It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any direct practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that trying to talk about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" gets you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—_bullshit nitpicking_. (What about complete androgen insensitivity syndrome? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said imply that lesbians aren't women? _&c. ad infinitum_.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks can and should be satisfactorily answered. (Any ones that couldn't would presumably fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks.) But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I feel somewhat gaslighted.
-(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define that category boundary however I want.)
+(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. _Somehow_ no one seemed to think I had the right to define _that_ category boundary for my convenience.)
If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that [the person in this photograph](https://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg) isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a _convenient rhetorical shorthand_ for a much longer statement about [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes) and [high-dimensional configuration spaces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) and [defensible Schelling points for social norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes)), then our techniques are _worse than useless_.
... Scott didn't get it.
[TODO:
-Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben, and Anna
+ * Soon, other conversations continued with Michael and Sarah and Ben—and with Anna
+
+[TODO:
+on ostracism—
+ * There's a view that says, as long as everyone is being polite, there's no problem
+ * I think there's a problem where the collective discourse is biased, even if it's surface-level polite
+ * Berkley rats are very good at not being persecutory (we might not have been if Scott hadn't a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college)
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Ben thought the bullshit nitpicking was meaningfully anti-epistemic: the game is that I have to choose between infinite interpretive labor, or being cast as "never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections
+ * I was inclined to meet the objections, to say, "well, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly" rather than "you're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me"; by meeting the objections I become a stronger writer
+ * Ben thought that being a better writer by responding to nitpicks from people who are trying not to understand was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to explain how people were failing to engage, rather than continuing to press the object-level itself—like, I had a model of "the rationalists" that keeps making bad predictions, what's going on there?
+ * I guess I'm only now, years later, taking Ben's advice on this. Sorry, Ben.
+
+[TODO:
+ * If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
+ * There have been times when I thought, "What the Hell am I doing?" [...]
+]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Anna and intellectual property
]
-> if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen - at least it's much higher probability than trying more of the same.
-(I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
-
-> Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
-Ben—
-> A description of the nitpicking as hostile and anti-epistemic can be correct and important even if mentioning that description is not the correct response for you.
+> A deluge of nitpicking is an implied ostracism threat, or at least a marginalization threat. The game is that the nitpicks force you to choose between infinite interpretive labor, and "never answered these construed-as-reasonable objections" (in which case you lose standing to make the claim, and if people call you on that, they get to start talking about you as a bad rationalist, likely think of you as unreasonable, stop inviting you to things, etc.).
+> It's a bit less direct than how "this is crazy talk" can be an implied imprisonment threat, but it's still strong (distributed) social aggression.
-to Sarah—
-> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
-Ben's reply—
-> Your special interest is not just a coincidence here.
+> if you applied your considerable capacity for verbally sophisticated interpretive labor to explaining exactly how people are failing to engage with your arguments and what this says about the "Rationalists", rather than why your arguments are valid, something interesting might happen
+(I'm only getting around to this now—sorry Ben)
-I don't think it's a coincidence, either, but I'd like to get more of a sense of how large the posited "If you once [gerrymander a category boundary], the[n parsimony] is ever after your enemy" effect is.
-
+> Like, you have some implicit model of what Rationalists would do, that keeps getting surprised - you can explain what you'd have expected, and give examples (anonymized if needed) of how those expectations were violated systematically (though not universally).
-Sarah shying away, my rallying cry—
+to Sarah—
+> If we have this entire posse, I feel bad/guilty/ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it's actually a proxy for "has Eliezer and/or everyone else [lost the plot](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/), and if so, how do we get it back?"
> There have been times during the last few weeks where it's felt like my mind has shut down with the only thought, "What the hell am I _doing_? This is _absurd_. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the _Bad_ Guys' position? I don't want to be one of the Bad Guys. Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool out of myself. After all, using Aumann-like reasoning, in a dispute of 'Zack M. Davis and Michael Vassar vs. _everyone fucking else_', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'? Obviously."
> And ... I want to be nice to my trans friends, too, but that can't possibly be the definitive end-of-conversation correct argument. Not _really_. Not if you're being serious.
-> But "whatever" is _not a counterargument!_
-
> But I want to live in a rationalist community that can actually _update_—where a bad argument by a high-status person will _eventually_ be publicly known to lose to a superior counterargument, even if the person originating the counterargument is lower status and the counterargument happens to have genuinely unfavorable political implications.
> But ultimately, I've got _something to protect_. This is even more humiliating, really. It's not even a good or wholesome something to protect that you'd feel comfortable blogging about under your own name. It's actually kind of obscene. Good or not, wholesome or not, obscene or not, it's for all the boys like me who had a dream whose proper realization happens to have [_more complicated implementation details_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) than applying social pressure to make everyone pretend that they've coordinated to redefine a top-20 word. Those boys deserve to not be lied to.
> I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts
-> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture." So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+> I do want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and "people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement in the general culture."
+
+> So-called "rationalists" are actually very good at not-being-persecutory! (I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
> I want to emphasize this, because I don't want to fall into the [bravery-debate](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
> In phrasing it that way, you're not saying that composites are bad; it's just that it makes sense to use language to asymmetrically distinguish between the natural thing that already existed, and the synthetic thing that has been deliberately engineered to resemble the original thing as much as possible.
-
-I deeply appreciate your effort here Zack. I think that the link-filled argument structure you have presented here is sufficiently compelling that for someone who is moved to action by arguments, who believes in the original mission of the rationalist community either narrowly or broadly defined, and who doesn't believe that The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://www.google.es/amp/s/srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/) there is little room for productive rebuttal. However, much to my regret, I don't discover in myself an expectation of the sort of action you are hoping for which is very different from your 20% estimate, but I do discover a much lower confidence in that action's success than is suggested by the "you alone can kill it" invocation. It could be true. Conditional on the right set of qualifications it probably is true, but that set of qualifications includes some assumptions about how much effort would be invested and about how other people would respond which I see as much less likely than not.
+The Craft Is Not The Community, (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/amp/)
+Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening.
-> I think that this is a pretty overwhelming argument from an analytic perspective. I'm not expecting that such a perspective will move Eliezer's actions right now, but I badly want to help him to get back to being the sort of person who would be moved by such an argument. I suspect that if something like this can enjoy sent out at a time several weeks away, it will contribute more to Eliezer once again being the sort of person who is influenced by this sort of argument. Can you wait a bit? Is it possiblefot is and some friends to steer the state of the discussion further in the direction you are hoping for before sharing this letter with him?
-
-Anyway, meanwhile, other conversations were happening. Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
+Anna told me that my "You have to pass my litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent"—in the sense that it's [trying to apply social incentives towards an outcome rather than merely exchanging information](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/). But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property, even if violence is generally bad. If we think of the "rationalist" label as intellectual property, maybe it's property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" isn't obviously a terrible time to start shooting at the bandits? What makes my "... or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" moves worthy of your mild reproach, but "You're not allowed to call this obviously biologically-female person a woman, or I lose all respect for you as not-an-asshole" merely a puzzling sociological phenomenon that might be adaptive in some not-yet-understood way? Isn't the violence-structure basically the same? Is there any room in civilization for self-defense?
When I told Michael about this, he said that I was ethically or 'legally' in the right here, and the rationalist equivalent of a lawyer mattered more for my claims than the equivalent of a scientist, and that Ben Hoffman (who I had already shared the thread with Scott with) would be helpful in solidifying my claims to IP defense. I said that I didn't _feel_ like I'm in the right, even if I can't point to a superior counterargument that I want to yield to, just because I'm getting fatigued from all the social-aggression I've been doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)
(I _want_ to confidently predict that everything I've just said is completely obvious to you, because I learned it all specifically from you! A 130 IQ _nobody_ like me shouldn't have to say _any_ of this to the _author_ of "A Human's Guide to Words"! But then I don't know how to reconcile that with your recent public statement about [not seeing "how there's scientific truth at stake"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232). Hence this desperate and [_confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) email plea.)
-And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
+And I'm still really confused, because I still feel like everything I'm saying here is a trivial application of Sequences-lore. If I'm getting something wrong, I should be overjoyed to be harshly corrected by the Great Teacher! A simple person like me is as but a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky! But if it looks like the Great Teacher is getting something wrong (wrong with respect to the balanced flow of arguments and evidence in which every "step is precise and has no room in it for your whims", although not wrong in the sense of making a factually incorrect statement) and the
+
+
+
+Great Teacher neither corrects me nor says "OK, you're right and I was wrong, well done, my student", what am I supposed to conclude? Is this a prank—a test? Am I like Brennan in "Initiation Ceremony", being evaluated to see if I have the guts to stand by my vision of the Way in the face of social pressure? (If so, I'm not doing a very good job, because I definitely wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael, Ben, and Sarah.) Did I pass??
In a functioning rationalist community, there should never be any occasion in which "appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal authority" seems like a good strategy: the way this is supposed to work is that I should just make my arguments with the understanding that good arguments will be accepted and bad arguments will be rejected. But I've been trying that, and it's mostly not working. On any other topic, I probably would have just given up and accepted the social consensus by now: "Sure, OK, whatever, trans women are women by definition; who am I to think I've seen into the Bayes-structure?" I still think this from time to time, and feel really guilty about arguing for the Bad Guys (because in my native Blue Tribe culture, only Bad people want to talk about sexual dimorphism). But then I can't stop seeing the Bayes-structure that says that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept even when it's ideologically unfashionable—and I've got Something to Protect. What am I supposed to do?
f you want people to use your preferred categories, you're going to need to convince them with some sort of argument that those categories are predictively useful. I don't see the point of saying "There's no epistemic issue here, although maybe there's a policy debate about how to use language; end-of-discussion" if it's not to justify the mind games? Why can't we get a clear ex cathedra statement that gender categories are not an exception to the rule that categories are nonarbitrary? Isn't it true, and important, and something that people who ought to know better are getting wrong? Surely there's some way for "not alt-right" signaling to be purchased separately?
+
+
+
[TODO: Ben—
> I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff