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. At this point, 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.
-... 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 this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war involving other people who had much more important things to do with their time.
+... 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 this personal obsession of mine wouldn't have been the occasion of a full-on robot-cult religious civil war involving other people who you'd expect to have much more important things to do with their time.
The _causis belli_ for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin. 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.
[^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).
+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.
[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/]
+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 I'd actually 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??) 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.
-[TODO: help from Jessica for "Unnatural Categories"]
+[TODO: three weeks later, Slate Star Codex went down]
+------
+I continued to work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis. The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:
-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 I'd actually 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??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place.
+> 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.
-He never got back to me.
-[TODO: three weeks later, Slate Star Codex went down]
+
+
+(It's not surprising that Scott
+
+[by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+------
+
+[TODO: blowing up at a stray remark; robot cult to stop tricking me]
[TODO: "out of patience" email]
--- /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]
+
+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
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff