Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs, that's utterly discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
-[TODO: discrediting to the community
- * "would have said anything where you could hear it" is _discrediting_
- * I mean, it's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph (or it would have been, if he was still my caliph), but
- * This actually a major life decision for a lot of people in your community! People in this community actually need the right answer here, whatever the right answer turns out to be
- * The "where you could hear it" is also bizarre—don't you people read widely? I'm unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I bring to bear (Kathleen Stock doesn't say anything about Bayesian networks), but my basic points are obvious
-]
+Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a _major life decision_ for many of the people in this community. People in this community _need the goddamned right answers_ to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely [(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/). If "the community" is _so_ bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one (!?) who can talk about any of the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual Culture War, why would you pay attention to "the community" _at all_? Insofar as "the community" is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the entire world for the practice of reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is _fraudulent_ (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that moves resources): it needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
+
+The "where you could hear it" clause is _particularly_ bizarre—as if Yudkowsky takes it as an unexamined and unproblematic assumption that people in "the community" _don't read widely_. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making about the relevance of autogynephilia to transgender identity and the reality of biological sex (!) are particularly novel. I think I _am_ unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics: when people like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell make similar points, they don't have the background to formulate it [in the language of probabilistic graphical models](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). _That_ part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences, and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section made that sound like an important and high-status thing to do.
+
+But the promise of Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be _applied to_ everything else you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in "the community" (such as it was) didn't say something, then I _wouldn't be able to hear it_ (?!?), would be absurd: _Overcoming Bias_ was a gem of the blogoshere, but not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's resentment of the tyranny of schools by selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year.) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year doesn't expect his followers to be able to pick up on obvious points when someone like Kathleen Stock or Corrina Cohn or Aaron Terrell says it, he should notice that he's running a mere cult or fandom rather than anything one would want to dignify by calling it an intellectual community.
-The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
waypoints—
✓ Jessica help with "Unnatural Categories"
✓ wireheading his fiction subreddit
-- discrediting to the community
+✓ discrediting to the community
- let's recap
- people-I-usually-respect footnote
- Yudkowsky is trying to be a religious leader
With internet available—
+_ university library
+_ Aaron Terrell and Corina Cohn
+_ Eddie Izzard
+_ rational-ist/physics-ist analogy (and link to Yudkowsky Tweet where I think I got this from)
_ "linking to K-complicity in my replies", link the specific reply
_ Wentworth on mutual information being on the right track?
_ "20% of the ones with penises" someone in the comments saying, "It is a woman's body", and Yudkowsky saying "duly corrected"
far editing tier—
+_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
+_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
+_ illustrate "student dysphoria is worse" with anecdote about leaving physics class and going to the counselor to see if I could graduate earlier?
_ as an author and a critic, I expect to lose status when my critics make good points, and expect to gain status when my criticism makes good points; communism analogy: you wouldn't expect credibly helpful work to be unpaid; and I have to make this kind of analysis even he didn't _say_ "I'm a communist"
_ hate for secrecy probably correlates with autogynephilia blogging
_ 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?
_ worth footnoting the "some sort of communist" joke?
-_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
_ elaborate on why I'm not leaking sensitive bits, by explaining what can be inferred by what was and wasn't said in public
_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff