>
> —_Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand
-[TODO: recap of previous three posts]
+[TODO: recap of previous three posts
+
+Recapping our Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I explained the thing about how I've always (since puberty)
+
+In a subsequent post, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer",
+
+In a subsequent–subsequent post "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"
+In a subsequent–subsequent–subsequent post "If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them",
+
+]
On 13 February 2021, ["Silicon Valley's Safe Space"](https://archive.ph/zW6oX), the _New York Times_ piece on _Slate Star Codex_ came out. It was ... pretty lame? (_Just_ lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while [pushing hard on the subtext](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310) to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of _Slate Star Codex_. ["Nominally"](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally)?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed to me more like a critique of the "many"'s reading comprehension, rather than Alexander's writing.
Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which [featured](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/) [futurist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/)-[themed](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relativity/) [delusions](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/05/relevance/), I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
-At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, less crazy people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, more emotionally stable people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient _code_ to represent elements of this world with _shorter_ strings, such that you could say (for example) `01100` (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) `01100001110110000010`.
-If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information _at all_: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. _Locating_ a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.
+If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information _at all_: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were `0110000111011000001`, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was `0110000111011000001`**`0`** or `0110000111011000001`**`1`**. Just _locating_ a book in the [Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.
However, in the world of a _non-uniform probability distribution_ over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—_is_ possible . If almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (`00000000000000000000`) or all-ones (`11111111111111111111`), with a very few exceptions that were still _mostly_ one bit or the other (like `00010001000000000000` or `11101111111011011111`), then you could devise a very efficient encoding.
-To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common case: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).
+To _be_ efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common cases: like `00` in the code to mean `00000000000000000000` in the world and `01` to mean `11111111111111111111`. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding `10110101110` could represent `00100010000000000000` in the world (`1` to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following `0` to indicate that _most_ of the bits are `0`, followed by the [Elias self-delimiting integer codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding) for 3 (`110`) and 7 (`101110`) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually `1`).
Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is _always_ in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" `00000100000000000000` or `11011111111101111011`, but never `10000000000000000000` or `01111111111111111111`.
Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two _clusters_ of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of `00000000000000000000` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of `11111111111111111111` plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various [probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [on the basis of cluster-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system.
-Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. I _wish_ this were a math blog—I wish I lived in a world where I could do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of greater reality. ("Gender?" I would say, confused, "I barely _know_ her.") It would be a better way to live than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). But since I _do_, somehow, go on living like this—having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say?—_application_.
+Unfortunately—_deeply_ unfortunately—this is not a math blog. I _wish_ this were a math blog—that I lived in a world where I could afford to do math blogging for the greater glory of our collective understanding of greater reality. ("Gender?" I would say, confused if not slightly disgusted, "I barely _know_ her.") It would be a better way to live than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned [in a Total Culture War](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) over the future of [my neurotype-demographic](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). But since I _do_, somehow, go on living like this—having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say?—_application_.
Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people _directly_ care about gametes or chromosomes or even gentials in most everyday situations. (You're probably not directly trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the _20th_ century.) It's that that these are _discrete_ features that are [causally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water) entangled with everything _else_ that differs between females and males—including many [correlated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) statistical differences of various [effect sizes](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/), and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because _sex_ is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of evolved biological creatures.
If trans advocates go astray in trying to destroy the concept of sex, their gender-critical foes often
+ * trans advocates say: there are exceptions, therefore
The typical gender-critical critique of trans ideology
Title: Book Review: Charles Murray's <em>Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America</em>
Date: 2021-06-30 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
+Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, genetics
Status: draft
Well, this is awkward.
[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prison—yes, I know, they call it a "hospital"—that says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
+[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
+
+The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
+
+The lawyer
+
+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
+
+I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant
+
+]
+
Notice how casually Murray mentions the decision of what charges are to be filed as "a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation"! As a description of the system as it actually exists, this is perfectly accurate, but it seems important to notice that the entire concept of plea bargaining is a perversion of justice. One would have hoped for a system that proportionately punishes people for the specific crimes that they _actually did_, in order to disincentivize crime. Instead, we have the Orwellian nightmare of a system that says, "We think you're guilty of something, but it'll be easier for you if you confess to being guilty of something less bad, [and swear under oath that no one threatened you to confess](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) (!!)."
In calling the current system an Orwellian nightmare, I'm _not_ saying I personally know how to do better. (If abolishing the police would just result in anarchy and mob justice, that would just be a different kind of nightmare.) I'm trying to highlight how the statistics output by the actually-existing "justice" and "education" systems need to be understood as data about what's happening _within_ the current power structure managed by these systems, and shouldn't be naïvely seen as solely reflecting an independently existing reality of "education" and "crime." If there were no schools, people would still learn things (people still _do_ learn things outside of school); if there were no law enforcement, people would still take advantage of each other (people still _do_ take advantage of each other, outside the reaches of the law).
Rather than being a silly non-realistic children's-literature grown-up, Johnny's mother is portrayed as being duped by social media and medical authorities. ("But Johnny's mom's phone said it's not just pretend / 'Only a bigot would say that! How dare you offend!'", with angry emoji and inverted Facebook thumbs-up icons bubbling out of her phone into the scene.) We get illustrations of protesters bearing signs saying "Human Walruses Are REAL Walruses", "Literally Walrusphobic", "He/Him/Walrux", _&c_. The worms come in an orange pill-type bottle labeled "Wormones." (Separately, walruses don't eat worms, but that's not the main problem here from a literary perspective.)
-All of these satirical real-world allusions completely _ruin the mood_, to the extent that I don't think this is really a book _for_ children. (Not even an ideological book for children, meant to socialize them into the correct beliefs.) It's a novelty "children's book" for the brief amusement of ideologically conservative grown-ups.
+[TODO: spoil the plot, and mention the Walsh-as-Zookeeper easter egg]
+
+The satirical real-world references (which do not earn the dignity of the word _allusions_) completely ruin the mood, to the extent that I don't think this is really a book _for_ children. (Not even an ideological book for children, meant to socialize them into the correct beliefs.) It's a novelty "children's book" for the brief amusement of ideologically conservative grown-ups.
This might partially explain the poor illustration quality. (The illustrations aren't _ugly_, just—very amateurish. The visible sketch-lines mark it as the probable product of Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes, rather than a serious artist with a portfolio.) To compete in the regular children's book market—to try to be the kind of book someone would unironically give as a gift for their niece or nephew, you want the illustrations to be beautiful or endearing, something kids or their minders will _want_ to look at many times. _Johnny the Walrus_ just—doesn't have that ambition. The ideological gimmick is the point. The point having been made, there was evidently no need to spring for a more expensive artist than Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes.
-I don't think this was inevitable. With care, it should be possible to pull off children's literature that maintains its integrity as children's literature while pushing back against the tide of gender identity ideology. (Which should _mostly_ just look like children's literature from the before-time when "gender" was a synonym for sex, with a few subtle modifications to defend itself in the current year.) But _Johnny the Walrus_ is not trying to have that kind of integrity. Not recommended.
+I don't think this was inevitable. With care, it should be possible to pull off children's literature that maintains its integrity as children's literature while pushing back against the tide of gender identity ideology. (Which should _mostly_ just look like children's literature from the before-time when "gender" was a synonym for sex if the word existed at all, with a few subtle modifications to defend itself in the current year.) But _Johnny the Walrus_ is not trying to have that kind of integrity. Not recommended.
marked TODO blocks—
-_ "Agreeing with Stalin" recap intro [pt. 5]
-_ confronting Olivia [pt. 2]
-_ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility" [pt. 4]
-_ AlphaGo seemed deeper [pt. 5]
+- "Agreeing with Stalin" recap intro [pt. 5]
_ social justice and defying threats [pt. 5]
+_ AlphaGo seemed deeper [pt. 5]
+_ scuffle on "Yes Requires the Possibility" [pt. 4]
+_ confronting Olivia [pt. 2]
_ "Lesswrong.com is dead to me" [pt. 4]
_ AI timelines scam [pt. 4]
_ secret thread with Ruby [pt. 4]
_ better introduction of S.K.
_ risk of people bouncing off progressivism
_ an AGP teen boy could at least consent to transition, and make plans based on knowing what the thing is (you'd actually want to go through a little bit of male puberty)
+_ explicitly explain "Hill of Validity" title inversion
_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
_ update "80,000 words" refs with the near-final wordcount
_ the "outright bad faith" clause in "Your Price for Joining"
pre-memoir—
_ Book Review: Nevada
+_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
_ I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
Minor camera-ready—
_ Janet Mock on Late Transitioners
-_ Book Review: Johnny the Walrus
_ Interlude XXII
Minor—
+_ Book Review: Johnny the Walrus
_ Beyond the Binary
_ Happy Meal
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality (short version)
_ Elision _vs_. Choice
-_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
_ Multi-Product Review: AI for AGP
_ Link: "On Transitions, Freedom of Form, [...]"
_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff