Title: Interlude XX
-Date: 2020-11-07 05:00
+Date: 2020-11-19 05:00
Category: fiction
Tags: interlude
-Status: draft
-"I'm not _done_ with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details that explain why I find the AGP model so compelling even if [I can't prove it](https://unstableontology.com/2020/01/26/on-hiding-the-source-of-knowledge/). Plus you get a chance to try [negotiating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining_model_of_war) with me in case publishing would be an act of probabilistic [timeless](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/ldt_intro_phil) genocide against you and yours."
+"I'm not _done_ with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details that explain why I find the AGP theory so compelling even if [I can't prove it](https://unstableontology.com/2020/01/26/on-hiding-the-source-of-knowledge/). Plus you get a chance to try [negotiating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining_model_of_war) with me in case publishing would be an act of probabilistic [timeless](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/ldt_intro_phil) genocide against you and yours."
"_Genocide?_" she asked.
--- /dev/null
+Title: Nixon on Forbidden Hypotheses
+Date: 2020-11-18 23:05
+Category: other
+Tags: censorship, quotepost, video, Richard Nixon
+
+I listened with great interest to this segment of a [1971 recording of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo) (starting at the 56 second mark). You really wonder more generally what things powerful people think in private that [they can't say](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) in public.
+
+> NIXON: I read with great interest your piece from the U.N.—on Herrnstein's piece that I had passed on to you. Let me say first of all, nobody on the staff even knows I read the goddamned article.
+
+> MOYNIHAN: Oh, good.
+
+> NIXON: And nobody on this staff is going to know anything about it, because I couldn't agree more with you that the Herrnstein stuff and all the rest, this is knowledge—first, no one must think we're thinking about it, and second, if we do find out it's correct, we must never tell anybody.
+
+> MOYNIHAN: I'm afraid that's just the case.
+
+> NIXON: That's right. Now, let me add a few things, if you can—and you might just make some mental notes about it, or anything you want, so I give you my own views. I've reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me, and I don't base it on any scientific evidence, that what Herrnstein says, and also, what's said earlier by Jensen and so forth, is probably very close to the truth. Now—
+
+> MOYNIHAN: I think's that where you'd have to—
+
+> NIXON: Now, having said that, then you counter that by saying something that the racists would never agree with, that within groups, there are geniuses—
Title: The Feeling Is Mutual
-Date: 2020-05-01
+Date: 2020-11-20 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: morality, symmetry
-Status: draft
+Tags: morality, epistemology
> She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how I might have turned out the same way if I had been born a few years earlier and read the wrong things in the wrong order.
>
In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own [isn't going to have some objective morality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtoQdG7E8MxYJrigu/no-universally-compelling-arguments) that all agents are compelled to recognize, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value sentient life rather than [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least [not be completely arbitrary](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RBszS2jwGM4oghXW4/the-bedrock-of-morality-arbitrary): we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her.
-If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.
+If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead? How do we break the symmetry?—if the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.
And that's how I break the symmetry: by acknowledging it when my counterparts don't. I _don't_ think I have fundamentally different _values_ from those whom I [happen to be fighting](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/). I think I happen to _know_ some decision-relevant facts and philosophy that they don't, and I can [trace back the causal chain of what I think I know and how I think I know it](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence). They see me as complicit with their oppressors, and mine; I see them as _not understanding what I'm trying to do_.
+++ /dev/null
-Title: Nixon on Forbidden Hypotheses
-Date: 2021-01-01
-Category: other
-Tags: quotepost, video, Richard Nixon
-Status: draft
-
-I listened with interest to this segment of a [1971 recording of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo) (starting at the 56 second mark).
-
-> NIXON: I read with great interest your piece from the U.N.—on Herrnstein's piece that I had passed on to you. Let me say first of all, nobody on the staff knows I read the goddamned article.
-
-> MOYNIHAN: Oh, good.
-
-> NIXON: And nobody on this staff is going to know anything about it, because I couldn't agree more with you that the Herrnstein stuff and all the rest. This is knowledge—first, no one must think we're thinking about it, and second, if we do find out it's correct, we must never tell anybody.
-
-> MOYNIHAN: I'm afraid that's just the case.
-
-> NIXON: That's right. Now, let me add a few things, if you can—you might just make some mental notes about it, if you want, so I give you my own views. I've reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me, and I don't base it on any scientific evidence, that what Herrnstein says, and also, what's said earlier by Jensen and so forth, is probably very close to the truth.
-
-> MOYNIHAN: I think's that where you'd have to—
-
-> NIXON: Now, having said that, then you counter that by saying something that the racists would never agree with, that within groups, there are geniuses—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff