I gave a parable (along the lines of ["it's not the incentives; it's you"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you)) to illustrate the problem: a senior scientist publishes a paper with a conclusion favorable to an organization that gave his lab a grant. The scientist's faithful student points out a fatal flaw in the paper, and suggests publishing a retraction. The scientist says, "No, that would be bad for my career." The student gets angry. The scientist says, "You're supposed to not get angry at the people who didn't create those career incentives. That's insane. Your issue is with Moloch: the publish-or-perish incentives of grant-funded science. If you can't take that down, then don't blame others who can't do that, either."
-That is, blaming people who commit fraud (where an innocent mistake _becomes_ fraud if you refuse to acknowledge it after it's been pointed out) is _part_ of a strategy for defeating Moloch, an attempt to coordinate on norms against fraud.
+That is, blaming people who commit fraud (where an innocent mistake _becomes_ fraud if you refuse to acknowledge it after it's been pointed out) is part of a strategy for defeating Moloch, an attempt to establish norms against fraud.
I successfully baited Lintamande, the other _Planecrash_ coauthor, into engaging with me. Lintamande said I was impossible to talk to about my special topic, because of the bizarre hostile performative thing I did in place of truthseeking inquiry; I imposed too stark of a trade-off on my interlocutors between successfully saying anything at all and not getting immediately whalloped with 30,000 words from me about how they fundamentally lack intellectual integrity; my behavior discouraged stifled genuine discussion in places where I might see it.
Lintamande said they agreed with those claims; Yudkowsky concurred with a "+1" emoji.
+I didn't think it was fair, I continued, for Yudkowsky to pull his everyone-but-me-is-retarded shtick while simultaneously pretending that Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying was the crux of trans rights debates.
+
+Lintamande said they didn't read Yudkowsky as having made any claims about the the crux of trans rights debates, just the narrow claim about pronouns.
+
+I said that when he knocks down bad arguments for sex-based pronouns without addressing the good ones, I read him as (not necessarily consciously) playing a ["Weak Men Are Superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) political strategy: carefully choosing what arguments to respond to in order to mood-affiliate with the winning team, without technically saying anything false. A lot of TERFs would be overjoyed to compromise on pronouns if pronouns weren't a wedge or proxy for the other issues that anyone cared about.
+
+Lintamande pointed out that other people thought about this topic less often than I did. Maybe they didn't carefully select which arguments to respond to in order to cleverly mood-affiliate, so much as get prompted by the surrounding Society to think about pronouns, do so, and come up with an answer. They thought it was plausible that Yudkowsky would have given the same verdict on pronoun conventions if someone had posed the question to him as a hypothetical in 2004. Just because pronouns had become a political proxy debate, didn't mean that it was disingenuous to just talk about pronouns without reference to the proxy debate.
+
+I didn't think that was what was actually going on.
+
[TODO—
- * "like, if you just went and found Eliezer!2004 and were like 'hey, weird sci fi hypothetical'"
-_speaking of the year 2004_; the thing I'm at war with is that I don't think he would _dare_ publish the same essay today The 2004 mailing list post was almost _mocking_ the guy, for being so naïve, for not seeing the type mismatch between the deep structure of reality, and mentalistic fantasies vaguely gestured at with English words.
+ * The input-output behavior of consciously trying to agree with Stalin and "getting prompted by the surrounding Society" are similar, as I noted in "Tails, Never Heard of Her"; it's not a coincidence that he didn't write this in 2004
+ * _speaking of the year 2004_; the thing I'm at war with is that I don't think he would _dare_ publish the same essay today The 2004 mailing list post was almost _mocking_ the guy, for being so naïve, for not seeing the type mismatch between the deep structure of reality, and mentalistic fantasies vaguely gestured at with English words.
* And the 2016–2021 posts _couldn't even acknolwedge that Biological Sex Actually Exists_. Did Yudkowsky expect us not to _notice_?? Coming from anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have minded. But the _conjunction_ of these political games and the eliezera racial supremacy rhetoric was just _insulting_.
* April said she didn't think the "Changing Emotions" argument was making claims relevant to trans people. The only claim you really needed was that it was reasonable for cis men and trans men, and cis women and trans women, to be in the same category for the purposes of general social interaction; whether you would need post-Singularity tech to make a biological male indistinguishable from a cis woman had little bearing on what we should make of trans women. That was interesting. April's profile said she was 19 years old and transfeminine. April saying that the essay wasn't making claims relevant to trans people; but _I_ thought it was relevant in 2008. (My dream of a fiction of animosity between a Yudkowsky-like and Lynn Conway-like character.)
* someone said "the word in their language doesn't match the word in yours"; and got a +1 emoji from Big Yud; I resisted the temptation to say "So ... I can define a word any way I want"; I call a killthread.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff