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"
+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?
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)
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
+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"
23 Jul: "epistemic defense" meeting
-24 Jul: Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip
-
-
-
-
+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!
+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
+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 "sure, Eliezer doesn't post here anymore, but that's bad for Eliezer too."—look up this comment
+Sonya pointed out Scott's view of his legacy https://twitter.com/sonyasupposedly/status/1211789899260518402
+[bookmark]
+1 Jan: the red phone / state of Church leadership
> 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.
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.
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")
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+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.
+
+ He ... flatters people? He ... didn't tell people to abandon their careers? What?!
+
+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.
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