check in—first of July

I actually have a five-day weekend—my usual cushy four, plus
Independence Day. I spent yesterday being netsick, and in the morning
I saw on Twitter Google has a new finetuned language model that broke
50% on a math-problem benchmark, which superforecasters had expected
to happen in 2025. So much can happen three years ahead of
schedule—and it's also equally possible to waste three years; there's
no fundamental reason I couldn't have written my Whole Dumb Story in
2019 and moved on. Instead—you know, the other day at my dayjob, I got
stuck in a Yudkowsky-hate loop again.

Independence Day will be the aniversary of the time I talked to him at
the Independence Day party last year, and had my heart
broken. It—hasn't really been a very productive year? I still have
lots of stuff to do and to write—it just hasn't been appealing on a
moment-to-moment level, compared to Super Auto Pets?

How do I escape this trap? I pulled my network cable out yesterday,
but today I've just been lazy on my phone. If I could get three and a
half solid days of writing in with the network cable out—just forget
that there is a Twitter with scary ML announcements and shrink my
world—

Then today I re-watched half an original series episode, skim-re-read
John Scalzi's _Redshirts_, and now my phone is off. I can turn my
phone on again Sunday night to order food, if I get enough
memoir-writing done tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday—just the memoir; I
can't afford to dilute my attention with AI stuff or correspondence
that I "should" be writing for dignity points ... I told you, I told
the blog, that I have to Believe that my Story matters.

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index b51c03a..c817477 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -1011,3 +1011,26 @@ https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
 
 [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/
+
+
+-----
+
+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

diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt
index 220d796..d3653d3 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/post_ideas.txt
+++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt
@@ -11,7 +11,6 @@ _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
 
 
 Minor—
-_ Consilent Worldbuilding
 _ my medianworld: https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639
 _ Happy Meal
 _ Link: "On Transitions, Freedom of Form, [...]"
@@ -56,37 +55,6 @@ _ Link: Lease Bound comic
 _ 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?