Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness was having me making crazy decisions.
-As it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky:
+As it happened, the next day, Wednesday, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a _Quillette_ article interviewing Lisa Littman on her work on rapid onset gender dysphoria:
> [Everything more complicated than](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512) protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/
(Why now? Maybe he saw the tag in my "tools have shattered" Tweet on Monday, or maybe the _Quillette_ article was just timely?)
-The most obvious reading of this is as a "concession" to my agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was _originally_ trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology.
+The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a "concession" to my general political agenda. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was _originally_ trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up "my side" on that by publicly offering an argument that there's probably a more-than-one-type typology.
-At this point, some people might think that should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. Now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something favorable to my agenda—a major concession! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I "call it even"?
+At this point, some readers might think that should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. But now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something _favorable_ to my agenda! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I "call it even"?
-That's not how it works. The entire concept of there being "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts; it's not something that _actually makes sense_. My posse and I were trying to get a clarification about a philosophy-of-language claim Yudkowsky had made a few months prior ("you're not standing in defense of truth if [...]"), which I claimed was substantively misleading.
+That's not how it works. The entire concept of there being "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts; it's not something that _actually makes sense_ as a process for constructing a map that reflects the territory. My posse and I were trying to get a clarification about a philosophy-of-language claim Yudkowsky had made a few months prior ("you're not standing in defense of truth if [...]"), which I claimed was substantively misleading. Why would we stop prosecuting that, because of this _unrelated_ Tweet about the etiology of gender dysphoria? That wasn't the thing we were trying to clarify!
-Why would I
+Moreover—and I'm embarrassed that it took me another day to realize this—this new argument from Yudkowsky about the etiology of gender dysphoria was actually _wrong_. As I would later get around to explaining in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), when people claim that some psychological or medical condition "comes in varieties", they're making a substantive _empirical_ claim that the [causal or statistical structure](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) of the condition is usefully modeled as distinct clusters, not merely making the trivial observation that instances of the condition are not identical down to the subatomic level.
-That was
+As such, we _shouldn't_ think that there are probably multiple kinds of gender dysphoria _because things are made of protons_ (?!?). If anything, _a priori_ reasoning about the cognitive function of categorization should actually cut in the other direction, (mildly) _against_ rather than in favor of multi-type theories: you only want to add more categories to your theory [if they can pay for their additional complexity with better predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length). If you support Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy of MtF, or Littman's proposed rapid-onset type, it should be on the _empirical_ merits, not because multi-type theories are especially more likely to be true.
+Had Yudkowsky been thinking that if he Tweeted something ostensibly favorable to my agenda, then maybe me and the rest of Michael's gang would be satisfied and leave him alone?
+But ... if there's some _other_ reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you _tell_ people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the _general_ problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. (Someone who trusted you as a source of wisdom about rationality might try to apply your _fake_ "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties" rationality lesson in some other context, and get the wrong answer.) Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is _not okay_, and it still wasn't okay in this case just because in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from _me_.
+I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, which was that dread was tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence was still being denied.
-[TODO bookmark: finish section explaining why concessions are not the Way ...]
-This thing about transgender typology was _not the thing we were trying to clarify!_
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-Moreover,
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-["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/)
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-[TODO proton concession
- * A concession! In the war frame, you'd think this would make me happy
- * "I did you a favor by Tweeting something obliquely favorable to your object-level crusade, and you repay me by criticizing me? How dare you?!" My model of Sequences-era Eliezer-2009 would never do that, because the species-typical arguments-as-social-exchange
- * do you think Eliezer is thinking, "Fine, if I tweet something obliquely favorable towards Zack's object-level agenda, maybe Michael's gang will leave me alone now"
- * If there's some other reason you suspect there might by multiple species of dysphoria, but you tell people your suspicion is because dysphoria has more than one proton, then you're still kind of misinforming them for political reasons, which is the generalized problem that we're worried about?
- * Michael's take: not worth the digression; we need to confront the actual crisis
- * We need to figure out how to win against bad faith arguments
-
-
-As I explained in ["On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/), this argument that "gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties" is actually _wrong_. The _reason_ I believe in the two-type taxonomy of MtF is because of [the _empirical_ case that androphilic and non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transsexualism actually look like different things](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), enough so for the two-type clustering to [pay the rent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) [for its complexity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length).
-
-But Yudkowsky can't afford to acknowledge the empirical case for the two-type taxonomy—that really _would_ get him in trouble with progressives. So in order to throw me a bone while maintaining his above-it-all [pretending to be wise](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise) centerist pose, he needs to come up with some other excuse that "exhibit[s] generally rationalist principles".
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-The lesson here that I wish Yudkowsky would understand is that when you invent rationality lessons in response to political pressure, you probably end up with _fake rationality lessons_ (because the reasoning that _generated_ the lesson differs from the reasoning that the lesson presents). I think this is bad, and that it's _equally_ bad even when the political pressure is coming from _me_.
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-If you "project" my work into the "subspace" of contemporary political conflicts, it usually _codes as_ favoring "anti-trans" faction more often than not, but [that's really not what I'm trying to do](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). From my perspective, it's just that the "pro-trans" faction happens to be very wrong about a lot of stuff that I care about. But being wrong about a lot of stuff isn't the same thing as being wrong about everything; it's _important_ that I spontaneously invent and publish pieces like ["On the Argumentative Form"](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) and ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) that "favor" the "pro-trans" faction. That's how you know (and how I know) that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
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-]
[TODO: Jessica joins the coalition; she tell me about her time at MIRI (link to Zoe-piggyback and Occupational Infohazards);
Michael said that me and Jess together have more moral authority]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff