[^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/).
+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, [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.")
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 my usual habit of spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.) While we (my posse) were aghast at Yudkowsky's behavior, Anna was aghast at ours: reaching out to try to have a conversation with Yudkowsky, then concluding that he was a fraud because we weren't satisfied with the outcome was like hiding soldiers in an ambulance, introducing a threat into a context where he had a right to be safe.
+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 my usual habit of 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.)
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 thought I remembered meeting a man with the same last name at the 2016 Summer Solstice event in Berkeley; maybe it was her brother.) I [replied](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/32GPaijsSwX2NSFJi) that that was understandable, but that I hoped it was also understandable 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.
+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 hoped it was also understandable 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.
> 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
+> 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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff