-Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc my posse. 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)").
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-Scott had been continuing to insist that it's OK to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand.
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-First, 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 didn'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?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q7Me34xvSG3Wm97As/but-there-s-still-a-chance-right))
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-Second, 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? 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 was "Your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together," and number 31 was, "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 was the thing I'd been trying to tell everyone about. But when I tried to talk to Scott about it, he was like, "Doesn't matter, mental health benefits for trans people are more important according to the utilitarian calculus!" 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?
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+Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott cc 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 that it's OK 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 OK ... why doesn't that just generalize to an argument in favor of _outright lying_ when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed much 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! Did that matter at all? 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 self-designated world-saving good guys", but because we were going to perfect an art of _systematically correct reasoning_. 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. Also, Scott had proposed a super-Outside View of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes in people, and suggested that I think of _that_ was 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 harrass) 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 the culture-war PTSD that he propsed, _and_ that my concerns have merit.