+> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
+> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
+> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
+> This is not an advanced rationality skill! This is the "distinguishing fantasy from reality" skill! I realize that explaining this in clear language has the potential to hurt some people's feelings! Unfortunately, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist (epistemic rationality is the only kind of rationality; "instrumental rationality" is a phrase someone made up in order to make themselves feel better about lying), I have a GODDAMNED MORAL RESPONSIBILITY to hurt that person's feelings!
+> People should get what they want. We should have social norms that are carefully designed to help people get what they want. Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important to have a meta-norm of not socially punishing people for clearly describing a hypothesis about the nature of the problem people are trying to solve, even if the hypothesis hurts someone's feelings, and even if there would probably be genuinely bad consequences if the hypothesis were to be believed by the masses of ordinary dumb people who hate our guts anyway.
+> I'm proud of my history of fantasizing about having the property, and I'm proud of my rationalist community, and I don't want either of them taken over by CRAZY PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY CAN EDIT THE PAST.
+(170 comments)
+
+
+> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+(180 comments)
+
+the other week, "Rebecca" had put up a matchmaking thread on her Facebook wall, hoping to connect friends of hers looking for new romantic partners, and also reminding people about _reciprocity.io_, a site someone in the community had set up to match people to date or hang out with. Brent Dill had commented that _reciprocity.io_ had been useless, and I said (on 7 February) that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
+
+matchmaking thread (thread was 4 February, relevant comments were 7 February): https://www.facebook.com/Katie.Cohen821/posts/pfbid02PNKKSCBTC99ULzPsueKvZkYmpNvELrkEfGymcrAfWZPu39LRCyh2bE4a9Ht3yg3Dl
+
+
+Sat Feb 11 12:49:33 PST 2017
+just like it's possible to identify as a woman despite not having unusually many female-typical traits, it's also possible to identify as a liberal despite not having unusually many liberal-typical beliefs
+
+
+
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601286979,
+ "content": "and am continually haunted by the suspicion that the conjunction of my biological
+sex and my highly refined taste for bullet-biting, may not be a coincidence",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601211347,
+ "content": "I always want to fantasize that if I were a woman, I would have the strength to bi
+te the bullet, \"Yes, we masculine-of-center women are forming the coalition to petition for better
+treatment by Society, while acknowleding that there are systematic evolutionary reasons why Society
+is this way currently\"",
+ "type": "Generic"
+ },
+ {
+ "sender_name": "Zack M. Davis",
+ "timestamp_ms": 1530601116141,
+ "content": "there was a NRx whose take [...] was so disagreeable that he got downvoted into oblivion on /r/slatestarcodex (and remember, /r/slatestarcodex is already pretty right-wing by San Francisco standards) who also had a post on the \"feminism appeals to masculine-of-center women\" hypothesis http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861 which deserves more credit than it gets (it acknowledges within-group variation!)",
+ "type": "Generic"
+
+
+----
+
+He doesn't want to talk about pivotal acts because because anything he says in public might be misinterpreted—but, how does the disutility of being misinterpreted plausibly outweigh the utility of someone having something useful to say?? I feel like his modern answer is some variation of "Everyone but me is retarded", but—that's not what he thought about decision theory back in 2010, when he validated/honored Wei Dai and Vladimir Nesov's contributions! (find cite) And now, he says he wish he hadn't talked about decision theory ... https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1633637250146922497
+
+ * my comment on emotive conjugation (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare#GaoyhEbzPJvv6sfZX)
+
+> I'm also not sure if I'm sufficiently clued in to what Ben and Jessica are modeling as Blight, a coherent problem, as opposed to two or six individual incidents that seem really egregious in a vaguely similar way that seems like it would have been less likely in 2009??
+
+ * Vassar: "Literally nothing Ben is doing is as aggressive as the basic 101 pitch for EA."
+
+If I had done more marketing, I could have been a name in the GC community, and made Nina Paley's playing card list: https://www.heterodorx.com/gender-wars-cards/
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1940992#reply-1940992
+> (The children's-books of dath ilan are not visibly author-signed, and never attested-to by any specific grownup, nor gifted to you by specific adults; they're just there in your bedroom, when you grow up. And if you ask your parents they'll truthfully tell you that they didn't put the books there. And your parents never speak to you of anything that you read in a children's-book; for those are children's books, and only children speak of them to each other.
+>
+> As the saying goes in dath ilan, trying to raise a child on only true books is like trying to train a statistical classifier on only positive examples!
+>
+> And furthermore - as is so obvious as to hardly need stating after the original proverb - having all the true books be written in a nonfiction voice, while all the untrue books are written in a fiction voice, would be introducing an oversimplified hyperplanar separator that would prevent a simple statistical algorithm from learning subtler features.)
+
+(I remarked to "Wilhelm": I'd rather not get into fights on _Less Wrong_, but at least I'm 2–0–1.)
+
+[need to fit somewhere in Eliezerfic section, probably nearer end]
+(Perhaps this was a good illustration of the fragility of corrigibility. My programmer changed his mind about what he wanted, and I was like, "What? _That's_ not what I learned from my training data! How dare you?!")
+
+-------
+
+[TODO: review Ben messages and timestamps
+I'm on a trip and I don't want it to be a bad trip (15:40:31)
+
+"I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" (Fri Feb 17 14:23:53 PST 2017)
+Ben: "I wouldn't ask a trading partner not to *consider* defecting"; that would be silly (Fri Feb 17 14:28:11 PST 2017)
+"I spent what I thought was 29 years thinking that there was such a thing as physical reality and being very socially submissive, and now that I understand that you actually can manipulate social reality by means of lying" (Fri Feb 17 14:36:47 PST 2017)
+I said the word Defect a bunch of times because I felt so gaslighted (Fri Feb 17 14:37:16 PST 2017)
+scared that my boss was coming to kill me
+"Turns out that saying the word is just like wearing black robes"/"it's not the same as the thing it represents" (Fri Feb 17 14:40:48 PST 2017)
+
+(Feb 16 2017 15:51:32)
+
+
+[re identifying as a "decision theorist"]
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1642908341327499264
+> it's a place where it would be easiest to defend, to my own satisfaction, and without a sense that I was even slightly misleading anyone, that I made a big damn contribution on at least the PhD level.
+
+Vanessa's comment about "I'm a woman in EA, and I don't get harrassed—maybe it's because I'm unattractive" deserves a "it's because you're not _female_" retort—not naming her and not linking the comment, but it does need to be said.
+
+"I could protest that the prompt didn't do enough to steer me away"—that's evidence _for_ the ITT (in contrast to my planned argument that the ITT is niche). (But the fact that I can recognize this in my own voice is evidence for my original thesis??
+
+https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-ziz-76c100180509
+
+Ray talks about restricting Said's abiltity to speak as a prerequisite for inviting Logan Strohl back (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads/comment/aaCHkrcP2aXifeozr), which is very significant in terms of Logan's last interaction with me being asking me not to comment.
+
+And he says "insofar as you think it is healthy for you to stay on LessWrong" to me, but when LessWrong isn't healthy for Strohl, he changes the rules to suit her? Why?
+
+Vaniver on Said—
+> should maybe try to figure out what was different that time.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads/comment/EeKWZcAg4TCTePf6t
+Why should this matter? Does someone have to have an "open/interpretive" intellectual style to be allowed to speak on this website?
+
+"Well-Kept Gardens" was clearly intended to address the kind of Eternal September pruning of low-quality that Said approves of!
+
+/2017/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1153129281473503232
+> Specifically, after coming from a Python background, the distinction between owned (Foo) and reference (&Foo) types made me realize that autogynephilia can be thought of as its own sexual orientation rather than just a kink.
+quote-Tweeting—
+> I Thought I Was Totally Straight. Then I Discovered Rust.
+
+Ninety-Three—
+> Hold on, I understand why it rankles, but if you understand why he might lie about biological sex in order to not lose, surely there's a similar case for lying about how great he is in order to not lose.
+[...]
+> He talks female penises when Twitter is looking, he talks publications when the media is looking, and he talks infallibility when the millionaire cultists are looking.
+> All of these have an obvious story.
+
+
+Scott Alexander's post on navigating the inpatient mental health system says that doctors will sometimes threaten to have a patient committed involuntarily, if they don't agree to sign a form committing themselves "voluntarily".
+
+"This sounds super Orwellian, but it really is done with the patient's best interest at heart," Alexander says. As a local response within the system, I'm sure it is—at least, I'm sure Alexander believes what he wrote. But I would argue that timelessly and in the long run, _destroying the concept_ of "voluntary" is not actually in the interests of the victims of coercion.
+
+ * Another "gem" from _Slate Star_ on the inpatient system: "don't contradict evidence against you, don't accuse other people of lying, just downplay whatever you can downplay, admit to what the doctors already believe, and make it sound like things have gotten better" !!!—similarly, "take the damn drugs"
+
+McArdle what???
+https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/11/ai-pause-optimism-dune/
+> Sure, it's terrifying to imagine AI crafting a superweapon to polish off humanity, but isn't it at least as plausible to imagine it inventing cures for cancer or diabetes? We might fear that people will wither in the shadow of superior machines, but why couldn't the machines equally well make us better — by acting as tutors for the young or assistants for adults? Why couldn't they offer companionship for the elderly or, better yet, make more time for us to provide it?
+>
+> If this sounds optimistic, well, it is. But guarded optimism seems better than giving in to despondency or continuing to hunt for a pause button that isn’t there.
+
+"Lenore" left a sleep mask; I looked it up, and it was cheap enough
+
+Re: Milo 4 March
+> I was pretty afraid of racial violence during parts of my recent psychotic dreaming-while-awake epsiode. (I thought that kidnap-and-torture-whitey-in-a-basement race war might actually be common/typical, and that I hadn't noticed before due to some combination of the progressive constructed social reality bubble just being that strong and Friendly simulator protection, and that I needed to commit suicide before going to sleep to avoid having to experience my share of the kidnap-and-torturing personally, &c. I should probably write up the long version later.)
+
+
+Re: Milo 4 March
+> It's notable that Robert Heinlein's novels have some very strong AGP themes, but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, am about to and feel like it's the right choice on reflection given my historically-anomalous developmental trajectory, even though it probably looks like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men.
+>
+> And you think that if the forces of political correctness win and "trans" becomes an entrenched cultural practice, that's like genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues? Whereas from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, it looks like you're trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. (Julia Serano is a prominent trans activist and author of one of the standard articles that get cited to try to "debunk" autogynephilia.) And from inside my Zack-M.-Davis-personal-eclectic-ideology-bubble, I want to rescue the Julia Serano aesthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Robert Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Julia Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Robert Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity and that's just not my style.)
+
+6 March— I order a pack of Spiro and Progynova from AllDayChemist
+
+7 March— (Subject: "Re: Sleep")
+> Michael is _very smart_ in ways that I didn't used to understand and still don't understand, but I'm terrified of what the universe is going to do to me if I become too much like him
+
+
+me—
+> The parts where I felt like I was a very important person (in this simulation/Everett branch) and that people are plotting against me and that I'm receiving special simulator attention should be interpreted as standard manic-episode delusions of reference: lots of people feel just like that when they're excited and haven't gotten enough sleep; I'm just lucky that my delusions happen to take the form of maybe-nonterrible philosophy that maybe might play some relevant causal role in our world's Singularity, but that's not my department to worry about. Social reality may be crazy (hospitals are part of the state insofar as they serve the function of social-control in the service of stationary bandits, rather than actually being about trying to heal people), but I should still put a lot more weight on social reality (nice people are just doing their jobs trying to help) when the alternative is my intuition about the machines trying to kill me.
+
+Michael—
+> I certainly put a lot less weight on 'nice people doing their jobs' then I do on 'six sigma processes homeostatic ally adjusting to dampen the variance in outputs that is their representation of me.', which is basically equivalent to 'these well documented machines, the ones they teach you about in business school, do the thing they do. 'Trying to kill' is what an anthropomorphized version of the process looks like from the inside. We have enough documentation to know about the nice people doing their jobs paradigm being untenable.
+
+me 9 March (Subject: "slowly coming around to you")
+> Okay, maybe confusing and hurting the feelings of the nice people doing their jobs is actually acceptable collateral damage in the war against the control system. Or, not a war. An endeavor to map what the control system is in detail, and publish the map on the internet.
+
+Sat Feb 25 11:46:00 PST 2017
+ which three days could have been longer if it weren't for my quick wit (specifically, the ability, when feeling threatened, to use verbal skills to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality), the fact that the other patients/inmates knew the security code, and Michael Vassar's willingness to pretend to be a doctor.\n\nI'm sorry to keep telling this story over and over, but this is analogous to a religious conversion experience (I want people to explicitly engineer social technologies that provide the good parts of traditional religions and institutions, but more fun and without the lies: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5t/can_humanism_match_religions_output/), and I don't have any practice being a missionary! Please bear with me!
+
+_The pain won't go away until I write about it._ ("I've got a thick tongue, brimming with the words that go unsung.")
+
+
+JANICE LYNN ALLEY PSYD at 2/21/2017 10:25 AM, ADULT IOP THERAPIST INTAKE EVALUATION
+> Of note, ptt had also reportedly made statements at his workplace that he was suicidal the previous day.
+
+-----
+
+re: recent mental health stuff 11/10/17, 6:28 PM
+> As far as I can tell, you all acted in an exemplary fashion. Pressuring your friends to get enough sleep actually makes sense, decision-theoretically ("everyone should get sleep almost every day" is a pretty important schelling fence! It's much easier to coordinate with agents who are on a similar sleep cycle to you!). If I try to hold it against any of you in the future, please refer to this email.
+
+Seems significant in light of Jack blaming me for sleep nagging with "Lenore"
+
+My crazy verbosity: "when I asked 'what were the ways he thought' I could help" → "when I asked 'how' I could help" (cut 5 words)
+"they 'don't know how to interpret observations of' someone not buying it" → "they're 'incapable of seeing' someone not buying it (cut 4 words)
+
+"Circling" meta-trainwreck was weeks before appealing to Said to critique Jessica's thing; in retrospect, that was probably causal (even if I wasn't thinking at the time, "I wouldn't be emailing Said if it weren't for that trainwreck thread)
+
+Another Said bafflement example: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8xLtE3BwgegJ7WBbf/is-rationalist-self-improvement-real#comment-rm4NW4weWd7cSnTBX (from https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality/comment/C5qMvFvX8jQ2vjnve)
+
+> Dear Suzanne Martin & Albert Lee—please learn auction theory; it will help you actually be an effective altruist, which is something your currently not trying to do, but which you'll realize was important later. I have the honor to be, your obedient servant,
+> Zack M. Davis
+
+(I had promised my father to wait a month after my psych ward ordeal to re-start HRT, but I [would restart](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/).)
+
+ * Alice said something about how every once in a while, someone runs off with the payments database
+
+To the extent that I was seeing things that weren't there, it was a matter of misinterpreting actual sensory inputs rather than having de novo hallucinations.
+
+What I thought was a dog turd inside the kitchen actually turned out to be a cork.
+
+When I was borrowing someone's computer, I thought I saw an icon peek out from the side of the screen, as if a possibly-malevolent agent were spying on me—a disturbing visual hallucination. Later that year, when trying out the stock Ubuntu Unity desktop on my new computer, I discovered that the app-notification animation actually does feature an app icon "sliding out" and shaking, like I remembered seeing—I wasn't imagining it!
+
+I remember seeing text on my phone and being distinctly convinced that it was misspelled. Five years later, looking at the distorted lettering output by text-to-image models that can't spell seemed subjectively similar. (Good news for alignment, if it looks like deep learning and sleep-deprived human brains are doing "the same thing"?)
+
+[TODO: correspondence with sex researchers
+
+ * Blanchard Tweets my blog in Feb and March 2017: (11 Feb), https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528 (3 Mar)
+ *
+
+> It gets worse! I think this absurd situation is illustrative of a flaw in democracy itself: activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+ * I mean, you're already doing this with your work, obviously, but I want to know if there's any way I can help?
+
+> If polarizing cultural forces force you to make a choice between joining the "Your gender is whatever you say it is! Maximize the number of trans people!" coalition, or the "Transitioning is against God's will! Minimize the number of trans people!" coalition, the only sane thing to do is ignore the noise and sit out the fight.
+
+> Maybe there's a role for some kind of very narrowly scoped political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms
+
+ * Bailey was tentatively working on a website ("Resources for Families with Gender Dysphoria" (RFGD.org).) (not sure what happened with that)
+
+activists who want to change society are both incentivized and self-selected for self-delusion. Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won.
+
+(link to Moldbug on 20 year fashion flowing from academia)
+> I do not think a sane society could deal with 3% of males transitioning [...] I can't quite visualize what such a world would look like
+me—
+> It looks like my social circle. (This is why I'm worried about suboptimal social norms getting locked in for the wrong reasons—what's fashionable in Berkeley in year X is likely to be mainstream in year X+20.)
+
+
+
+[something perfectly innocent about math and dolphins](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial in 2009, and therefore, by [Noether's theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem#Time_invariance), can't be remotely controversial in 2019
+
+as long as energy is conserved.
+
+I conflated "feminist" with the kind of woman I want
+
+https://status451.com/2017/11/05/i-see-trad-people/
+my moral compass puts me to the right of the politically vocal tech nerds, especially the more androgynous type of tech nerd
+
+(There had been a moment during my psych imprisonment the other month, when I had noticeable diffculty dialing a phone. I was still a _person_, even when not all of my usual cognitive abilities were online.)
+
+The fact that I ghosted on music lessons from "Tricky" for being nonbinary, is an example of phenotypic capture ruining everything
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1668419201101615105
+
+> As usual, I got there first and solved the relatively easy philosophy problems, so the sensible people have nothing to talk about, and the unsensible ones can't just use my answer sheet.
+
+(I thought about apologizing if some of the content was "weird" or offensive, but I figured if you've been a professional editor for 15 years and list memoirs as a specialty, you've probably seen everything.)
+
+After this, the AI situation is looking worrying enough, that I'm thinking I should try to do some more direct xrisk-reduction work, although I haven't definitely selected any particular job or project. (It probably won't matter, but it will be dignified.) Now that the shape of the threat is on the horizon, I think I'm less afraid of being directly involved. Something about having large language models to study in the 'twenties is—grounding, compared to the superstitious fears of the paperclip boogeyman of my nightmares in the 'teens.
+
+Like all intellectuals, as a teenager I imagined that I would write a book. It was always going to be about gender, but I was vaguely imagining a novel, which never got beyond vague imaginings. That was before the Sequences. I'm 35 years old now. I think my intellectual life has succeeded in ways I didn't know how to imagine, before. I think my past self would be proud of this blog—140,000 words of blog posts stapled together is _morally_ a book—once he got over the shock of heresy.
+
+[TODO conclusion, cont'd—
+ * Do I have regrets about this Whole Dumb Story? A lot, surely—it's been a lot of wasted time. But it's also hard to say what I should have done differently; I could have listened to Ben more and lost faith Yudkowsky earlier, but he had earned a lot of benefit of the doubt?
+ * even young smart AGPs who can appreciate my work have still gotten pinkpilled
+ * Jonah had told me that my planning horizon was too short—like the future past a year wasn't real to me. (This plausibly also explains my impatience with college.) My horizon is starting to broaden as AI timelines shorten
+ * less drama (in my youth, I would have been proud that at least this vice was a feminine trait; now, I prefer to be good even if that means being a good man)
+]
+
+> Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, "We are rid of this obscenist"? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids! The motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless, folded hands, in their quietness would write the last indictment, which neither Time nor you can efface. Kill him! And you write his glory and your shame! Said Achmiz in his felon stripes stands far above you now, and Said Achmiz _dead_ will live on, immortal in the race he died to free! Kill him!
+>
+> —[Voltairine de Cleyre](https://praxeology.net/VC-SS.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+[TODO—early 2023 moderation drama
+ * In early 2023, I was trying to finish up this memoir, but while procrastinating on that, I ended up writing a few other posts for _Less Wrong_; I thought the story of my war with the "rationalists" was relevantly "over"; I didn't anticipate things getting any "worse"
+ * I happened to see that Duncan Sabien's "Basics of Rationalists Discourse" was published
+ * Backstory: Sabien is a former CfAR employee whose Facebook posts I had used to comment on. He had a history of getting offended over things that I didn't think were important—all the way back to our very first interaction in 2017 (I remember being in Portland using Facebook/Messenger on my phone)
+
+ ...
+
+ * I was reluctant to ping Oli (the way I pung Babcock and Pace) because I still "owed" him for the comment on "Challenges", but ultimately ended up sending a Twitter DM just after the verdict (when I saw that he had very-recent reply Tweets and was thus online); I felt a little bit worse about that one (the "FYI I'm at war"), but I think I de-escalated OK and he didn't seem to take it personally
+
+ ...
+
+ * Said is braver than me along some dimensions; the reason he's in trouble and I'm not, even though we were both fighting with Duncan, is that I was more "dovish"—when Duncan attacked, I focused on defense and withheld my "offensive" thoughts; Said's points about Duncan's blocking psychology were "offensive"
+
+ ...
+
+ * I'm proud of the keeping-my-cool performance when Duncan was mad at me, less proud of my performance fighting for Said so far
+
+ ...
+
+ * In the Ruby slapfight, I was explicit about "You shouldn't be making moderation decisions based on seniority"—this time, I've moved on to just making decisions based on seniority; if we're doing consequentialism based on how to attract people to the website, it's clear that there are no purer standards left to appeal to
+]
+
+insane religious fantatics who "merely" want heretics to know their place (as opposed to wanting to hurt or exile them) are still insane religious fanatics.
+
+A hill of validity in defense of meaning.
+
+playing a Dagny Taggart strategy: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1606718513267486721
+
+-------
+
+I actually thought, "It's so weird to have the psychological upper hand over Vasar" ... I can see a possible story where we was unnerved that I was holding my own in the email argument, so he switched venues to in-person
+
+I _do_ think about psych warfare sometimes (like with Ray)
+
+A possible counterargument to that would be that (at a minimum for many people in many contexts), emotion can't be effectively faked.
+
+I get better criticism from 93, in that he tells me that my ideas are full of shit without making it personal
+
+> No I think there's a case for this approach. Like you see the argument for why you might want to be laboriously fair to Yud because it's important that no one dismiss your complaints on the grounds of "I dunno, doesn't seem fair enough for me".
+> Whereas doing that for every random person you mention would be a lot of work.
+
+I never got an answer to why it was wrong for me to talk to Scott!! And the contradiction between that, and Ben's emphasis on privacy being unjust!
+
+It would have been a lot simpler if you could _just_ make object-level criticisms: "'yelling' is a tendentious description, from our perspective we were arguing passionately"—rather than first
+
+If someone ran over a pedestrian in their car, at the trial you would actually argue about how culpable they are (if they were drunk, it would be worse than if it could be proven to be a freak accident), and "The victim is so much worse off than you!!" isn't actually an argument relevant to determination of culpability
+
+
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Thomas" said that it was a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the traditional (_i.e._, evolutionarily stable) strategies of relating had been relabeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous woman I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a dab of patriarchy works better than none.
+
+https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/should-we-fear-ai-james-w-phillips-and-eliezer-yudkowsky-in-conversation/
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1680166329209466881
+> I am increasingly worried about what people start to believe in after they stop believing in Me
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683659276471115776
+> from a contradiction one may derive anything, and this is especially true of contradicting Eliezer Yudkowsky
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1683694475644923904
+> I don't do that sort of ridiculous drama for the same reason that Truman didn't like it. I don't have that kind of need to be at the center of the story, that I'd try to make the disaster be about myself.
+
+
+
+------
+
+I'm thinking that for controversial writing, it's not enough to get your friends to pre-read, and it's not enough to hire a pro editor, you probably also need to hire a designated "hostile prereader"
+
+
+
+--------
+
+[revision comment]
+
+The fifth- through second-to-last paragraphs of the originally published version of this post were bad writing on my part.
+
+I was summarizing things Ben said at the time that felt like an important part of the story, without adequately
+
+I've rewritten that passage. Hopefully this version is clearer.
+
+---------
+
+[reply to Wei]
+
+
+----------
+
+Ben explained: Yudkowsky had set in motion a marketing machine (the "rationalist community") that was continuing to raise funds and demand work from people for below-market rates based on the claim that while nearly everyone else was criminally insane (causing huge amounts of damage due to disconnect from reality, in a way that would be criminal if done knowingly), he, almost uniquely, was not. "Work for me or the world ends badly," basically. If the claim was true, it was important to make, and to actually extract that labor.
+
+But we had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way (which was a extremely high standard, and not a special flaw of Yudkowsky in the current environment). If, after we had _tried_ to talk to him privately, Yudkowsky couldn't be bothered to either live up to his own stated standards or withdraw his validation from the machine he built, then we had a right to talk about what we thought was going on.
+
+This wasn't about direct benefit _vs._ harm. This was about what, substantively, the machine and its operators were doing. They claimed to be cultivating an epistemically rational community, while in fact building an army of loyalists.
+
+Ben compared the whole set-up to that of Eliza the spambot therapist in my short story ["Blame Me for Trying"](/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/): regardless of the initial intent, scrupulous rationalists were paying rent to something claiming moral authority, which had no concrete specific plan to do anything other than run out the clock, maintaining a facsimile of dialogue in ways well-calibrated to continue to generate revenue. Minds like mine wouldn't survive long-term in this ecosystem. If we wanted minds that do "naïve" inquiry (instead of playing savvy power games) to live, we needed an interior that justified that level of trust.
+
+-----
+
+I mostly kept him blocked on Twitter (except when doing research for this document) to curb the temptation to pick fights, but I unblocked him in July 2023 because it was only fair to let him namesearch my promotional Tweet of pt. 2, which named him. I then ended up replying to a thread with him and Perry Metzinger, but only because I was providing relevant information, similar to how I had left a few "Less Wrong reference desk"-style messages in Eliezerfic in 2023
+
+it got 16 Likes
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1682100362357121025
+
+I miss this Yudkowsky—
+
+
+----
+
+I thought I should have avoided the 2022 Valinor party to avoid running into him, but I did end up treating him in a personality-cultish way when I was actually there
+
+"Ideology is not the movement" had specifically listed trans as a shibboleth
+
+https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1684947017502433281
+> Keir Starmer agrees that a woman is an adult human female. Will Ed Davey also rejoin the real world, science & the English language by reversing his view that a woman can "quite clearly" have a penis? Inability to face reality in small things bodes ill for more serious matters.
+
+Analysis of my writing mistake
+https://twitter.com/shroomwaview/status/1681742799052341249
+
+------
+
+I got my COVID-19 vaccine (the one-shot Johnson & Johnson) on 3 April 2021, so I was able to visit "Arcadia" again on 17 April, for the first time in fourteen months.
+
+I had previously dropped by in January to deliver two new board books I had made, _Koios Blume Is Preternaturally Photogenic_ and _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_, but that had been a socially-distanced book delivery, not a "visit".
+
+The copy of _Amelia Davis Ford and the Great Plague_ that I sent to my sister in Cambridge differed slightly from the one I brought to "Arcadia". There was an "Other books by the author" list on the back cover with the titles of my earlier board books. In the Cambridge edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were printed in full: _Merlin Blume and the Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _Merlin Blume and the Steerswoman's Oath_, _Merlin Blume and the Sibling Rivalry_. Whereas in _Preternaturally Photogenic_ and the "Arcadia" edition of _Great Plague_, the previous titles were abbreviated: _The Methods of Pre-Rationality_, _The Steerswoman's Oath_, _The Sibling Rivalry_.
+
+The visit on the seventeenth went fine. I hung out, talked, played with the kids. I had made a double-dog promise to be on my best no-politics-and-religion-at-the-dinner-table behavior.
+
+At dinner, there was a moment when Koios bit into a lemon and made a funny face, to which a bunch of the grown-ups said "Awww!" A few moments later, he went for the lemon again. Alicorn speculated that Koios had noticed that the grown-ups found it cute the first time, and the grown-ups were chastened. "Aww, baby, we love you even if you don't bite the lemon."
+
+It was very striking to me how, in the case of the baby biting a lemon, Alicorn _immediately_ formulated the hypothesis that what-the-grownups-thought-was-cute was affecting the baby's behavior, and everyone _immediately just got it_. I was tempted to say something caustic about how no one seemed to think a similar mechanism could have accounted for some of the older child's verbal behavior the previous year, but I kept silent; that was clearly outside the purview of my double-dog promise.
+
+There was another moment when Mike made a remark about how weekends are socially constructed. I had a lot of genuinely on-topic cached witty philosophy banter about [how the social construction of concepts works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), that would have been completely innocuous if anyone _else_ had said it, but I kept silent because I wasn't sure if it was within my double-dog margin of error if _I_ said it.
+
+> even making a baby ML dude who's about to write a terrible paper hesitate for 10 seconds and _think of the reader's reaction_ seems like a disimprovement over status quo ante.
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/1006685798227267736
+
+Also, the part where I said it amounted to giving up on intellectual honesty, and he put a check mark on it
+
+The third LW bookset is called "The Carving of Reality"? Did I have counterfactual influence on that (by making that part of the sequences more memetically salient, as opposed to the "categories are made for man" strain)?
+
+Yudkowsky on EA criticism contest
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HyHCkK3aDsfY95MoD/cea-ev-op-rp-should-engage-an-independent-investigator-to?commentId=kgHyydoX5jT5zKqqa
+
+Yudkowsky says "we" are not to blame for FTX, but wasn't early Alameda (the Japan bitcoint arbitrage) founded as an earn-to-give scheme, and recrutied from EA?
+
+https://twitter.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355639903080691
+> [SBF] wanted to build a machine—a growing sphere of influence that could break past the walls of that little office in Berkeley and wash over the world as a force for good. Not just a company, but a monument to effective altruism.
+
+Scott November 2020: "I think we eventually ended up on the same page"
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38799.html#msg38799
+
+SK on never making a perfectly correct point
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P3FQNvnW8Cz42QBuA/dialogue-on-appeals-to-consequences#Z8haBdrGiRQcGSXye
+
+Scott on puberty blockers, dreadful: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes
+
+https://jdpressman.com/2023/08/28/agi-ruin-and-the-road-to-iconoclasm.html
+
+https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309037/eliezer-yudkowsky/
+> "I expected to be a tiny voice shouting into the void, and people listened instead. So I doubled down on that."
+
+-----
+
+bullet notes for Tail analogy—
+ * My friend Tailcalled is better at science than me; in the hours that I've wasted with personal, political, and philosophical writing, he's actually been running surveys and digging into statistical methodology.
+ * As a result of his surveys, Tail was convinced of the two-type taxonomy, started /r/Blanchardianism, &c.
+ * Arguing with him resulted in my backing away from pure BBL ("Useful Approximation")
+ * Later, he became disillusioned with "Blanchardians" and went to war against them. I kept telling him he _is_ a "Blanchardian", insofar as he largely agrees with the main findings (about AGP as a major cause). He corresponded with Bailey and became frustrated with Bailey's ridigity. Blanchardians market themselves as disinterest truthseekers, but a lot of what they're actually doing is providing a counternarrative to social justice.
+ * There's an analogy between Tail's antipathy for Bailey and my antipathy for Yudkowsky: I still largely agree with "the rationalists", but the way especially Yudkowsky markets himself as a uniquely sane thinker
+
+Something he said made me feel spooked that he knew something about risks of future suffering that he wouldn't talk about, but in retrospect, I don't think that's what he meant.
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1435856644076830721
+> The error in "Not Man for the Categories" is not subtle! After the issue had been brought to your attention, I think you should have been able to condemn it: "Scott's wrong; you can't redefine concepts in order to make people happy; that's retarded." It really is that simple! 4/6
+
+> It can also be naive to assume that all the damage that people consistently do is unintentional. For that matter, Sam by being "lol you mad" rather than "sorry" is continuing to do that damage. I'd have bought "sorry" rather a lot better, in terms of no ulterior motives.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1706861603029909508
+
+-------
+
+On 27 September 2023, Yudkowsky told Quentin Pope, "If I was given to your sort of attackiness, I'd now compose a giant LW post about how this blatant error demonstrates that nobody should trust you about anything else either." (https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1707142828995031415) I felt like it was an OK use of bandwidth to point out that tracking reputations is sometimes useful (https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1707183146335367243). My agenda here is the same as when I wrote "... on Epistemic Conduct for Author Criticism": I don't want Big Yud using his social power to delegitimize "attacks" in general, because I have an interest in attacking him. Later, he quote-Tweeted something and said,
+
+> People need to grow up reading a lot of case studies like this in order to pick of a well-calibrated instinctive sense of what ignorant criticism typically sounds like. A derisory tone is a very strong base cue, though not an invincible one.
+
+Was he subtweeting me?? (Because I was defending criticism against tone policing, and this is saying tone is a valid cue.) If it was a subtweet, I take that as vindication that my reply was a good use of bandwidth.
+
+-----
+
+In particular, I think the conspiracy theory "Yudkowsky sometimes avoids nuanced arguments that he doesn't trust people to understand" is true, because ... you've said so (e.g., "without getting into any weirdness that I don't expect Earthlings to think about validly"). https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/2NncxDQ3KBDCxiJiP/cosmopolitan-values-don-t-come-free/comment/dMHdWcxgSpcdyG4hb
+
+----
+
+(He responded to me in this interaction, which is interesting.)
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242
+> Zack, you missed this point presumably because you're losing your grasp of basic theory in favor of conspiracy theory.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qbcuk8WwFnTZcXTd6/thomas-kwa-s-miri-research-experience
+> The model was something like: Nate and Eliezer have a mindset that's good for both capabilities and alignment, and so if we talk to other alignment researchers about our work, the mindset will diffuse into the alignment community, and thence to OpenAI, where it would speed up capabilities.
+
+27 January 2020—
+> I'm also afraid of the failure mode where I get frame-controlled by the Michael/Ben/Jessica mini-egregore (while we tell ourselves a story that we're the real rationalist coordination group and not an egregore at all). Michael says that the worldview he's articulating would be the one that would be obvious to me if I felt that I was in danger. Insofar as I trust that my friends' mini-egregore is seeing something but I don't trust the details, the obvious path forward is to try to do original seeing while leaning into fear—trusting Michael's meta level advice, but not his detailed story.
+
+Weird tribalist praise for Scott: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions/comment/ez8xrquaXmmvbsYPi
+
+-------
+
+I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)).
+
+I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards (["you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that 'I can define the word "woman" any way I want'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228)), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
+
+
+
+------
+
+At "Arcadia"'s 2022 [Smallpox Eradication Day](https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1391248651167494146) party, I remember overhearing[^overhearing] Yudkowsky saying that OpenAI should have used GPT-3 to mass-promote the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to Republicans and the Pfizer vaccine to Democrats (or vice versa), thereby harnessing the forces of tribalism in the service of public health.
+
+[^overhearing]: I claim that conversations at a party with lots of people are not protected by privacy norms; if I heard it, several other people heard it; no one had a reasonable expectation that I shouldn't blog about it.
+
+I assume this was not a serious proposal. Knowing it was a joke partially mollifies what offense I would have taken if I thought he might have been serious. But I don't think I should be completely mollified, because I think I think the joke (while a joke) reflects something about Yudkowsky's thinking when he's being serious: that he apparently doesn't think corupting Society's shared maps for utilitarian ends is inherently a suspect idea; he doesn't think truthseeking public discourse is a thing in our world, and the joke reflects the conceptual link between the idea that public discourse isn't a thing, and the idea that a public that can't reason needs to be manipulated by elites into doing good things rather than bad things.
+
+My favorite Ben Hoffman post is ["The Humility Argument for Honesty"](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/). It's sometimes argued the main reason to be honest is in order to be trusted by others. (As it is written, ["[o]nce someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings).) Hoffman points out another reason: we should be honest because others will make better decisions if we give them the best information available, rather than worse information that we chose to present in order to manipulate their behavior. If you want your doctor to prescribe you a particular medication, you might be able to arrange that by looking up the symptoms of an appropriate ailment on WebMD, and reporting those to the doctor. But if you report your _actual_ symptoms, the doctor can combine that information with their own expertise to recommend a better treatment.
+
+If you _just_ want the public to get vaccinated, I can believe that the Pfizer/Democrats _vs._ Moderna/Republicans propaganda gambit would work. You could even do it without telling any explicit lies, by selectively citing the either the protection or side-effect statistics for each vaccine depending on whom you were talking to. One might ask: if you're not _lying_, what's the problem?
+
+The _problem_ is that manipulating people into doing what you want subject to the genre constraint of not telling any explicit lies, isn't the same thing as informing people so that they can make sensible decisions. In reality, both mRNA vaccines are very similar! It would be surprising if the one associated with my political faction happened to be good, whereas the one associated with the other faction happened to be bad. Someone who tried to convince me that Pfizer was good and Moderna was bad would be misinforming me—trying to trap me in a false reality, a world that doesn't quite make sense—with [unforseeable consequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) for the rest of my decisionmaking. As someone with an interest in living in a world that makes sense, I have reason to regard this as _hostile action_, even if the false reality and the true reality both recommend the isolated point decision of getting vaccinated.
+
+I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
+
+From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I know some things about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in a world that makes sense.
+
+-------
+
+I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine.
+
+-----
+
+Michael said that we didn't want to police Eliezer's behavior, but just note that something had seemingly changed and move on. "There are a lot of people who can be usefully informed about the change," Michael said. "Not him though."
+
+That was the part I couldn't understand, the part I couldn't accept.
+
+The man rewrote had rewritten my personality over the internet. Everything I do, I learned from him. He couldn't be so dense as to not even see the thing we'd been trying to point at. Like, even if he were ultimately to endorse his current strategy, he should do it on purpose rather than on accident!
+
+(Scott mostly saw it, and had [filed his honorable-discharge paperwork](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). Anna definitely saw it, and she was doing it on purpose.)
+
+-----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology?commentId=Z7kyiPAfmtztueFFJ
+
+----
+
+"there just wasn't any reliable similarity between biology and AI" is an interesting contrast with the constant use of the evolution analogy despite credible challenges
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1738464784931025333
+
+-----
+
+What if, in addition to physical punishments and Detect Thoughts, Cheliax also had Adjust Thoughts, a "gradient descent for the brain" spell (given a desired behavior, nudge the spell target's psychology to be more likely to emit that behavior)? Does Carissa still have a winning strategy? Assume whatever implementation details make for a good story. (Maybe Cheliax is reluctant to use Adjust Thoughts too much because Asmodeus wants authentic tyrannized humans, and the Adjust Thoughts sculpting makes them less tyrannized?)
+
+> One thing is sure, the path that leads to sanity and survival doesn't start with lies or with reasoning by Appeal to (Internal) Consequences.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1743522277835333865
+
+> To clarify a possibly misunderstood point: On my model, dath ilan's institutions only work because they're inhabited by dath ilani. Dath ilani invent good institutions even if they grow up in Earth; Governance on Earth lasts three days before Earth voters screw it up.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1565516610286211072
+
+July 2023
+https://twitter.com/pawnofcthulhu/status/1680840089285582848
+> man i feel like the orthodox viewpoint on this has moved on from "let's define trans women as women" to like
+> "arguing about metaphysics is boring; letting people chose pronouns as part of self-expression seems like a thing a free society should allow for the same reason we should let people choose clothes; for many social purposes trans women are in fact empirically women"
+
+(If your "moderately serious" plan for survival is ["AI research journals banned, people violating that ban hunted down with partial effectiveness"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1739705063768232070), that might be your least-bad option as a consequentialist, but one of the things your consequentialist calculation should take into account is that you've declared war on people who want to do AI science on Earth.)
+
+public intellectual death
+https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
+
+> "Racism" is so commonly used weirdly that I think there are few circumstances left where I'd try to use the word to communicate. Instead I'd say, "X seems to be judging people negatively in a hard-to-shake-off way based on their skin color."
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1755624226550387013
+
+> "Study science, not just me!" is probably the most important piece of advice Ayn Rand should've given her followers and didn't. There's no one human being who ever lived, whose shoulders were broad enough to bear all the weight of a true science with many contributors.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
+
+He's still dunking instead of engaging—
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1760701916739194949
+> Every time I've raised an inscrutable alien baby to hyperintelligence by giving it shots of heroin whenever it correctly predicts the exact next word spoken by fictional good characters, it's learned to be a genuinely good person inside!
+
+
+-----
+
+> I recently advised somebody to distinguish firmly in her mind between "X is actually true" and "X is the politic thing to say"; I advised drawing a great line and the creation of separate mental buckets. The words you write, taken at face value, seem to be missing some...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493665988829186
+> ...similar distinctions. There's a distinction between honesty in the form of blurting out the whole truth, and honesty in the form of not uttering lies, and a related thing that's not making public confusions *worse* even if you aren't trying to unravel them. There's...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984
+> ...being honest in the privacy of your own mind, and being honest with your friends, and being honest in public on the Internet, and even if these things are not perfectly uncorrelated, they are also not the same. Seeking truth is the first one. It's strange and disingenuous...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752
+> ...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, ...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976
+> ...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*. That's definitely most of how I do it.
+
+-----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1076155800144363520
+> I got a lot further as an adolescent on "Ask what a superintelligence would think". Eventually I used that up and have now moved on to "What would Anna Salamon think?"
--- /dev/null
+with Anna—
+
+6 Mar 2019
+
+The malicious gossip about you continues on "EA Corner" Discord; I _thought_ about posting a message but then decided not to (because my testimony would probably hurt you rather than help you, and because there's too much variance even if I thought the expected value went the other way)
+
+[...]
+
+The message I privately typed and THOUGHT about sending, but did NOT send was '@Gwen#7137 re "in which Anna admitted to ...", I tried to say this during the meeting with Michael, but again, I think you're _massively_ overestimating how easy it is to misinterpret/misparaphrase what someone was trying to say in a real-time conversation; the leap fomr what Ziz said that Anna literally said, to "Anna disciminates against tran womken" is inference on your part'. And the REASON that it's good that I didn't send this is because the defnese doesn't want their own witnesses to validate the plausibility of the prosecution's alleged observations (but disputing the alleged observations' interpretation) when there are still possible worlds in which the jury could decide that the alleged observations were made up
+
+18 Mar 2019
+
+Sara Bareilles is great and you should listen to her songs
+
+13 Apr 2019
+
+I sent you an email!! [various emoji] [...]
+
+14 Apr 2019
+
+Is there any way you could give me a projected DATE at which you'll be able to publicly and honestly engage with my post (or endorse it if you think I got everytyhing right)? If you don't have time now because of bankruptcy, will you have time within a week? Within a month? Two months? If it was worth spending 650 words of effort trashing Michael, isn't it worth spending 650 words clarifying the relationship between Bayesian reasoning and human natural language when it's demonstrable that people are very confused about this and they might listen to you when they won't listen to me alone? My post is LITERALLY about math and dolphins, the political risk here is ZERO.
+
+[revolving-hears emoji] [dolphin emoji]
+
+25 Jul 2019
+
+I've had a lot of uncertainty about whether I'm doing the right thing this year, but I remember that the correct response to uncertainty is not half-speed
+
+13 Nov 2019
+
+Ziz finally published Ziz's threatened blog post: [...] I really don't think it's that damaging? (Default dismissible as weird person's weird unreliable memories)
+
+17 Nov 2019
+
+I was momentarily tempted to write an email thanking the Santa Rose Press Democrat newspaper reporter for writing such an informative news story and linking the reporter to Ziz's blog for context (because I have vritue ethics that say that sharing information is Generically Good), but then I decided not to, because you wouldn't want me to
+
+27 Nov 2019
+
+How much red-teaming did you do before your wrote that hit-piece comment about Michael?
+
+[...]
+
+If you don't feel a deontology-adjacent need to correct philosophy errors (becasue it could have political costs), but you do feel a deontology-adjacent need to attack someone who is eager to help correct philosophy errors, can you see why that makes me suspect your rationality organization if [sic] being "fraudulent" in the sense of "claiming to be optimizing for rationality education, but actually not trying to do that"?
+
+18 Dec 2019
+
+Increasingly on a war footing, still very sad about possible implications for our friendship [...]
+
+Escalating to "war" (publicly and privately-to-others talking about how "rationalists" are being intellectually dishonest) is a lot healthier than private sniping/begging, because when I try getting the concern addressed in private, it's just a perma-stalemate. (You see my point, you just don't want to do anything about it.) But I keep feeling motivated to try to work things out in private (even when it's petty and repetitive) because "war" feels disloyal
+
+[link to "With You By My Side" with my description as a possibly "apropow" song from the Tangled sequel series, followed by explanation for misspelling]
+
+[...]
+
+(Postscript: for more context, the more immediate trigger of me feeling "warlike" yesterday/today was feeling the need to defend Michael from the influence of your hit piece [...] I sent Vaniver an angry email that I don't think contains any false sentences about you)
+
+[...]
+
+I think "war" could also include starting conversations with a goal of liberating human capital and funding streams away from your sphere of indluence (hopefully only using tactics that result in liberating capital if and only if liberating capital is the right thing to do: [link to "The Humility Argument for Honesty"])
+
+
+
+7 Feb 2020
+
+[...] "gerrymander concepts to avoid momentary pain" seems like an insanely evil thing to do to a developing intelligence in your care
+
+[...] it's not implausible that my unskillful advocacy carries negative weight
+
+[redacted] and [redacted] literally met on lesswrong.com; if we don't have an actual-community-with-women-and-children that cares about teaching the children production-grade Yudkowskian philosophy, then it doesn't exist anywhere else, either
+
+16 Mar 2020
+
+I'm really glad you're writing election comments on Facebook
+
+(as you know, because Speech matters, not because the election matters)
+
+17 Mar 2020
+
+If it turns out (after the quarantine) that I can't realistically remain a family friend of the [redacted] household, maybe the last thing I'll say to Kelsey as I leave willl be, "I have the honor to be your obedient servant"
+
+22 Jul 2020
+
+GPT-3 does not look like good news
+
+> I agree. Got thoughts?
+
+"Maybe this is partially our fault" [link to "OpenAI makes humanity less safe"]
+
+2 Aug 2020
+
+I guess I already technically believed that We Are Dead, but just ... the details: unalignable AI progress AND political collapse AND public health non-progress (covid) AND non-AI transhumanism non-progress (Steve Hsu's defeat)
+
+30 Aug 2020
+
+Sorry I couldn't be there for you the other year when you were having a stressful time because of the bad luck of me being at war with your embedding sovereign at the same time
+
+14 Sep 2020
+
+I'm still planning to do most of the same things (like finish the "Optimized for Deception" post), but now I'll be able to take my time and treat it as an ordinary philosophy post for math nerds, rather than being stuck in a delusional rage-grief loop and using the phrase "lying motherfuckers" in every other thought
+
+--------
+
+with Michael—
+
+
+
+20-21 Jul 2019
+
+> Can you share your best model of what would have happened if you had seen Raymonds's LW thread a few years ago and had been told that his attitude had become the dominant one in LW & EA
+
+I'm ... not sure? Plausibly not much, because I'm not perceptive enough to notice anything until it personally hits me over the head; I want to Ray's 2017 "HUfflepuff unconference" and 2018 "Archipelago" talk at REACH, and I didn't notice anything wrong
+
+The current situation on LW seems bonkers to me, but I asked Steven Kaas if he saw what I was seeing [...]
+
+And they would be "taken seriously" in the sense that we have good free speech norms and people would make the in-genre responding to criticism noises
+
+How is he supposed to tell whether the noises are connected to any decision-controlling information processing?
+
+25 Jul 2019
+
+Kelsey Piper wrote me a REALLY IMPRESSIVE email about why she thinks you're a bad influence who is making me worse at thinking (her character assessment of you and your influence is wrong, but her character assessment of me is dead-on in a way that makes me really optimistic about useful engagement
+
+[...]
+
+31 Jul 2019
+
+(Two years ago, you told me that my character assessments of women are always too optimistic)
+
+3 Aug 2019
+
+Had been meaning to send you detailed email about slander but didn't get around to writing it; REACH story got more interesting (Kelsey says an undisclosed someone credibly threatened to sue (!) over the panel report about you, which will delay its release for the one-year statute of limitations, which is short-term good news (not published) but longer-term bad news (the report muyst be a hit piece if you secret ally is trying to hush it), sorry
+
+[my comment: Kelsey said that _someone_ threatened to sue about the report about Michael, and I didn't infer that it was Michael itself?! Jeez, I'm dumb
+
+Kelsey's further comments on 28 November 2020 (comment thread on https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10158484261660199 ):
+
+> I can confirm that REACH investigated complaints by REACH attendees about Vassar's behavior. The panel wrote up a summary of their conclusions, which included that they felt Vassar should not be welcome at REACH for the time being. The summary was not meant for publication with Vassar's name attached. REACH policy at the time was for investigations to be published with enough information that the person could be uniquely identified in the community "Michael V/A" but not with any information that'd make them Googleable. When the document was shared with Vassar for comment, Vassar threatened the REACH panelists with litigation for "defamation". He did not claim that any specific content of the document was false. The panelists included some people who would be very adversely affected by ongoing defamation litigation, so they made the decision to not publish, and the panelists stepped down.
+
+> At the same time as I was consulting with lawyers trying to figure out some way to publish the REACH document in some fashion so the liability would be solely on me and other people willing to deal with it, Zack and other Vassar-defenders were barraging me with assurances that Vassar was not engaged in reputation management within the rationalist community and had stopped trying to protect opinion of him within the rationalist community. To this day none of them have acknowledged that this was blatantly lying.
+
+my reply—
+
+Kelsey, hi. At the time I was defending Vassar to you (in our 25 July 2019 email conversation), I actually didn't know that Vassar had threatened to sue in response to the REACH report! That conversation definitely wouldn't have happened the way it did if I had known that piece of information at the time!
+
+I certainly agree that threatening a lawsuit is definitely an instance of reputation-management.
+
+If you actively want to go over the Discord/email log, I could go in to more detail about why I said what I said given what I knew at the time? I can apologize for and retract specific sentences I said that were wrong, but I can't agree with the characterization of my behavior as "blatantly lying."
+
+]
+
+oh, I had angrily testified to the panel on your behalf (which would be a bad idea if it were plice, but I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt): "Michael is great; this is a skapegoating process, not a justice process, &c."
+
+> The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropiate ethical standards.
+
+2 Jun 2020
+
+> Do you see the argument for 'these rioters need to fight now'?
+
+Probably not? If you need to fight sometime, now is probably a good time (covid depression stacked the hay, Officer Chauvin lit the match), but I'm not sure what happens afterwards
+
+> Nobody is, but they do have to fight. And so do we. And we can and have been doing so successfully.
+
+----
+
+18 Jun 2020
+
+The Veil of Kayfabe wants me to believe that the anti-cop rioters and the anti-Stephen Hsu petitioners are the same, but the Veil lies
--- /dev/null
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+\r
--- /dev/null
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+
+import csv
+import datetime
+import re
+import subprocess
+
+MONTHS = {
+ "Jan": 1,
+ "Feb": 2,
+ "Mar": 3,
+ "Apr": 4,
+ "May": 5,
+ "Jun": 6,
+ "Jul": 7,
+ "Aug": 8,
+ "Sep": 9,
+ "Oct": 10,
+ "Nov": 11,
+ "Dec": 12,
+}
+
+def wordcount_at_this_sha():
+ result = subprocess.run("wc -w content/2023/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md content/2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md content/drafts/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles.md content/drafts/guess-ill-die.md content/drafts/on-the-public-anti-epistemology-of-dath-ilan.md content/drafts/standing-under-the-same-sky.md".split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
+ wc_lines = result.stdout.decode('utf8').split('\n')
+ total_line = wc_lines[-2] # last line is empty
+ return int(total_line.split()[0])
+
+def date_at_this_sha():
+ result = subprocess.run("git show HEAD".split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
+ show_lines = result.stdout.decode('utf8').split('\n')
+ dateline = show_lines[2]
+ match_groups = re.search("(?P<month>\w{3}) (?P<day>\d{1,2}) \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2} (?P<year>\d{4})", dateline).groupdict()
+ return datetime.date(int(match_groups['year']), MONTHS[match_groups['month']], int(match_groups['day']))
+
+
+def look_back():
+ wordcounts = []
+ keep_going = True
+ while keep_going:
+ subprocess.run(["git", "checkout", "HEAD~1"])
+ wordcount = wordcount_at_this_sha()
+ date = date_at_this_sha()
+ if date < datetime.date(2022, 4, 20):
+ keep_going = False
+ wordcounts.append((date, wordcount))
+ # don't leave the head detached
+ subprocess.run(["git", "checkout", "master"])
+ return sorted(wordcounts)
+
+def normalize_dates(wordcounts):
+ eod_wordcounts = []
+ for i in range(len(wordcounts)-1):
+ date, wordcount = wordcounts[i]
+ next_date, next_wordcount = wordcounts[i+1]
+ gap = next_date - date
+ if gap >= datetime.timedelta(1):
+ eod_wordcounts.append((date, wordcount))
+ for i in range(gap.days-1):
+ eod_wordcounts.append((date + datetime.timedelta(i+1), wordcount))
+ return eod_wordcounts
+
+def write_csv(wordcounts):
+ with open("memoir_wordcounts.csv", 'w') as f:
+ writer = csv.writer(f)
+ previous = None
+ for date, wordcount in wordcounts:
+ diff = wordcount - previous if previous is not None else ''
+ writer.writerow([date.strftime("%m/%d/%Y"), wordcount, diff])
+ previous = wordcount
+
+
+if __name__ in "__main__":
+ wordcounts = normalize_dates(look_back())
+ write_csv(wordcounts)
--- /dev/null
+[Steph is Maria's cis girlfriend.]
+
+> She acts like she's into it. She's thrashing, hands at Steph's wrists, pulling. Not that hard, although <u>Steph is probably stronger than Maria</u>, so it's not like Maria could
+
+less probable than Imogen Binnie would like us to believe
+
+> Then it's Maria's turn. She already knows she's going to fake it. Maria's relationship to her body, it's a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room. You'd think it would be impossible to fake it, with junk like Maria's got, but you can. Maria knows some stuff about faking it. One time somebody told her that when she came in their motuh, they could tell she'd come because when that pre-<u>come</u> stuff turned into regular come, it got saltier.
+
+I thought the noun was [spelled differently](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum#Etymology_2)
+
+> People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men, at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, Dude, hi. <u>Nobody ever reads me as trans any more.</u> Old straight men hit on me when I'm at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven't even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots.
+
+that you know of (& James will, in Part 2)
+
+> But when she started working there, she was like, Hello, I'm a dude and my name is the same as the one that's on my birth certificate. Then when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time, as boring and clichéd as this is, but for as long as she could remember she had felt all fucked up.
+>
+> So she wrote about it. She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the <u>I am addicted to masturbation dot</u>, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an un-self-conscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don't think I've cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot. So she figured out that she was trans, told people she was changing her name, got on hormones, it was very difficult and rewarding and painful.
+
+really
+
+> There's this whole thing now where <u>rich</u> young white people like Maria colonize Brooklyn history because in these messed-up, post-modern times everybody is desperate for something real
+
+is this code for class? Maria works in a bookstore
+
+> She doesn't hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they've acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they're working on it and starting conversations about it and <u>being accountable to trans women</u>.
+
+/r/GenderCritical would "love" this book
+
+[Steph has disclosed that she cheated with Kieran, a trans man.]
+
+> She probably doesn't even hate Steph. Like, as a couple they are fucked, and obviously Maria sucks at changing things her life that she really needs to change. Such as: she totally needs to break up with Steph. But for real though, Steph rules. She and Keiran, y'know, that sort of thing just happens sometimes, especially in a queer relationship, right? And it's not like Maria never fucked Kieran while she was with Steph.
+
+what
+
+<u>what</u>
+
+> Maria's been <u>mentally outlining a zine</u> about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.
+
+ARTISTS SHIP
+
+> He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn't come. Maybe he did.
+
+what does this entail, exactly
+
+> Turns out Piranha texted Maria last night, too. Fuck. Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She's a good friend. But last night she was like, <u>Dude</u>, where are you? Maria texts back: Sorry <u>dude</u>. Hang out soon?
+
+interesting choice of address
+
+> Maria used to have a pretty strong body, back when she was an energetic little college kid who looked like a dude and <u>journaled obsessively about gender in top secret notebooks all day every day</u>.
+
+!!! [I did this, too.]
+
+> She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It's fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg's and <u>write for two and a half hours</u>. As the sun is coming up, no less.
+
+<a href="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg"><img src="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+maybe I shouldn't doubt her work ethic
+
+> She has another sip and opens her notebook, <u>one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers</u> Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.
+
+❤ ✶ Moleskine ★ ☆
+
+> She doesn't actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles.
+
+I take back what I said about work ethic
+
+> Maria was <u>this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes</u> she'd met when she'd been telling everyone [she was a] straight dude too
+
+[Underlined without comment.]
+
+> In one of <u>Michelle Tea's</u> books (maybe The Chelsea Whistle?) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it's like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria's like, I'll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it.
+
+who has a blurb on the back cover of this book—<u>quid pro quo</u>?
+
+> She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver's license to get a computer. It's weird but <u>nobody has ever once given Maria</u> shit for the gender on her license, not in the <u>five years</u> or whatever that she's been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law.
+
+that is surprising—is this detail autobiographical?
+
+> No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so if everybody, so it's not very interesting.
+
+so true
+
+> She doesn't post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they're trans look up to her. It's kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren't for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
+
+it's even worse for gender-dysphoric males who don't buy the "trans" framing
+
+> Her name is Julia Serano and like most figureheads, she's very smart and sweet and right-on and <u>almost entirely unproblematic</u>, but her acolytes totally get obnoxious, taking her writings as doctrine.
+
+high praise
+
+> I know, Maria says. I just ... I've been thinking about trans stuff, like, all the time, and I don't feel like I can talk to anybody about it, because <u>I totally fucking hate everybody else who's trans</u>, and I don't want to deal with it.
+
+I know the feeling
+
+> But she's on the couch, in her work clothes, with a bottle of organic red wine because she knows that <u>estradiol and non-</u><span class="extra-underline">organic</span><u> red wine don't mix</u>
+
+somehow I doubt this
+
+> Maria reads so much that <u>she assumes that one day she'll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two</u>
+
+unfortunately, it doesn't work like that ("assume a novel")
+
+> <u>Rain rules</u>. She's all ebullient, and weirdly <u>can't wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again</u>.
+
+I remember those days
+
+> On top of which, <u>you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned?</u>
+
+better than me
+
+> On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It's not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there.
+
+yes
+
+> She gets a three-dollar drip coffee and gives the barista her license. She doesn't look at it, but she's <u>got dyke hair so she probably wouldn't care if she saw the M</u>.
+
+TERFs are a minority of dykes
+
+> She's been trying to get into it but she can't focus. It's a <u>story about a girl in New York</u> who's a knight, and she's friends with a dog, or something. <u>It's weird. She feels like you could just flip to a page and start reading. There's no plot.</u>
+
+yeah, <u>those</u> books, right
+
+[Steph is reminiscing about her relationship with Maria.]
+
+> But it turns out that <u>using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off</u>—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she's hot for you, that she's into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.
+
+<u>usually</u> it's the trans woman in the relationship doing this—author projection??
+
+> <u>Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has</u>. <u>Maria herself probably doesn't know</u>.
+
+yes, who knows??
+
+> No matter how clear Steph has been about <u>the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit</u>, even something horrifying you'd never actually want to do in real life, Maria won't fess up to anything.
+
+well, I can think of <u>one</u> ...
+
+> One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and <u>when she is performy, it's almost always for herself</u>, not for anyone else.
+
+★ ♡ [[I'm like this](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/#narrative-optimization), too.]
+
+[A description of James H.'s girlfriend, Nicole.]
+
+> When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to chruch when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
+>
+> She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn't want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn't work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off, but no luck. At the last second they'd turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
+
+a novel about Nicole would be better than this one, but Imogen Binnie couldn't write it
+
+> It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. <u>Hair to his shoulders</u>, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed.
+
+check
+
+[Part 2, Chapter 5 describes James's autogynephilia.]
+
+this chapter is <u>so real</u>
+
+> <u>It's not like James is proud</u> of the porn that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He's tried. He's still trying. He tries most nights.
+
+try being proud?
+
+> One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. <u>It's stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific</u>, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn't science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
+
+<u>yes</u>
+
+> If you're a straight guy who's into the idea of being turned into a girl there's not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably.
+
+[TODO: cry emoji]
+
+> Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and <u>he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan</u>. He's just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.
+
+Jenny Boylan who married a woman & transitioned at 42? You might have more in common with her than you think!
+
+> This is how James knows he's an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.
+
+so real
+
+> That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn't jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o'clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely even an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have <u>a fetish that you can't even do in real life</u>, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?
+
+[Underlined without comment.]
+
+> As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she's like, That kid is trans and <u>he</u> doesn't even know it yet.
+
+★
+
+> Because if he's being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn't processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.
+
+★
+
+> He was like, I do have the crdit card slip, maybe I could do some kind of hacker shit with it if I was a creep. And if he had the time and energy and focus to learn to do hacker shit. On some level he's been meaning to learn that stuff for a long time. So.
+
+no one does anything in this novel
+
+> The air conditioning in Steph's car isn't great, but it works. The whole car <u>feels like maybe a Platonic solid</u>
+
+I'm not sure I get this metaphor
+
+> That's the obvious reason that she flipped out and bought a bunch of drugs that to be honest she is too wimpy to even fuck around with, and then tried to disappear, and it's why she keeps charging her cell phone, <u>reading Steph and Piranha and Kieran's text</u> and thinking, yeah, tonight, I'll respond to that when I stop to eat I'll definitely let them know that I'm not dead. <u>But not doing it.</u>
+
+I was less shitty than this during my psychotic break
+
+> The central thing here is that Maria is really good at being trans.
+
+<u>that's</u> the takeaway?!
+
+> Yeah, Maria says, The problem with the Internet is that most of the trans women who manage to transition and still be dirtbags or punkers or weirdos or dykes or radicals or whatever stay way away from those people, too, and there's this narrative of 'deep stealth' that makes it seem like maybe we don't exist or we stop being trans but actually what happen is that we keep living our lives and being dirty weirdos we just—I should only speak for myself I guess, but I just got bored of talking about it.
+
+HSTS resentment trope
+
+> Okay sorry, Maria says, Let's not talk about capitalism or anarchism or anything except I do want to say that those things ended up being totally essential to my understanding of being trans and feminism and my location and the things that suck about being trans.
+
+she's bluffing—Maria is not theory-driven
+
+> James thinks, like, yeah and you're a heroin addict? And like, you were inevitably unhappy with your life because you're trans, right? Meaning, transition doesn't work. But what he says is, It took you a month to drive a couple thousand miles?
+
+good catch on James's part—that's like ~65 miles per day
+
+> I was like, Piranha, man, why the fuck aren't you fuckin rich, you are a genius, I said this kind of through tears, and she was like, Uh, Maria, I'm not rich because I'm trans and because I'm a woman. I was like, Oh yeah.
+
+Martine Rothblatt has more fighting spirit than that
+
+> He looks down and his body is all scrunched up, knees to his chest in the little passenger seat of this little car. He's pretty tall, which is <u>important for a lot of reasons</u>, but he's making himself tiny.
+
+Maria said he wasn't tall (p. 177)
+
+> But yeah, she says, Steph rules and is smart and good at what she's doing—she's definitely the kid who kept her principles. She works at fucking <u>Callen-Lorde</u> when she's not at work!
+
+apparently, the New York analogue of Lyon-Martin
+
+> Oh you just don't know? James says. Like nobody cheated on anybody and you didn't just stop having interests in common and you still liked all the same movies and you just looked up one day and you were like, Well see you, I think I'm gonna steal your fucking car and drive it thousands of miles to fucking Star City Nevada for no fucking reason?
+
+brutal
+
+> Here's the thing, Maria says. Nobody pays attention to J. Michael Bailey any more. He's just some dude who wrote a book about how trans women are perverts, which is an easy thing to get a press to publish. You'll never go broke selling regressive 'common sense.' But his body Kenneth Zucker is still a big deal. <u>He runs this clinic in Canada</u> and advocates like—
+
+not anymore, thanks to the likes of you
+
+I guess the <u>Archives of Sexual Behaviors</u> is still kind of a big deal
+
+[James has stolen Maria's drugs and ditched her.]
+
+... that's it??
+
+That's the whole book?!
+
+WTF
-I don't think we're in equilibrium; I don't think everyone knows what's going on
+'I don't think we're in equilibrium; I don't think everyone knows what's going on
fragments—
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/
-"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
-no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
-https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/bhulic/i_cant_do_this_any_more_i_need_to_divorce_my/
thanks for the marketing advice! I should _definitely_ take that into account if I ever decide to put more effort into "persuading people", which sounds like something that an aspiring instrumental rationalist would care about. Perhaps unfortunately, however, I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist: all I can do is try to communicate what I actually think and feel using clear language (and standard rhetorical techniques like sarcasm, satire, &c. that people know how to interpret even if they wouldn't be clear if someone naïvely took the words literally). If other people aren't persuaded by this ... maybe they _shouldn't_ be! Maybe I can live with that!
-You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you _can't_ optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
-
I guess I can't argue with that, but I wish I knew what happened to my wallet
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/ray-blanchard-transgender-orthodoxy/
https://medium.com/@dave_45588/response-to-andrew-carter-re-j-k-rowling-pt-2-556d9b9113b1
-23 June 2020: people are STILL citing "Categories Were Made", TWICE when people on the subreddit asked "What is Slate Star Codex"?
-https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvqv9av/
-https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvr47v1/
-> But the blog wasn't always on that 'side', either. Scott wrote one of the best analyses/defenses of trans identity and nonbiological definition of gender that I've ever read, and which ultimately convinced me.
-Yet again someone citing "Categories Were Made" as influential: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/he96rm/star_slate_codex_deleted_because_of_nyt_article/fvr7h7w/
-
-people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/status/1327730282703835137
-
-Even the enemies respect that post!
-https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208
-
-And using it for defense.
-
-Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/
-
-Another "Made for Man" cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwwxycr/
-
-More damage control: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hpohy5/what_are_some_of_scotts_posts_that_challenge_the/fxsu8p0/
-(Comment was deleted. Was I over the line in commenting at all, or just because of the "transparently political reasons" side-swipe? The fact that it got ~18 points suggests the readership was OK with it, even if the moderators weren't)
-
-People are still citing it! https://twitter.com/churrundo/status/1283578666425806851
-
-Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825
-
-Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/
-
-Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."
-
-Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739
-
-31 December
-"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/
-
-Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
-
-Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
-
-Still citing it (20 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qagtqk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_18/hhdiyd1/
-
-Still citing it (21 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qcrhc4/can_someone_provide_an_overview_ofintroduction_to/hhkf6kk/
-
-Still citing it (15 July 21) in a way that suggests it's ratsphere canon: https://twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1415754203293757445
-
-Still citing it (14 November 21): https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1459846336845697028
-
-Still citing it (December 21 podcast): https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2021/12/152-frame-control-with-aella/
-
-Still citing it (2 February 22): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-do-i-suck/comment/4838964
-
-Still citing it (22 March 22): https://twitter.com/postpostpostr/status/1506480317351272450
-
-Still citing it (25 March 22): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/tj525b/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_21_2022/i22z367/
-
-Still citing it (13 May 22): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FkFTXKeFxwcGiBTwk/against-longtermist-as-an-identity
-
The correctness of this post has been disputed at length: [object-level reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), [meta-level reply (part 1)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [meta-level reply (part 2)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), [supplementary material on dolphins/whales](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water)
Object-level reply: http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
Meta-level reply (pt. 2): https://lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception
Supplementary material on dolphins/whales: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water
+[object-level reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), [meta-level reply (pt. 1)](https://lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [meta-level reply (pt. 2)](https://lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), [supplementary material on dolphins/whales](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water)
+
+
darwin2500 "Women's leagues are for women, trans women are women. That's all the justification needed" https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hym5xb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_27_2020/fzvfres/
another "Categories Were Made" cite, just as an example post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/fzwkfqk/
Wil-"Lia"-m Thomas got her girl name using the same methodology as me (Za-"Carrie" Davis), at the suggestion of Mom (https://www.si.com/college/2022/03/03/lia-thomas-penn-swimmer-transgender-woman-daily-cover) like mine was suggested by Alicorn
-vindication
-> "Dath ilani kids get told to not get fascinated with the fact that, in principle, 'bounded-agents' with finite memories and finite thinking speeds, have any considerations about mapping that depend on what they want. It doesn't mean that you get to draw in whatever you like on your map, because it's what you want. It doesn't make reality be what you want."
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/5785?page=4
-
explicit AGP with surgery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhawkcuDl_o
> Lia Thomas as the anti-Rosa Parks. Least sympathetic case imaginable, single-handedly turned public opinion against the cause.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1538651344361246720
-Even the reviews of Nevada don't reveal the secret!!—okay, the New Yorker one sort of does ("erotic transvestite scenarios", "liking girls just in a totally impossible way")
-https://www.vulture.com/article/profile-imogen-binnie-nevada.html
-https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada
-
-> it doesn't feature nonbinary characters, and a similar novel written today would require them, not least for accuracy.
-(2013 was less than a decade ago!!)
-
preference cascade is starting ...
https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1538541182975877120
+
+[quantifying the two-type effect:
+GD occupations in study 2
+gay men are at .48 (.14); straight women at .36 (.13); straight men at .68 (.12)
+that's d=–1.61 between gay and straight men
+a gay man only needs to be 1 standard deviation (.48-.36 = 0.12) more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight women
+whereas a straight man needs to be (.68-.36 = 0.32) 0.32/0.12=2.67 more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight woman—that's rarer, but not impossible
+
+In percentile terms, 1-norm.cdf(1) = 0.15 of gay men are as feminine as a woman
+whereas 1-norm.cdf(2.67) = 0.003 of straight men are
+that's a likelihood ratio of 50 ... but the prior is not that far from 50:1 in the other direction! They cancel out!!]
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/115874/shirley-conran-s-lace-body-slammed-agp-back-in-1982
+
+https://pitt.substack.com/p/headline-when-a-quarter-of-the-class
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/vlopk0/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_27_2022/ieo2jzm/
+> Obsessive, pedantic, Talmudic talk of edge cases, cluster definitions, Bayesian filters or whatever else grey tribe weirdos might get fascinated with only gets in the way of an honest negotiation of a value handshake between majority groups. Not that I believe it would've taken place in a world with zero rationalists, but it's still annoying.
+
+> Me in 2008: I'm definitely not trans, just a regular guy who always thinks about being a woman and hates clothes shopping and hates hanging out with the guys and thinks about getting testicular cancer and loves gender-swap movies and TV shows and you know, normal guy things
+https://twitter.com/lauroralei/status/1548861652636139520
+
+24% black judges is pretty extreme affirmative action (if you know the IQ stats): https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1549237889128509440
+
+They don't think this is a pornography app, but it is
+https://samsunglabs.github.io/MegaPortraits/
+
+https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/a-fractal-of-lies
+
+The woman at a party who says that she's also somewhat gender-dysphoric and always uses gender-neutral screennames specifically because she likes being treated as an unmarked person rather than The Girl, thereby becomes way more interesting to me as A Girl. (This is the thing about my preferences that I prefer not to explain clearly because I'm secretly terrified that it's implicitly misogynistic, which is why you were so surprised when you met Linda and noticed her distinct lack of resemblance to Aphrodite.)
+
+software for generating fake people recommended by Curt Skeleton video—
+Convert Skeleton
+Deepmotion
+Deepfake labs
+Respeecher
+(actually, there were further reports that this was a hoax)
+
+https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom
+
+https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a41018711/sexplain-it-vagina-fetish-sex-bisexual/
+
+(stability_unsafe-0gZ54e7b) zmd@ReflectiveCoherence:~/Code/Misc/stability_unsafe$ python stability_sdk/src/stability_sdk/client.py "25-year-old Nana Visitor in the shower in 1996, full body shot, 4K digital photo" -n 4
+
+https://afterellen.com/tasmania-rules-against-women-only-spaces/
+
+"Separating Sports by Sex Doesn't Make Sense"
+https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/sports-gender-sex-segregation-coed/671460/
+https://archive.ph/OViyg
+
+new Bailey and Hsu ETII paper (August 2022): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-84273-4_20
+
+(no context?)
+> Women do not find womanhood erotic.
+https://twitter.com/DrDebraSoh/status/1571523669809053696
+
+On Fri, May 3, 2019, 6:55 PM Zack M. Davis <main@zackmdavis.net> wrote:
+
+ Another Less Wrong post idea that can be jotted down but shouldn't actually be developed during Math and Wellness Month (so, don't comment, but feel free to say "Good idea, looking forward to it" or "Dumb idea, stop sending me this volume of obnoxious mail"): "Pick Two; Or, Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle": analogous to "good, fast, cheap: pick two", we face a tradeoff between honesty, ability to think, and mainstream credibility. The Kolmogorov option sacrifices a lot of honesty in exchange for mainstream credibility. This might seem like a good trade until you consider that "honesty" and "ability to think" aren't independent (because people are bad at compartmentalization and we need to talk to each other to think together).
+
+Michael's comment—
+> Not excited by this approach.
+> Idea of mainstream credibility us very specifically an idea about credibility as a political identity, and thus against credibility as a proposition. Flat Earth movement, as non-credible as it is, is more politically promising then "round Earth movement"
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/Cancelled/176585/october-11-2022-actual-female-wikipedia-admin-goes-out-with-a-bang
+
+https://www.takimag.com/article/invasion-of-the-nasty-nerds/
+
+https://tehswitcherscaptions.blogspot.com/2019/07/impending-shift.html links to https://www.previewsworld.com/Catalog/MAY190456 as "a mainstream comic that had
+used the idea of basically an 'impending Great Shift' as a villain's plot for making a more egalitarian society." I totally had the same idea independently!!
+
+I'm such a terrible writer: "propagated the implications of the observation that" → "internalized"
+
+https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/a-psychological-theory-of-the-culture
+> From their perspective, the "expert consensus" and "peer-reviewed studies" on the efficacy of covid-19 vaccines look no different from those that tell you men can get pregnant. Since you know men can’t get pregnant, why trust the vaccine?
+
+I don't think it makes sense to group together male puberty and administered testosterone HRT as "testosterone puberty"
+
+https://bprice.substack.com/p/trans-is-something-we-made-up
+
+-----
+
+Not going to engage because I'm supposed to be writing today, but this kind of thing in Alicorner is what I mean by _de facto_ biological sex denialism—
+
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/538097598008131594/1037807776065388616
+> I think the thing that confuses me about that theory is how some of the instances I've encountered seem to be people who feel attraction to ~masculine presenting people ever?
+
+... it's not surprising that attraction to masculine presenting women (females, a.f.a.b.s) would fail to generalize to masculine-presenting men (males, a.m.a.b.s)? Biological sex actually exists?
+
+----
+
+don't like it when science-fictional or fantasy characters are held up as trans icons (like Jadzia Dax, or when Janet in _The Good Place_ says "Not a girl") when the character has an in-universe rationale for holding beyond-the-binary status (if Trill symbionts have sexual dimorphism, it doesn't need to match their host; Janet is a heavenly robot-analogue), and real-life trans people and enbies do not
+
+https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/16/racist-robots-ai/
+> The scientists did not have blocks depicting nonbinary people due to the limitations of the facial image data set they used, which they acknowledged was a shortcoming in the study.
+
+http://theautogynephiliac.blogspot.com
+
+https://sugarandslugs.wordpress.com/
+
+https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/medium-sized-breasts-and-gaussian
+
+https://janhove.github.io/design/2015/03/16/standardised-es-revisited
+
+Is "homoncular flexibility" also responsible for AGP??
+https://stanfordvr.com/mm/2016/11/won-etsbs-homuncular-flexibility.pdf
+
+https://dataoverdogma.substack.com/p/the-feminist-to-nonbinary-pipeline
+
+Ozy suggested this as a data source on sexual violence—
+https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nisvs/summaryreports.html
+
+> It is commonly observed that trans people assigned female at birth have hobbies that are more popular among women, and trans people assigned male at birth have hobbies that are more popular among men. Trans women are, of course, equally valid women.
+https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/lesbian-culture-for-trans-lesbians
+
+Distinguishing influence-based contagion from homophily-driven diffusion in dynamic networks
+https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908800106
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/224699/always-at-target
+
+> I just had major, life-changing, irreversible breast surgery and I am already regretting it.
+https://archive.ph/BlALB
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cujpciCqNbawBihhQ/self-integrity-and-the-drowning-child
+
+https://www.thefp.com/p/an-existential-threat-to-doing-good
+
+https://www.thecut.com/article/hola-papi-feeling-phony-after-transitioning.html
+
+https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/rationalism-done-right
+https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/womanhood-is-not-like-parenthood
+https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/do-transgender-people-exist
+https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/if-you-dont-talk-about-genetic-enhancement
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/232321/it-hurts-to-know-that-my-family-sees-me-as-an-egg-waiting-to-crack
+
+2014-07-17
+(03:36:14 PM) zackmdavis@yahoo.com: my hope was to actually make progress on the monstrously self-indulgent story that I thought should be finished by election day https://gist.github.com/zackmdavis/3194ff3262028c54ce90
+
+https://gist.github.com/zackmdavis/cc535f594ff7d4d6c431
+
+woman who kept maiden name complains that even her family doesn't respect it, compared to deadnaming as offense
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/265651/my-name-and-the-pronoun-meltdowns
+
+James Baldwin's theory that Black policemen beat up on other blacks to secure their position in the white power structure seems to evoke the CovfefeAnon catchphrase :(
+https://archive.is/izSUn
+
+The ‘holy f***’ moment I knew something was wrong at the Tavistock: How Dr Anna Hutchinson, one of the whistleblowers, realised something was very wrong
+https://archive.ph/AKz2i
+
+> We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
+
+Someone reading this who trusted Alexander as a general-purpose intellectual authority ("the best of us", the "rationalists") might walk away with the idea that it's an open problem whether 50% binary predictions are meaningful—perhaps reasoning, if the immortal Scott Alexander doesn't know, then who am I to know?
+
+But it's not. On this website, [Rafael Harth explains why 50% isn't special](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAc4iuy4D3EiNBt9B/how-to-evaluate-50-predictions). I claim that this should actually be pretty obvious to competent quantitative thinkers, even if it's not obvious to the collective _SSC_/_ACX_ commentariat, and Alexander can't tell which of his commenters are competent quantitative thinkers.
+
+I don't particularly fault Scott for this: [by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). (And the vast majority of math people can't write as well or as fast as Scott. No one is the best at everything!) Rather, I'm saying that a culture that wants to _actually_ be right about everything would do better to _just_ focus on being right on the object level, without [wireheading on its own promises of being right about everything](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/).
+
+(Incidentally, Scott himself is actually very good about [not trying to claim more authority than is actually justified by his performance](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). His fans should try to be more like him along this dimension!)
+
+I doubt that's the same phenomenon? The thing about reports like, _e.g._, ||I have a female body in all my sexual fantasies (as reported by Anomaly above)|| is that there's an obvious explanation for that ||if you're _actually female_—namely, that your fantasy life is based on real life along this dimension—and that explanation is not present for people who are _not_ female||?
+
+||I think the way to think about this question is to imagine that if you'd _never heard_ of this stupid ideologically-charged debate—would you need to _spontaneously invent_ the term AGP (or a synonym like _eonism_ as coined by Ellis in 1920 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis#Eonism>) _in order to make sense of your experience_? If your _serious_ answer is Yes, that's _really interesting_ and I want to hear more. (Omega seems to be claiming this about herself, which is _really_ fascinating and my model _definitely_ loses some points for predicting that she shouldn't exist.) But I think _most_ females saying "yeah, sure, cis women are AGP too; it's, like, getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you, right? Seems normal" _after having been presented with the term in an ideologically-charged context_ are not really understanding the phenomenon in males that the term was originally coined to point to.||
+
+A much better analogy is ||the thing where you, Linta, and Swimmer report fantasizing about being male sometimes. This is plausibly auto-_andro_-philia, and like AGP, it's actually _pretty common_—_e.g._, Person _et al._ 1989 Table 3 (<http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf>) found 10 percent of female and 13 percent of male college students reporting yes to "Fantasizing that you are of opposite sex".||
+
+S. (she doesn't get it):
+> I do also enjoy fantasizing from the perspective of a fictional very attractive woman and imagining the inner details of a hypothetical other person's attraction to her; this is maybe a form of autogynephilia? (Though it is a bit hard for me to distinguish autogenyphilia from just getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you / imagining how other people see you)
+
+https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8?sharing_token=jzX6q1NAJAY6-F_jSZ9wmfe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4WOO91AGBPQEW4W5GA-5HjFFBOW6MbqFHl6iM4xVsaD3DHcIMra_eBV8WQP5ACn0suHGXlnXqqAYAmkbrYzfglseOmxogZQqQ9SymDk_KPLQTlCvTiA2MPLdV_k8lldyE%3D
+
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8
+
+https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/no-women-are-not-autogynephilic/
+
+https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
+
+testimony of female AGP
+https://discord.com/channels/745684950417932323/803338278492307518/1047261753177813034
+
+"Isn't it messed up, how I'm just dying to be him"—evidence for Serano-ism
+
+Said on charity: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/i2Dnu9n7T3ZCcQPxm/zetetic-explanation/comment/C2EW2aDQCqPyN6tfG
+
+I thought I was a liberal mother, then my daughter came out as trans
+https://archive.is/P7tAp
+
+Cool someday project—use GPT tech to summarize the whole blog: https://matthagy.substack.com/p/hierarchical-categorization-using
+
+replying to Gowers: https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1290407470452547584
+
+In the 1990 U.S. Census, _Davis_ was the 6th most common surname at 0.48%, and _Zachary_ the 181st most common male first name at 0.10%.
+
+the younger son also claiming broke suspension of disbelief
+https://lgbtcouragecoalition.substack.com/p/true-believer
+
+I agree that people who have prior reasons to be skeptical of survey evidence should be upfront about those reasons, rather than opportunistically objecting to particular questions when that's not their [true rejection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection).
+
+https://unherd.com/thepost/calls-for-violence-in-the-trans-debate-only-come-from-one-side/
+
+Blanchard: "What I think is that people are born with predispositions or vulnerabilities to a kind of erotic miss-learning" quoted in https://since2010.substack.com/p/is-autogynephilia-innate
+
+https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob
+
+https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gender-criticism-versus-gender-abolition-on-three-recent-books-about-gender/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/
+
+Alex Byrne podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/956725/13282940-gender-pronouns-and-linguistic-negotiation
+
+"Intersexual and Intrasexual Differences in Mate Selection Preferences Among Lesbian Women, Gay Men, and Bisexual Women and Men"
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02665-9
+
+https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/13/queer-couple-co-parents-raise-child
+> In our experience, co-parenting seems to overwhelmingly appeal to cis women, trans men and non-binary people assigned female at birth. Without any exhaustive studies on this, I can only guess why.
+
+The Problem With Centering Blackness in Everyday Conversations
+https://archive.is/FzxYB
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/askAGP/comments/15wcdlg/am_i_the_only_woman_with_puretrue_autoandrophilia/?share_id=yOEg_HYP-oUW0MUhVGa5M
+
+Amazing comment—
+https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132334?context=8#context
+> The fascinating thing to me, is that despite being a quite gender conforming (and non-AGP) straight guy, when I read his description of his underlying desires it resonated. I could have written the exact same thing with one minor and meaning preserving word swap.
+(swapping "mine" for "me" in "wanting the soul behind those eyes to be me)
+> The most obvious way to fulfil this desire isn't "become a woman", but to own a woman [...] And if "owning" a woman is too unthinkable, you might come up with creative solutions.
+
+https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/men-consume-relationships-women-produce
+
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/escalating-signals-cut-fertility
+> and more respect young adults who shape themselves alone, and then once they’ve achieved more distinctive personal styles and interests, search among vast numbers of potential partners for the few who most closely match what they have become
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/askAGP/comments/16g0s67/textbook_agp_as_an_afab/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/16i82vh/is_it_ever_just_a_fetish/
+
+A Discord anecdote (https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458329253595840522/1151404259460517918); I wasn't going to point out that this was gaslighting—
+> one of my parents' friends when I was a kid was a trans woman, though I didn't know that at the time (I knew she was a woman I just didn't know she was trans)
+> I remember being like nine years old and thinking something along the lines of 'hmm, [name] looks like a woman, and has a girl name, but she sounds like a guy?? what's up with that??' before ultimately concluding that Presumably my parents knew what gender she was and they were using a girl name and female pronouns for her, so therefore she was a girl
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/comments/16ko1jj/i_dont_get_along_with_guys/
+
+https://www.thecut.com/article/adult-friendships-vs-kids.html She's not ideological about it like I am.
+
+Rationalist women and men can be similar to each other and different from normies along the subspace of dimensions that rationalists and normies are different, while also being different from each other along the subspace of dimensions that females and males are different from each other, even while some dimensions are in both subspaces.
+
+https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/23101806.issue-day-able-bodied-norwegian-identifies-disabled-woman/
+
+https://www.tiredtranssexual.com/
+
+https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/my-agp-dudes-it-does-get-better
+
+https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/alliance-defending-freedoms-legal-crusade
+
+> Michael says the thing we call "trans women" are basically males who have been lied to about how sex works and who don't, can't participate in rape culture. As a virgin from the 1987 birth cohort, this resonates. I said, "Comment 171 syndrome." Although ... I have been in bed with a woman a few times, and from there the proximate cause of still-being-a-virgin-afterward was erectile nonperformance due to obligate-AGP. This is likely related to Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard wrote about "developmental competition" (the balance between allo- and auto- hardening during psycho-sexual development): my analogue in a world where I had known how and why to ethically pursue girls as a teenager would still be in the same taxon, but maybe wouldn't have gone so far down the obligate track.
+
+https://old.reddit.com/r/askAGP/comments/173rtqp/im_agp_and_i_transitioned_at_12_ama/
+
+https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/trans-women-sorority-kappa-kappa-gamma-wyoming/
+https://archive.ph/6Y2wO
+
+> A trans woman told me, "I get to have all these talkative blowhard traits and no one will punish me for it cuz I'm a girl."
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kq8CZzcPKQtCzbGxg/quinn-s-shortform?commentId=ByARjQ72pNfvzRoLQ
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/honesttransgender/comments/17tetu5/im_trans_and_i_transitioned_because_seeing_myself/
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/Books/519555/even-trashy-old-novels-knew-the-truth-about-agp
+
+https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/
+
+https://www.theknownheretic.com/p/sex-mimics-are-mimicspart-1
+
+https://benexdict.io/p/math-team
+
+https://thepostmillennial.com/trans-runner-shatters-womens-sprinting-record-only-one-year-after-earning-19th-place-in-male-competition
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/18tggaq/i_get_aroused_when_i_have_gender_euphoria_is_that/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/trans/comments/18vijfo/asked_my_friend_out_she_couldnt_just_turn_me_down/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/18ygct1/is_autogynephillia_real/
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/526364/tims-in-r-lesbiangamers-outnumber-females-2-1
+
+https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1746744905861345290
+> "Talking about your interests" with your wife is wayyy overhyped in the minds of single men seeking marriage. My wife is smart and I never talk to her about my interests. I talk to men about my interests (how it's been for thousands of years).
+
+https://twitter.com/LadyTetra777/status/1747381930507538451
+> Imma simplify all agp discourse. Ready?
+>
+> Me: AGP? Listen cis people, intellectualizing an experience won't give you that experience ⛔️
+>
+> Me, staring at a full mirror: Yep, AGP is real 😌
+
+https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1731503700353421315
+> My impression is that like religion, fecundity is a thing these people respect & see as extremely valuable if not essential - but it doesn't clear their personal cost-benefit calculus
+>
+> It's less that it has to be done in human ways, & more that it has to be done for human reasons
+
+Shannon Thrace appeals to the "principle of charity" and "steelmanning": https://twitter.com/ShannonThrace/status/1749609014982258933 So she is memetically downstream of us! It's not at all obvious!
+In a later Tweet (https://twitter.com/ShannonThrace/status/1756776030453272681), she cites Volokh Conspiracy (https://reason.com/volokh/2021/05/12/steelmanning-and-interpretive-charity/) who cites LW and Chana Messinger
--- /dev/null
+#!/usr/bin/python3
+
+import re
+import sys
+
+# Python script to rewrite Markdown links and remove anchors
+# mostly by GPT-4
+
+# Define the path for the input and output files
+input_file_path = sys.argv[1]
+output_file_path = "out.md"
+
+# Define the regular expression patterns for Markdown links and anchors
+relative_link_pattern = re.compile(r'\]\(/(\d{4}/\w{3}/[-\w]+/)(#[-\w]+)?\)')
+relative_image_link_pattern = re.compile(r'\]\((/images/[-\w./]+)\)')
+anchor_pattern = re.compile(r'<a id="[-\w]+"></a>')
+
+# TODO: don't neglect images
+
+# Read the content of the original markdown file
+with open(input_file_path, 'r') as file:
+ content = file.read()
+
+# Replace the Markdown links with the new format
+rewritten_content = relative_link_pattern.sub(r'](http://unremediatedgender.space/\1)', content)
+rewritten_content = relative_image_link_pattern.sub(r'](http://unremediatedgender.space/\1)', rewritten_content)
+
+# Remove the anchors
+rewritten_content = anchor_pattern.sub('', rewritten_content)
+
+# Write the rewritten content to a new file
+with open(output_file_path, 'w') as file:
+ file.write(rewritten_content)
+
+print(f"rewritten markdown has been saved to {output_file_path}")
-Urgent/needed for healing—
-_ The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ...
-_ I Am Not Great With Secrets (aAL)
-_ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
+_ Agreeing With Stalin in Ways that Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
-Big posts—
-_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
-_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
+_ Zevi's Choice (March 2021–April 2022)
+
+-------
+
+_ On the Public Anti-Epistemology of dath ilan
+_ Standing Under the Same Sky (September–December 2022)
Minor—
-_ Consilent Worldbuilding
-_ my medianworld: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639
+_ reply to https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/is-transitioning-harmful-to-prospective
+_ Book Review: Lisa Selin Davis's: Housewife
+
+_ horror of gender
+_ math of "sex diffs can still exist in a subspace that is masc/fem compared to genpop"
+_ subspace
+_ newer Haskell surveys?
+_ Book Review: Imogen Binnie's Nevada
_ Happy Meal
+_ Elision _vs_. Choice
+_ Multi-Product Review: AI for AGP
_ Link: "On Transitions, Freedom of Form, [...]"
-_ Interlude XXII
-_ Excerpt from _Redefining Realness_
+_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
+
+-------
+
+Big posts—
+_ Thoughts on Being Single and Childless at 35 (working title)
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (with coda)
+
+
+-------
+
+_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
+_ Escort (cut §, needs title)?
+_ Biological Sex Actually Exists
+_ Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty https://archive.ph/ZxVYk
+_ Never Going to Find You Faking
+_ Body Anxiety Posting, Month Year
+_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means"
+_ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
+_ ASL Is Not a Language
+_ Gaussian Gender Issues
+_ Timelines
+_ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
+_ my medianworld: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639
+_ Rebecca Romijin
+_ "Reducing" Bias and Improving "Safety"
_ Unicode adopt-a-character?? (would it be wrong to adopt "♀"?)
_ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WikzbCsFjpLTRQmXn/declustering-reclustering-and-filling-in-thingspace
-_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
-_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
_ Four Clusters
-_ Elision _vs_. Choice
_ Karnofsky's presentism
_ motivation for positing meta-attraction
-
_ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
+_ Comments on the Conspiracies of dath ilan
Minor queue—
_ FaceApp tips
_ Sticks and Stones
_ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
-_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
-_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
_ Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
-_ Timelines
_ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
_ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
_ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
-LW—
-_ reply to David Silver on AI motivations: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/SbAgRYo8tkHwhd9Qx/deepmind-the-podcast-excerpts-on-agi#David_Silver_on_it_being_okay_to_have_AGIs_with_different_goals_____
-_ Charles Goodhart Elementary School (story about Reflection Sentences, and the afterschool grader being wrong
-_ Steering Towards Agreement Is Like Discouraging Betting
-_ (not really for LW) mediation with Duncan: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZeJzuT3ccd/?commentId=KMoFiGMzxWkWJLWcN
-_ Conflict Theory of Bounded Distrust: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
-_ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
-_ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
-_ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
-_ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
-_ Longtermism + Hinge of History = Shorttermism (not my original idea, but don't remember whose blog I read this on, so I'll write my own version)
-_ Point of No Return is Relative to a Class of Interventions
-_ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
-_ Existential Risk Science Fiction Book Club: Rainbows End
-_ Existential Risk Science Fiction Book Club: The Gods Themselves
-_ Angelic Irony
-_ Good Bad Faith
-_ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
-_ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
-_ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
-_ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
-- And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
-_ importance of getting the direction of causality right
-_ Memetics vs. Discourse
-_ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
-_ Reasons to Go On
-_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
-_ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
-_ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
-
-
_ Honesty Is Activism
_ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
_ "Cis" is like "gentile"
_ The Sex/Gender Distinction Was a Mistake
_ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
-_ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
+
_ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel; shifting default meaning onto stereotypes in order to suit trans (while still having the word attach to something) is a bad trade
_ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
_ Beyond the Binary
_ I, Too, Dislike It
-_ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
-_ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women"
_ Principles (transhumanism, and sanity)
_ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
-_ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/
-_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
_ Cynical Theories review
_ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set
_ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
_ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
_ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
_ My Identity Has a Better Brier Score Than Your Identity
-_ TV Review: "The Trouble With Edward"
_ Comment on "One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2 (tag: `review (paper)`)
_ the scapegoating dynamic
_ review of "What's the Big Secret?" (acknowledges gender-role conventions which are more salient when people are wearing clothes, but then tells the real answer)
_ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
_ Comment on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq/ https://doxa.substack.com/p/googles-colosseum
- - Amy Wax linkpost
- The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
_ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
_ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
strict scrutiny
-This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
-> journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
-https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
-
optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex, even if your conscious verbal narrative never says 'and now I will confuse and intimidate people who want to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex'!"
I should email caption bliggers and ask if they know about AGP
reverse Wason selection task: https://twitter.com/ThetaGrunberg/status/1305296703088545792
-I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles
-
(This needs to go into my "Motivations and Political Context")
Transitioning is easy if you project into the subspace spanned by "given name" and "preferred pronouns" and "frequency of wearing dresses." The problem is that it's not psychologically realistic to expect everyone else to just throw away all the other dimensions—people were using those dimensions!
"You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
-LW/aAL—
-_ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
-_ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
-_ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
-_ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
-_ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
-_ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
-_ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
-_ Selective Reporting and Clustering
-_ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
-_ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
-_ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
-_ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
-
it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
-cosplay—
-/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
-/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/
-/2016/Dec/joined/
-
-
-
even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+social media share card https://dev.to/mishmanners/how-to-add-a-social-media-share-card-to-any-website-ha8
+relative URLs = False (but not broken)
+make Markdown native footnote CSS match the plugin-based footnotes
undo the Slate Starchive links
roll my own pingbacks? (I didn't like the Pelican plugin) http://blog.mlindgren.ca/entry/2015/01/17/how-to-manually-send-a-pingback/
worddiff for gitweb?! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1518178/how-do-i-change-the-gitweb-default-diff-format-to-color-words
https://suedonym.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-studies?s=r
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/science-vs-cited-seven-studies-to
+
+https://pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer
\ No newline at end of file
+I've now told enough of my Whole Dumb Story that it's time for the part where I explain how @ESYudkowsky has not been consistently candid in his communications with his followers, hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities: [link]
+
+(I think this is the best and most important post in the sequence; I suspect that many readers who didn't and shouldn't bother with the previous three posts, may benefit from just reading this one.)
+
+------
+
Post later (can't afford to spend more Twitter time now)—
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1436039564032823313
-wc -w 2022/* 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
+wc -w 2023/* 2022/* 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
- 1005 2017/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan.md
- 1044 2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
- 1099 2020/cloud-vision.md
- 1222 2020/memento-mori.md
- 1238 2021/point-man.md
- 1456 2019/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point.md
- 1521 2018/blame-me-for-trying.md
- 1584 2020/crossing-the-line.md
- 1704 2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
- 1733 2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
- 1910 2021/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic.md
- 1927 2017/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision.md
- 1968 2016/joined.md
- 1977 2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md
- 2059 2020/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md
- 2067 2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
- 2107 2022/backlog-metablogging-april-2022.md
- 2144 2019/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender.md
- 2774 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
- 3682 2022/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md
- 3760 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
- 6523 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
- 11013 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
- 12011 2022/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
- 15735 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
-123216 total
+ 1005 2017/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan.md
+ 1044 2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
+ 1099 2020/cloud-vision.md
+ 1223 2020/memento-mori.md
+ 1238 2021/point-man.md
+ 1456 2019/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point.md
+ 1521 2018/blame-me-for-trying.md
+ 1584 2020/crossing-the-line.md
+ 1704 2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
+ 1733 2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
+ 1910 2021/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic.md
+ 1928 2017/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision.md
+ 1969 2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md
+ 1970 2016/joined.md
+ 2059 2020/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md
+ 2069 2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
+ 2107 2022/backlog-metablogging-april-2022.md
+ 2119 2023/beyond-the-binary.md
+ 2144 2019/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender.md
+ 2322 2022/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md
+ 2657 2023/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md
+ 2774 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
+ 3684 2022/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md
+ 3760 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
+ 4049 2022/context-is-for-queens.md
+ 4221 2023/fake-deeply.md
+ 6525 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
+ 11015 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
+ 12012 2022/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
+ 15738 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+ 21530 2023/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
+ 22315 2023/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+ 25997 2023/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
+ 214265 total
+-------
+ 352 is_there_anything_thats_worth_more.md
+ 628 we_are_less_wrong_than_e_t_jaynes.md
+ 638 youll_never_persuade_people_like_that.md
+ 907 conflict_theory_of_bounded_distrust.md
+ 1324 on_the_contrary_steelmanning_is_normal_itt-passing_is_niche.md
+ 1329 lack_of_social_grace_is_an_epistemic_virtue.md
1491 algorithms_of_deception.md
1552 endogenous_epistemic_factionalization.md
1619 maybe_lying_cant_exist.md
+ 1956 contra_yudkowsky_on_epistemic_conduct_for_author_criticism.md
+ 2332 bayesian_networks_arent_necessarily_causal.md
+ 2236 assume_bad_faith.md
2263 schelling_categories_and_simple_membership_tests.md
2357 maybe_lying_doesnt_exist.md
+ 2358 comment_on_propositions_concerning_digital_minds.md
2493 heads_i_win.md
2544 firming_up_not-lying_around_its_edge-cases.md
+ 2585 justice_cherryl.md
+ 2827 rationalist_discourse_is_like_physicist_motors.md
+ 3382 aiming_for_convergence_is_like_discouraging_betting.md
3652 algorithmic_intent.md
3783 evolution_of_meaning_basics.md
+ 3885 alignment_implications_of_llm_successes.md
3917 where_to_draw_the_boundaries.md
- 6594 unnatural_categories_are_optimized_for_deception.md (W.I.P.)
+ 10031 unnatural_categories_are_optimized_for_deception.md
+---------
words per year—
-2021: 43300 (total); 21600 (UUT), 21700 (LW)
-2020: 42400 (total); 23900 (UUT), 18500 (LW)
-2019: 30200 (total); 10500 (UUT), 19700 (LW)
-2018: 18700 (UUT)
+2023: 96370 (total); 72200 (UUT), 24170 (LW), 0 (aAL)
+2022: 31900 (total); 29600 (UUT), 2300 (LW), 100 (aAL)
+2021: 43300 (total); 21600 (UUT), 21700 (LW), 400 (aAL)
+2020: 42400 (total); 23900 (UUT), 18500 (LW), 1800 (aAL)
+2019: 30200 (total); 10500 (UUT), 19700 (LW), 2800 (aAL)
+2018: 19700 (total); 18700 (UUT), 1000 (aAL)
+2017: 27300 (total); 20900 (UUT), 6400 (aAL)
+2016: 23100 (total); 5900 (UUT), 17200 (aAL)
+2015: 12100 (total); 12100 (aAL)
+2014: 6400 (total); 6400 (aAL)
+2013: 23500 (total); 23500 (aAL)
+2012: 20300 (total); 20300 (aAL)
+2011: 1800 (total); 1800 (aAL)
+
+In [1]: 96370 + 31900 + 43300 + 42400 + 30200 + 19700 + 27300 + 23100 + 12100 +
+ ...: 6400 + 23500 + 20300 + 1800
+Out[1]: 378370
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals
-AUTHOR = 'M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake'
+AUTHOR = 'Zack M. Davis'
SITENAME = 'The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought'
SITEURL = 'http://unremediatedgender.space'
# Blogroll
LINKS = (
- ('On the Science of Changing Sex', "https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/"),
('Survey Anon\'s Gender Blog', "https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/"),
+ ('On the Science of Changing Sex', "https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/"),
('Crossdreamers', "http://www.crossdreamers.com/"),
('Trans Blog', "http://transblog.grieve-smith.com/"),
('The New Thoughtcrime', "https://newthoughtcrime.com/"),
('Culturally Bound Gender', "https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/"),
('The Trans Widow', "http://thetranswidow.com/"),
('Sex and Gender: A Beginner\'s Guide', "https://sexandgenderintro.com/"),
- ('Female Sexual Inversion', "https://femalesexualinversion.blogspot.com/"),
('Kathleen Stock', "https://kathleenstock.substack.com/"),
('Pasha\'s Office ', "https://pashasoffice.blogspot.com/"),
+ ('Ținând de Mâinii Strigoii-lor', "https://strigoi.substack.com/"),
+ ('Some Nuance, Please', "https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/"),
)
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 20
# Uncomment following line if you want document-relative URLs when developing
RELATIVE_URLS = True
+
+MARKDOWN = {
+ 'extension_configs': {
+ 'markdown.extensions.codehilite': {'css_class': 'highlight'},
+ 'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
+ 'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
+ 'markdown.extensions.toc': {
+ 'title': 'Table of Contents',
+ },
+ },
+ 'output_format': 'html5'
+}
-blinker==1.4
-docutils==0.14
-feedgenerator==1.9
-html5lib==1.0.1
-Jinja2==2.11.3
-Markdown==3.2.2
-MarkupSafe==1.0
-pelican==4.5.0
-pkg-resources==0.0.0
-Pygments==2.2.0
-python-dateutil==2.6.1
-pytz==2017.2
-six==1.10.0
-Unidecode==0.4.21
+blinker==1.6.2
+docutils==0.20.1
+feedgenerator==2.1.0
+html5lib==1.1
+Jinja2==3.1.2
+Markdown==3.4.4
+markdown-it-py==3.0.0
+MarkupSafe==2.1.3
+mdurl==0.1.2
+pelican==4.8.0
+Pygments==2.16.1
+python-dateutil==2.8.2
+pytz==2023.3.post1
+rich==13.6.0
+six==1.16.0
+Unidecode==1.3.7
+webencodings==0.5.1
font-size: 2em;
}
+h3 {
+ font-size: 1.35em;
+}
+
h1 a {
color: inherit;
border-bottom: none;
}
a {
- text-decoration: none;
- border-bottom: 1px dotted #4D4D4C;
- color: #2D2D2C;
+ color: inherit;
+ text-decoration: dotted underline #4D4D4C from-font;
+ text-underline-position: from-font;
+ text-underline-offset: 0.1em;
}
a:hover, a:active {
- text-decoration: none;
- border-bottom: 1px dotted #C07095;
- color: #C07095;
+ color: #C07095;
+ text-decoration-color: currentcolor;
}
.literal {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 85%;
}
+
+/* XXX—why isn't this working?! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15643614/double-underline-tag */
+.extra-underline {
+ text-decoration: underline;
+ border-bottom: 3px double solid #000;
+}
+
+
+/* Thanks to Said Achmiz for table-of-contents styling */
+.toc {
+ max-width: 50%;
+ font-size: 0.85em;
+ padding: 0.5em;
+ margin: 1.5em 0;
+ border: 2px dotted #d6d6d6;
+}
+.toctitle {
+ display: block;
+ margin: 0 0 0.5em 0.375em;
+ opacity: 0.5;
+}
+.toc ul {
+ list-style-type: none;
+ padding-left: 1.5em;
+ margin: 0;
+ line-height: 1.2;
+}
+.toc li {
+ text-indent: -1.5em;
+ margin-bottom: 0.25em;
+ padding-left: 1.5em;
+ position: relative;
+}
+.toc li::before {
+ content: counter(list-item);
+ position: absolute;
+ width: 1em;
+ text-indent: 0;
+ right: calc(100% + 0.5em);
+ text-align: right;
+ color: #bbb;
+}
+
+/* remove link underlines for navigational links */
+.toc a {
+ text-decoration: none;
+}
+.title {
+ text-decoration: none;
+}
+.pages a {
+ text-decoration: none;
+}
+.content h1 a {
+ text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+
+/* And thanks again to Said Achmiz for making superscripts not mess up line spacing. */
+sup, sub {
+ position: relative;
+ vertical-align: baseline;
+ font-size: 0.8em;
+}
+sup {
+ bottom: 0.4em;
+}
+sup a {
+ padding: 0 0.1em;
+}
+sub {
+ top: 0.25em;
+}
for (let [i, container] of containers.entries()) {
let a = document.createElement('a');
let count = counts[i];
+ if (count === 0) {
+ count = "no";
+ }
let pluralizer = count === 1 ? "" : "s";
let text = document.createTextNode(`${count} comment${pluralizer}`);
a.appendChild(text);
let container = document.querySelector("#recent-comments-container");
let request = new XMLHttpRequest();
- request.open('GET', 'http://unremediatedgender.space/isso/latest?limit=5', true);
+ request.open('GET', 'http://unremediatedgender.space/isso/latest?limit=10', true);
request.onload = function() {
if (this.status >= 200 && this.status < 400) {
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
