I may have subconsciously pulled off an interesting political maneuver. In my final email to Yudkowsky on 20 April 2019 (Subject: "closing thoughts from me"), I had written—
-> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+> If we can't even get a public consensus from our _de facto_ leadership on something _so basic_ as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's _no point in pretending to have a rationalist community_, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?[^my-price-for-joining]
+
+[^my-price-for-joining]: The Sequences post referenced here, ["Your Price for Joining"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining), argues that the sort of people who become "rationalists" are too prone to "take their ball and go home" rather than tolerating imperfections in a collective endeavor. To combat this, Yudkowsky proposes a norm:
+
+ > If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+ I claim that I was meeting this standard: I _was_ willing to personally fix the philosophy-of-categorization issue no matter how long it took, and the issue _did_ arise from outright bad faith.
And as it happened, on 4 May 2019, Yudkowsky [re-Tweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922)—the point that group differences aren't a matter of any single variable—which was _sort of_ like the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel less aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpret this as [another "concession" to me](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#proton-concession)? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)
Anna said she didn't want to receive [cheerful price](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price) offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my custom of recklessly throwing money at people to get what I wanted as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her _using_ me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of those posts, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (_e.g._, ["Politics Is the Mind-Killer"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer)), that it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.
-I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether or not I should cut my dick off would _become_ a political issue. That was new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't particularly trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the "rationalists" were _worse than useless_ to me. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I was part of a reference class that included AI researchers).
+I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether or not I should cut my dick off would _become_ a political issue. That was new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't particularly trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit a trivial epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, but couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the "rationalists" were _worse than useless_ to me. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I was part of [a reference class that included AI researchers](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/)).
Fundamentally, I was skeptical that you _could_ do consistently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the mechanism that Yudkowsky had described in ["Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) and ["Dark Side Epistemology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology): the need to lie about lying and cover up cover-ups propagates recursively. Anna in particular was unusually skillful at thinking things without saying them; I thought most people facing similar speech restrictions just get worse at thinking (plausibly[^plausibly] including Yudkowsky), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's less risky to recommend ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) to your housemates than to put it on your 501(c)(3) organization's canonical reading list.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding [Occam's razor](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor); you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding the [37 ways that words can be wrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:[^linkrot]
-[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but Yudkowsky's comment was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d).
+[^linkrot]: The original _TechCrunch_ comment would seem to have succumbed to [linkrot](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot), but it was quoted by [Moldbug](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/) and [others](https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d).
> "More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]
>
Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
-Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at _d_ ≈ 1.31 for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).) A solid supermajority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
+Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women.) A majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in the late-onset/AGP taxon and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions of guys like me.
But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore contrary evidence that the kid "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that would not have existed if not for their belief in it.
-Crucially, if innate gender identity isn't a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but large sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. (There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.)
+Crucially, if innate gender identity isn't a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. (There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.)
What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as "a girl", only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the [many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) where people are using "gender" (perceived sex) to make a prediction or decision?
first edit pass bookmark: "I got a chance to talk to"
pt. 3 edit tier—
-_ footnote on the bad-faith condition on "My Price for Joining"
-_ "it might matter timelessly" → there are people with AI chops who are PC (/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/)
-_ confusing people and ourselves about what the exact crime is
+✓ footnote on the bad-faith condition on "My Price for Joining"
_ footnote explaining quibbles on clarification
+_ quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
+_ confusing people and ourselves about what the exact crime is
_ FTX validated Ben's view of EA!! ("systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done")
-_ "your failure to model social reality is believing people when they claim noble motives"
_ hint at Vanessa being trans
-_ quote Jack on timelines anxiety
-_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
-_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
-_ link to protest flyer
-_ "it was the same thing here"—most readers are not going to understand what I see as the obvious analogy
-_ better explanation of MOPs in "Social Reality" scuffle
-_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier
+_ Ruby fight: "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
-_ establish usage of "coordination group" vs. "posse"?
-_ LessWrong vs. GreaterWrong for comment links?
-_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (if people want to read them, they can click through ... but on review, these descriptions seem pretty reasonable?)
-_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it) (but it still seems clear to me on re-read?)
_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
_ meeting with Ray (maybe?)
_ friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog
-_ "Density in Thingspace" comment (maybe a footnote in the § explaining the background to "Unnatural Categories")
-_ Ruby fight: "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
-_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
_ at some point, speculate on causes of brain damage
-_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general ("Let's say that the true level of negativity"), does that seriously undermine my thesis, or does it only merit a footnote?
-_ quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
-_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
+_ quote Jack on timelines anxiety
+_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
+_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
+_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general
+_ link to protest flyer
+_ establish usage of "coordination group" vs. "posse"? (editor might catch?)
+_ "it was the same thing here"—most readers are not going to see an obvious analogy (editor might catch?)
+_ better explanation of MOPs in "Social Reality" scuffle (editor might catch?)
+_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier (editor might catch?)
+_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (editor might catch?)
+_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it) (but it still seems clear to me on re-read?)
+_ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
pt. 4 edit tier—
_ body odors comment
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff